Hacker News: andy81

New comment by andy81 in "Theranos.world"

andy81 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:27:14 +0000

The "tech" sector label is a fraud in its own right.

It makes sense to have a separate label for companies that develop software. They have a unique investment appeal because their cost of production doesn't increase with units sold, so higher PE ratio if growing.

For "some reason" Netflix isn't priced as a media company. Tesla isn't priced as manufacturing.

New comment by andy81 in "Creepy Crawlies"

andy81 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:35:01 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

New comment by andy81 in "Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place"

andy81 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:28:37 +0000

More than similar. Another word for the same thing.

New comment by andy81 in "Space Cadet Pinball on Linux"

andy81 — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:29:37 +0000

It's crazy that license laundering is still the primary use case for LLMs.

New comment by andy81 in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

andy81 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:51:28 +0000

Digit is the English word for finger.

New comment by andy81 in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

andy81 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:26:36 +0000

Agents will happily automate away intentional friction like a confirm prompt, even if you organise it as multiple API calls.

The fix needs to be permissions rather than ergonomics.

New comment by andy81 in "'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet"

andy81 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:37:32 +0000

Because Polymarket creates an incentive to change the real-world result.

If you create a bet on {person} getting assassinated by {date}, you greatly increase the chances of somebody on the "Yes" side thumbing the scales.

New comment by andy81 in "Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops"

andy81 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:40:56 +0000

Price isn't affected by mining difficulty, only the other direction.

New comment by andy81 in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

andy81 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:27:41 +0000

The only thing "clear" about that License agreement is it contradicts all their other marketing about Copilot.

So either that document is fraudulent or everyone else at Microsoft is committing fraud daily.

Examples from the first search result: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-365-copi...

Support page with ~25 tutorials provided by Microsoft about how to "Create a document with Copilot" or "Create a branded presentation from a file" or "Start a Loop workspace from a Teams meeting".

Do you actually believe that creating branded presentations (from Microsoft's own examples) is something people do for "entertainment purposes"?

New comment by andy81 in "C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper"

andy81 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 11:20:02 +0000

The way to do enums in SQL (generally, not just MSSQL) is another table. It's better that they don't offer several ways to do the same thing.

New comment by andy81 in "Most-read tech publications have lost over half their Google traffic since 2024"

andy81 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:19:15 +0000

We've all tried to ask the LLM about something outside of its training data by now.

In that situation, they give the (wrong) answer that sounds the most plausible.

New comment by andy81 in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

andy81 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:26:04 +0000

LA is sparse by European standards, or rural by Asian standards.

http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf CTRL+F for "BUILT-UP URBAN AREAS BY URBAN POPULATION DENSITY: 2025"

America is the exception for population density in general.

New comment by andy81 in "Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says"

andy81 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:32:28 +0000

There are more options -

Banning advertising targeted at the user rather than the context

Enforcing Do Not Track

Enforcing GDPR (especially sites that use cookie banners)

New comment by andy81 in "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"

andy81 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:52:35 +0000

SO also isn't afraid to tell you that your question is stupid and you should do it a better way.

Some people take that as a personal attack, but it can be more helpful than a detailed response to the wrong question.

New comment by andy81 in "OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026"

andy81 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:56:04 +0000

Amazon paid no dividends, that's their big debt financing.

New comment by andy81 in "Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by EFF to stop spying"

andy81 — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 19:15:10 +0000

There's no reason that contextual ads couldn't be automated at scale.

It might even be easier than automating targeted ads, given the incredible level of research and compute that gets wasted on targeting.

New comment by andy81 in "Canadian math prodigy allegedly stole $65M in crypto"

andy81 — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 09:50:42 +0000

> That is a philosophical argument completely unrelated to whether or not something is illegal.

Most comments saying that cryptocurrency holders should abide by "code is law", are not actually saying that we should abide by "code is law" and abandon the legal system.

It's a classic argument to show that the purported benefits of cryptocurrency are a farce.

New comment by andy81 in "A 10x Faster TypeScript"

andy81 — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 19:23:54 +0000

F# isn't in the running for third either.

Maybe top ten behind MSSQL, Powershell, Excel Formulae, DAX etc.

New comment by andy81 in "400 reasons to not use Microsoft Azure"

andy81 — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 12:24:32 +0000

Powershell was 2006, so I suppose the real "peak windows server UX" was 2016 when PS was relatively mature and came out-of-the-box with the latest version.

New comment by andy81 in "How about trailing commas in SQL?"

andy81 — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 12:51:26 +0000

What would it offer that you can't already get from DBATools, LINQ, and ORMs more generally?