Hacker News: eCa

New comment by eCa in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

eCa — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:59:37 +0000

I’ve only seen this snippet (on phone so no source access), but var + no fat arrow could also indicate someone who learned js a long time ago and use as what they’re used to.

New comment by eCa in "I moved my digital stack to Europe"

eCa — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:38:14 +0000

> Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data.

You are equating illegal behavior with legal behavior. We do what we can to avoid the legal ways the US government can access our data.

New comment by eCa in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

eCa — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:56:54 +0000

That’s when you ask it to write tests to a good coverage, and then have it reimplement everything with the tests still passing…

New comment by eCa in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

eCa — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:59:45 +0000

Couldn't the same argument be made for Chrome suddenly including a bitcoin miner? Seems like that would be a difference in degree rather than in kind.

New comment by eCa in "The Joy of Folding Bikes"

eCa — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 23:09:08 +0000

I know it's not for everyone, but it is also a reasonable touring bike if done within its constraints. I've probably done closer to 40 days on my 16" Brompton, longest was a two-week 1000km ride. On the topic of leaving the bike out-of-sight: In those 40 days I've left it locked a total of 20 minutes, otherwise it comes with me into restaurants, supermarkets, public restrooms, hotel rooms..

The biggest downsides are speed and climbing ability. 80k or so has been a reasonable max distance on tour (I've done one 100k day, it was long) and I wouldn't take it to the Alps.

Like the OP, I run Schwalbe Marathon Plus which has been good. But I have had one catastrophic puncture after riding over a particularly nasty piece of glass that cut straight through the tire. After that I bring a folding backup tire.

New comment by eCa in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

eCa — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:18:17 +0000

One obvious argument is what it was trained on.

New comment by eCa in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

eCa — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:43:51 +0000

Vibe coding and copilot inserted the ad-code into that PR?

Is that the most charitable way?

New comment by eCa in "AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton"

eCa — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:28:51 +0000

> That's not augmentation, that's a completely different game

Not saying that this comment is ai written, but this phrasing is the em-dash of 2026.

New comment by eCa in "AWS European Sovereign Cloud"

eCa — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:13:00 +0000

> still under the jurisdiction of the US regime

Exactly, this seem pointless for people serious about staying away from US owned data stores. I know first hand of EU based businesses that left AWS (and all other US owned services) before 2020 due to customer (B2B) demand which in turn was due to the Cloud Act[1], and for whom it today would be completely untenable to return.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

New comment by eCa in "AI Police Reports: Year in Review"

eCa — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 11:06:45 +0000

Just this weekend it (Gemini) has produced two detailed sets of instructions on how to connect different devices over bluetooth, including a video (that I didn’t watch), while the devices did not support doing the connections in that direction. No reasonable human reading the involved manuals would think those solutions feasible. Not impressed, again.

New comment by eCa in "Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features"

eCa — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 11:31:56 +0000

> Why search, wade through dubious results, etc when you can just instantly get the result you want in the format you want it?

For one, that way you can see that the source is dubious. Gemini gives it to you cleaned. And then you still have to dig through the sources to confirm that what it gave you is correct and not halucinated.

New comment by eCa in "Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?"

eCa — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:38:00 +0000

> I do create an ephemeral Apple ID every time I get a new phone

In other words, you do have an in-use apple id at (pretty much) all times.

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

eCa — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 05:33:24 +0000

No, I want to read it (or not) the way the writer intended.

New comment by eCa in "Koralm Railway"

eCa — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 16:22:10 +0000

The 57 km Gotthard Base Tunnel has been in operation since 2016. There's also a 3km long tunnel between France and Italy that opened in 1882. Nowadays there's probably hundreds of 1km+ tunnels in the Alps.

New comment by eCa in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

eCa — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:21:21 +0000

While I agree completely with the conclusion, for obvious reasons we can’t know for sure if it is correct about the future until we reach it. Perhaps asking it for wild ideas rather than ”most likely” would create something more surprising.

New comment by eCa in "I successfully recreated the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude"

eCa — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:39:53 +0000

Laziness is one of the three virtues (of a good programmer), but I think Larry didn’t anticipate the current situation when he wrote it:

”The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.”

New comment by eCa in "How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs"

eCa — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 09:11:58 +0000

The ”historically” does some lifting there. Historically, before the internet, mass media was produced in one version and then distributed. With AI for example news reporting can be tailored to each consumer.

New comment by eCa in "AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society"

eCa — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 07:28:56 +0000

Especially combined with the AI companies focusing on the destruction of value of human creative output.

New comment by eCa in "Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'"

eCa — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:38:18 +0000

I’m probably an outlier: I use chatgpt/gemini for specific purposes, but ai summaries on eg google search or youtube gives me negative value (I never read them and they take up space).

New comment by eCa in "Mixing Is the Heartbeat of Deep Lakes. At Crater Lake, It's Slowing Down"

eCa — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 08:14:03 +0000

In addition to that, how many lakes would need to be pumped or would it be a feel-good project for famous lakes?