Hacker News: elcdodedocle

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

elcdodedocle — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:57:51 +0000

The closest to a short answer I can give: I have been infatuated with this industry (not just AI, but tech in general) since I was a kid in the 80s. I have seen lots of hype. Nothing even close to this. That is already a very good reason: That it can simply tank the economy and have even worse consequences if we put too much faith in it. And I think there is pretty solid evidence that we are, but let's not get into it. Even if the hype turned out to be justified (It never is), it would still suck at so many levels: The version that is being pushed onto us is the worst possible one. It's a lead-in-gasoline asbestos-in-everything darkest-timeline type of event, only bigger. It basically promises to turn all of us into mere line operators of a dystopian knowledge stealing & gate-keeping machine that we can't own or control. I can't see how it benefits anything or anyone except from some megayatch-owning suborbital-flying useless jerks and their island visiting friends. How can a community of people built around using our brains to produce awesome things be excited about a product that is essentially designed for us to get lazy and turn them off to pay for someone else's statistical approach to it as yet another enshittified service?

New comment by elcdodedocle in "GabeN Is Shitting Yacht Money into Flatpak and You're Still Arguing Init Systems"

elcdodedocle — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:37:31 +0000

I understand the frustration. I have the uttermost reverence for distro maintainers and I love distro repos. I like that my OS is a consistent and well thought suite of aligned tools mindfully put together by a collective that knows what they are doing and test that it all fits and plays nice much better than I do. Please stop treating these awesome people like some kind of authoritarian ogres. I am grateful for flatpaks too. I understand that tools seldomly need to be tightly coupled to work together well, and that it does come at a cost, just as sandboxing does. I respect developers who do not package anything else. When I need a flatpak, I install it. Finally, it is also amazing that we have AppImages. Some tools just work perfectly well or well enough with limited integration capabilities in multiple diverse ecosystems. Why does everything have to be installable? So, if I want to use a tool I will get it however the developer decided to distribute it, trust that they have a good reason to do it the way they do it, and if I open my mouth it will be to say thanks, instead of being lame about someone's way of putting an effort for me to get a great product without asking for anything in return not being what I think most convenient. For me.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

elcdodedocle — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:22:20 +0000

I agree. It reads like a cook book rather than a dictionary of tech specs. No spam getting in in the way of getting things running and getting things right; If you need details you can go to individual package docs from maintainers and project docs from devs, no need for misaligned redundancy. It is also pretty comprehensive, or at least I have not missed anything yet. And up to date. So, in my opinion, the best distro documentation I know of. And I like their community process too: The most trustworthy and reliable I have seen so far without a big corporation backing it up, except for maybe Debian. Let's keep the donations going, these good people deserve it!

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Good system design"

elcdodedocle — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 10:52:41 +0000

Good article describing a boilerplate framework & techniques for (web) backend systems architecture implemented with off-the-shelf components. But like every systems architect I have ever met, it does not even put a thought into security or data governance (a priori).

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Time travel is self-suppressing"

elcdodedocle — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 07:17:03 +0000

I like the approach taken by several authors from Asimov in "The End of Eternity" to Star Trek or Loki on TV: Time travel is not allowed except for entities that live outside of time in a way that is not meaningfully perceived by anyone else; When unsanctioned travel happens, it is easy to detect and retroactively suppress by these entities. Of course this can all be refuted or at least declared a transient state at most by the mess Time Cop is; Or how things end up in any of the other stories.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Why leather is best motorcycle protection [video]"

elcdodedocle — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 17:52:49 +0000

F9 produces such a consistently and ridiculously good, cool, fun, and educational *social media content*; that it is installed permanently as a cognitive dissonance in the back of my mind.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Ask HN: Why are dating apps so bad? Why hasn't anyone made a good one?"

elcdodedocle — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:20:56 +0000

Why are they so bad? They want you to keep using them, so they have to be bad enough.

Why hasn't anybody made a good one? Maybe they have, but they are not around for long. It is not a good business: Little growth potential, no recurring revenue.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Ask HN: Is it wise to accept an intern position at Meta?"

elcdodedocle — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 10:11:09 +0000

I wouldn't ask this question to other people. Not about a specific company. I would look for core values and culture that align with mine, and the kind of impact I can have or the position sets me up for. Large renowned companies look better on your CV; startups often assign you more significant tasks, so don't dismiss them lightly. Also when I say core values I do not mean the HR corporate propaganda that every company puts out. Listen to the interviewers, check out the actual product(s) or service(s) they put out: it's about what they do and how they do it, not what they say; if the interview is transparent enough, you'll get to know at least part of the team you are going to work with: use that opportunity to find out what they are really about. A company is a community: it is not politics, religion, gender, age, race, friendship or family; but the collective planning and execution of ideas and goals through means every person in the organization should support or at least feel comfortable with.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Despite the hype, iPhone security no match for NSO spyware (2021)"

elcdodedocle — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 10:09:13 +0000

(same reason as almost every other I/O decision they make, apparently)

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Despite the hype, iPhone security no match for NSO spyware (2021)"

elcdodedocle — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 10:07:47 +0000

They dropped the jack because there was money to be made, selling airpods.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Sir Clive Sinclair has died"

elcdodedocle — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 08:10:46 +0000

