Hacker News: cactacea

New comment by cactacea in "Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors"

cactacea — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:44:42 +0000

New comment by cactacea in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

cactacea — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:39:33 +0000

Yeah there's a Pho place in Seattle I'd go to lunch at (iykyk) where we'd regularly have 20 people at a table and pay individually. But they didn't even use the check for that, they'd just ask what you had and ring that in as they went around the table with the handheld. Literally the only place I've ever seen that even offered to split a check at a table with more than 3-4 people.

New comment by cactacea in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

cactacea — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:31:48 +0000

> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.

I'm guessing the author has never worked as a server themselves... Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill? As an American this just seems obvious to me but maybe the expectation is different in Dubai.

New comment by cactacea in "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors"

cactacea — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:49:24 +0000

It was also designed by European engineers, not in Michigan. Not saying that's the reason the Focus is more reliable than a Taurus but they didn't follow the "typical" Ford design process at the time for that vehicle. For what it is worth I owned a 1992 Taurus and it left me stranded more times than I can count. Just some of the issues I had were a water pump that exploded and a seized A/C compressor.

New comment by cactacea in "Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?"

cactacea — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:19:05 +0000

I see this question as akin to "do I really need to learn basic flight skills when my A320 has autopilot?". Yes. Yes, you do. For exactly the same reasons. AI is workload reduction the same way that autopilot is workload reduction when used as intended.

New comment by cactacea in "U.S. pulling ocean sensors a 'shock' for Canadian research as El Niño nears"

cactacea — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:58:15 +0000

Science is evil and must be destroyed at all costs.

New comment by cactacea in "Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity"

cactacea — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:54:43 +0000

> In the early 2020s Texas was luring in remote workers

And not a single one of the people I know that moved there want to still live there. ymmv I guess

New comment by cactacea in "American Wealth, Sliced Up"

cactacea — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:19:27 +0000

compare to https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

rest of america == bottom 50%

hedge funders, fascist VCs, etc == 50-90%

walton children == 90-99%

elon bezos == 99.9%

New comment by cactacea in "Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot"

cactacea — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:01:08 +0000

Highly recommend the book Fixing Your Feet if you found this useful, it is a gold mine of helpful info. I used to get really awful blisters even on short hikes but after applying some of the lacing techniques from this book I don't get blisters at all.

https://www.fixingyourfeet.com/fixing-your-feet/

New comment by cactacea in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

cactacea — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:30:48 +0000

Thanks, I needed a laugh. Only on HN...

New comment by cactacea in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

cactacea — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:29:41 +0000

So the numbers will need adjusted for inflation. Eventually. Like any other tax. If you're making an argument it is entirely unclear what your position is.

New comment by cactacea in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

cactacea — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:20:43 +0000

Sure yeah, all those middle class families with second homes in New York City. Right.

Nobody affected by this is middle class. Nobody that will be affected by this in the next 20 years would be considered middle class by any rational measure.

New comment by cactacea in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

cactacea — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:37:34 +0000

"Separation" seems like clear bad faith to me as well. Alberta as an independent country? Yeah right, they'd pull a Texas for sure.

New comment by cactacea in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

cactacea — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:21:26 +0000

I also work at Amazon and my coworkers are playing 20 questions every morning to keep their metrics up. Like anything else there it depends on your org & managers.

New comment by cactacea in "Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable"

cactacea — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:02:34 +0000

That is pretty much my existence at $MAJOR_TECH_COMPANY now. Inexperienced security engineers running bots against my codebase and sending me pages long tickets with their "findings". There might be a couple of interesting nuggets here and there but by and large the reports are just noise. This churn is actively taking away from my ability to actually respond to customer-impacting issues because "security is always our top priority".

New comment by cactacea in "Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI Overview claimed he was a sex offender"

cactacea — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:51:20 +0000

There isn't one.

New comment by cactacea in "Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy"

cactacea — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:39:56 +0000

Thanks, I hate it.

What are the practical, legitimate use cases for buying domains at scale? I really can't think of a single one. I can however think of quite a few nefarious ones.

New comment by cactacea in "AI Product Graveyard"

cactacea — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:15:35 +0000

not anymore!

New comment by cactacea in "Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test"

cactacea — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:50:41 +0000

Because stuff like the Bullet Cluster exists. Dark matter is in fact the simplest answer.

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

New comment by cactacea in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

cactacea — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:17:19 +0000

> I've worked in the aerospace industry for the past 8 years, and for most of that time I felt like I could confidently say that RF engineering felt like it was a quiet, non evolving field.

Not an EE myself but honestly baffled how the author got that impression with the huge expansion of RF engineering in the consumer space - particularly with 3/4/5G/LTE networks and 802.1x. Maybe this is just an artifact of working on building weapons (i.e. defense) and being in the US?