Hacker News: barfoure

New comment by barfoure in "The New Right-Wing Tech Intelligentsia"

barfoure — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:16:45 +0000

Take a look at her campaign donations, where she flies, how often, where she stays, which restaurants she attends and everything else involved.

It’s millions and millions. She did a good job of keeping her husband out of the spotlight.

$49 to $125k sounds like a fictitious “we don’t know” number. It’s amusing. And politicians will lie directly to you.

New comment by barfoure in "Graphite is joining Cursor"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 23:11:51 +0000

> I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think the Cursor team weren’t standup people with high character and kindness

Somebody screenshot this please. We are looking at comedy gold in the next 3 years and there’s no shortage of material.

New comment by barfoure in "Believe the Checkbook"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 23:06:16 +0000

I disagree with this article and what it attempts to do: frame the acquisition using a conjecture. The only thing to “believe” are the authors reasons - which are flimsy, because they are the very thing we need to be critical of.

I don’t know why the acquisition happened, or what the plans are. But it did happen, and for this we don’t have to suspend disbelief. I don’t doubt Anthropic has plans that they would rather not divulge. This isn’t a big stretch of imagination, either.

We will see how things play out, but people are definitely being displaced by AI software doing work, and people are productive with them. I know I am. The user count of Claude Code, Gemini and ChatGPT don’t lie, so let’s not kid ourselves.

New comment by barfoure in "Prepare for That Stupid World"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:32:44 +0000

You’re welcome to try but something tells me people resort to these satirical takes precisely because they (you) are powerless to do anything of significance.

You are welcome to continue posting nonsense but the world will move forward with AI with or without you.

New comment by barfoure in "Performance Hints"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 21:07:13 +0000

It is not about outperforming the compiler - it’s about being comfortable with measuring where your clock cycles are spent, and for that you first need to be comfortable with clock cycle scale of timing. You’re not expected to rewrite the program in assembly. But you should have a general idea given an instruction what its execution entails, and where the data is actually coming from. A read from different busses means different timings.

Compilers make mistakes too and they can output very erroneous code. But that’s a different topic.

New comment by barfoure in "Performance Hints"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:56:55 +0000

The reason why that formatting is not used is because it’s not useful nor true. The table in the article is far more relevant to the person optimizing things. How many of those I can hypothetically execute per second is a data point for the marketing team. Everyone else is beholden to real world data sets and data reads and fetches that are widely distributed in terms of timing.

New comment by barfoure in "Performance Hints"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:50:31 +0000

Some of this can be reduced to a trivial form, which is to say practiced in reality on a reasonable scale, by getting your hands on a microcontroller. Not RTOS or Linux or any of that, but just a microcontroller without an OS, and learning it and learning its internal fetching architecture and getting comfortable with timings, and seeing how the latency numbers go up when you introduce external memory such as SD Cards and the like. Knowing to read the assembly printout and see how the instruction cycles add up in the pipeline is also good, because at least you know what is happening. It will then make it much easier to apply the same careful mentality to this which is ultimately what this whole optimization game is about - optimizing where time is spent with what data. Otherwise, someone telling you so-and-so takes nanoseconds or microseconds will be alien to you because you wouldn’t normally be exposed to an environment where you regularly count in clock cycles. So consider this a learning opportunity.

New comment by barfoure in "Prepare for That Stupid World"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:53:39 +0000

My bad, I should have been more clear: tech journalists have always been paid shills.

New comment by barfoure in "Prepare for That Stupid World"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:17:51 +0000

It’s a milquetoast rant but I got nothing - the employee is right. You should prepare for the world and stop acting so shocked. You had decades to call out journalists for being paid mouthpieces but you didn’t because they spewed nonsense that you agreed with and benefitted you.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Prepare for what happens next. FAFO.

New comment by barfoure in "Is Firefox Firefucked?"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:21:04 +0000

You let them oust Brendan Eich. I have no sympathy whatsoever because you let the charlatans into the project and now you’re complaining.

Nobody stood up for Brendan. Nobody is going to stand up for you.

New comment by barfoure in "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:15:25 +0000

Only fools approach hyenas in good faith. You have to be naive to allow yourself to get swindled by internet marketing junkies.

I’m all for prefacing each post that comes from a16z with “Asshole Alert” so that we know who we are dealing with upfront.

New comment by barfoure in "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:51:26 +0000

It’s a Fark.com style applied to HN. Maybe we should do a SomethingAwful theme next?

New comment by barfoure in "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest"

barfoure — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:48:38 +0000

Yup. And if you dared to bring this up in the comments (ie. your own rewrite of a title/post), you’d get reminded of the guidelines and downvoted/flagged. Because fuck honesty - we are here for clicks and engagements.

This is a good step. Next: disclose financial incentives and other motives just to nip it in the bud.

New comment by barfoure in "How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips"

barfoure — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:21:00 +0000

Your analysis is out of date I think. This has already happened. Poor NXP just got their asses handed to them by the PRC. The fab they have in Italy looks nice but PRC has many of those.

New comment by barfoure in "Heart and Kidney Diseases and Type 2 Diabetes May Be One Ailment"

barfoure — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:51:44 +0000

You’ve got more patience than me. I read the title and decided I won’t bother reading the rest.

New comment by barfoure in "A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote"

barfoure — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 02:58:14 +0000

> Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT.

Hard disagree, and I’ll cite a simple example: Reddit isn’t one community. It’s a hub and spoke model. There are many good communities with curators and SMEs.

My canonical example that’s counter to this is HN. No offense to anyone but Reddit doesn’t have a hive mind - communities do. And HN hive mind is wrong more often than right and has been targeted by all sorts of astroturfers along the way. I personally take very few comments on here seriously, no takes seriously, and mostly show up to read comments by some actual hard cred people (f.e. animats). Everyone else might as well be a shill bot. AI doesn’t change this. I still get cream of the crop from Reddit.

Having said that, social media isn’t dead. It’ll transform. Two things are eternal: 1) women’s need for attention, 2) men’s need to get laid.

New comment by barfoure in "Americans overestimate how many social media users post harmful content"

barfoure — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:35:26 +0000

Turns out the kids are alright after all!

New comment by barfoure in "Thin desires are eating life"

barfoure — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:40:14 +0000

Sigh. I get it. I just don’t agree with it but fair point.

New comment by barfoure in "Former CIA spy: agency's tools can takeover your phone, TV, and even your car"

barfoure — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:27:36 +0000

It hurts to read.

New comment by barfoure in "This is not the future"

barfoure — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:08:31 +0000

Sigh…

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.”