My first computer was a Sinclair clone hooked up to the only TV we had at home. So was the case for so many people in my country in the 80s who couldn't afford the disproportionately more expensive machines. Kudos to this genius for bringing inexpensive computer access to the layman. He could have patented the shit out of his company's systems, charge whatever he wanted for them, and spend a ton of money on an army of lawyers defending his patents and making him a shit ton more. Instead he gave so many of us early access to the tools we would use to make our living, so we weren't in a huge disadvantage any more. I couldn't be more grateful.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years"

elcdodedocle — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 20:12:12 +0000

Well I agree with you. And I also suspected those numbers, to be honest. A sudden increase to 80% of total production? 80% from what? Since when? But I did not do a lot of research: I tried to find sources as the article is not only vague on context but also on references, but the numbers I found were not clear either. They only showed that around 90% of the global production was from silicon crystal based panels already back in 2013, way before the patent expiration. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics citing https://www.webcitation.org/6SFRTUaBS and https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...). I found no breakdowns to compare boron vs. gallium doping over time. I do not know anything about foundries. Maybe replacing boron with gallium is not a trivial change in process. Maybe the patent and planned obsolescence are not the issues here and I was being pretty cynic on my comment without fact checking it anyway. But way too often they are. If that figure, 80%, is true, and the shift from boron to gallium happened over the last year like the article claims, it is very likely that 2 main factors, if not the main ones, were those.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Is Norway the New East India Company?"

elcdodedocle — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 19:05:14 +0000

This. If only every other country with oil managed their wealth with such good intentions and for the common good the whole world would most certainly be way far ahead in getting rid of much of our dependency on it. So no, I do not think that selling oil to oil dependent countries is the same as selling opium. They have the same knowledge, means and even more motivation (no freaking oil) to get their shite together and follow the same conversion Norway has been undergoing for almost half a century now. What, do you think their fight is that they just grew a conscience yesterday and decided to replace all their petrodollars with Teslas? They freaking groomed generations of environmentally conscious citizens with all around free access to the best education to become great scientists and engineers to fight off this dependency. In and out of their country. They imported some of our best research scientists which were struggling to make a living out of their work and did not even care about it (At least until they reached their mid 30s and tried to start a family). They now own and live in literally million dollar mansions because their research efforts paid off by a country acknowledging their value. As they should. They were even able to monetize this fight for the environment, making good bucks from it. The fight for our freaking oxygen and clean water. Which shouldn't need any monetary incentive by the way, in case that is not obvious enough. In my mind they are the best kind of society you can get nowadays. I do appreciate the point of view comparing them with freaking vicious enslaving East India trading company and I am sure there is people with that mentality in their numbers but... Bitch, please.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years"

elcdodedocle — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 18:13:25 +0000

You know why release a product to the market that lasts longer when you can just hold the patent and make shitty panels that have to be replaced every so often? Forget the competitors. Forgive the cynicism but this was clearly a 20 year long win-win for the industry. Long live the big wheel industrial complex. F the consumer.

*and the environment.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "I ****Ing Hate Science"

elcdodedocle — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 19:20:27 +0000

TL;DR: (Without providing any hard data to back it up)

- Design bugs are (more) expensive to fix after implementation.

(I really don't want to be an asshole here. The piece is well written. Particularly the part where it criticizes how a lot of CS research is done nowadays. But so many words for such a remarkably obvious platitude!)

New comment by elcdodedocle in "When Everyone’s a Genius: A Few Thoughts on Speculation"

elcdodedocle — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 19:58:01 +0000

oh here comes the good ol' chewbacca defense! It's been a while... ^^

New comment by elcdodedocle in "This is How Google will Collapse (2017)"

elcdodedocle — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 07:38:52 +0000

spoiler: it's an ad.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development"

elcdodedocle — Sun, 20 Dec 2020 21:59:30 +0000

I do a lot of work for personal projects on an old 2.6Kg 2011 laptop I never felt the need to replace. I have no doubt I can produce benchmarks on this laptop involving daily tasks any average user does that would destroy any M1 device. Also I can do things on it no M1 device can reliably do right now and won't do for a while, perhaps ever or until M2 are already out (docker much?). My point is I am tired of useless biased benchmarks. Just tell people what they are: Laptops running on smartphone tech. Powerful enough to do most if not all daily tasks without any perceivable performance impact or inconvenience for the average user. Also way more efficient and cheaper to produce. It is very simple, and marketable. Just the integration with smartphone apps is already a super nice selling point, why not make it the core of the marketing strategy instead of those convoluted tricky and misguiding benchmarks and claims? What the Appleshpere is doing is comparing apples to oranges. Like: Hey look how much faster hackernews is compared to facebook! Ok, sure, whatever.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development"

elcdodedocle — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 19:31:15 +0000

bollocks.

M1 devices are quality products. A more than necessary innovation. I expect them to do well if sold at reasonable prices.

The strategy of trying to sell them as outperforming the big boys on computationally intensive tasks, on the other hand, is plain absurd.

New comment by elcdodedocle in "Why Abstaining Helps"

elcdodedocle — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 20:50:43 +0000

I also find hilarious how following this principle of "let's torture data until we make it say what we want" the headline for the exact same article could perfectly be "why abstaining hurts"