Hacker News: entropyie

New comment by entropyie in "We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians"

entropyie — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 10:38:03 +0000

Ian M Banks covers this in great detail in his science fiction books. Highly recommended.

New comment by entropyie in "Mother convicted of: her 5 yo walks short way to pond alone in Virginia"

entropyie — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:20:55 +0000

Haven't heard a single story like this from Ireland in the last 20 years, but I'm happy to be corrected. If anything the police here are too lenient on children running amok. It's common to see 9 year olds flying around on e-scooters. The UK might be a different story.

New comment by entropyie in "Ollama: All Aboard Open Models"

entropyie — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:09:41 +0000

To any ollama.com dudes and dudettes reading this: why won't you offer any embedding models on your subscription when they are readily supported by the software and fairly efficient to run?

New comment by entropyie in "The US grocery slowdown is real"

entropyie — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 11:23:40 +0000

I think if you take a global outlook, you'll find I am not the outlier. Wasting food is a recent Western phenomenon.

New comment by entropyie in "The US grocery slowdown is real"

entropyie — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 23:12:06 +0000

I have two kids and this is pure bollox. They'll eat what they are given if they are hungry enough. Or eat the leftovers yourself. Cook the fruit and make compote. We never throw out edible food, virtually zero waste. Just make an effort.

New comment by entropyie in "Ask HN: Why isn't Google indexing information about the AT Protocol?"

entropyie — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:32:47 +0000

Maybe they should have used a name that wasn't already taken...

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

New comment by entropyie in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

entropyie — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:03:23 +0000

What an obnoxious comparison. Any engineer good enough to get into Meta has had their pick of tech jobs for the past decade. They could easily live comfortably, but less well paid, working for a myriad of less exploitative tech companies. Your average coal plant worker had no such options.

New comment by entropyie in "Meta employees protest against mouse tracking tech at US offices"

entropyie — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:30:49 +0000

Stunning hypocrisy.

New comment by entropyie in "Kagi is contemplating the removal of the assistant from its professional tier"

entropyie — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:35:02 +0000

Please keep Assistant, it's an easy to use alternative to OpenAI, and is not intrusive. I will say that I find the GUI infuriating though... It's never clear where the cursor is when you start a new chat. Don't understand the low contrast layout with too much whitespace.

New comment by entropyie in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

entropyie — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:46:38 +0000

Another Irishman here. Stop trying to harken back to some notional "good old days" that didn't exist. People are better off than they've ever been. Energy was always expensive relative to income. When I was a kid in the 80s, we weren't allowed to turn on the central heating unless there were arctic conditions. The main issue driving COL issues is the complete lack of social housing construction for the last 15 years. You can't blame the tree huggers for that. Renewable energy is a matter of national security, and prevents our hard earned money being sent overseas to regimes like Russia and all the charmers in the Middle East. Our very first electricity plant as a free state was hydro ffs.

New comment by entropyie in "Uber CEO on culture: expects weekend email replies, will push out non-performers"

entropyie — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:14:05 +0000

What would you be spending that money on exactly? If you can't afford to unplug on the weekend, spend time with family / friends, then you are poor.

New comment by entropyie in "Battle-Testing Lynx at Allegro"

entropyie — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:33:44 +0000

That name is taken, especially for anything web related.

New comment by entropyie in "Ask HN: Has anyone else been struggling with search lately?"

entropyie — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 07:50:29 +0000

Search is great, using Kagi. Just bought the family plan, never going back to google. Also FastMail.

New comment by entropyie in "AI-generated videos showing young and attractive women promote Poland's EU exit"

entropyie — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:21:50 +0000

Indeed. This was not such an issue when everybody had their own website or blog or whatever, and you had to seek out content intentionally... It's the active intervention of an algorithmic megaphone that is causing the damage. To me this is when it stops being free speech and starts being corporate policy that needs to be regulated.

New comment by entropyie in "1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18"

entropyie — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 07:53:58 +0000

Delighted to see something made in Ireland that didn't come from a multinational... The Zorin brothers have worked on this since they were teenagers. https://stconleths.ie/the-zorin-brothers-technology-for-huma... They were even on the national news a few weeks back!

New comment by entropyie in "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (1999)"

entropyie — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 13:52:45 +0000

Excellent piece, captivating. I found many parallels here to managing IT. So much of control theory and systems engineering is relevant to developing and deploying cloud systems, improving performance etc...

Many times I've seen engineers polishing and optimizing the code of an existing system without ever questioning the process itself or indeed the paradigm. I myself was in that position, spent 5 years optimizing the parameters of a complex system, only to realize that system was put in place based on faulty assumptions that were never questioned. The whole thing could have been removed and performance sped up 200%.

New comment by entropyie in "Medical student ate 700 eggs in a month and his cholesterol levels dropped"

entropyie — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 08:06:59 +0000

Virtually zero ads using firefox mobile... I don't know how normal people can stand surfing the web these days ..

New comment by entropyie in "Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods Is Completely Unrealistic"

entropyie — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 22:14:03 +0000

Is this a submarine article for food corps or what? Yes, it's hard work to make food by hand, but for fucks sake, our ancestors did it for generations, without any modern appliances or temperature controlled ovens. This article was so long, I don't even know the point was. Is she trying to say that UPF is not so bad? That you should just give in? At the end of the day it just comes down to priorities. There is almost nothing more important than what goes into a child's developing body. Maybe skip some of the after school activities and cook with them instead.

New comment by entropyie in "Fastmail desktop app"

entropyie — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 07:28:10 +0000

I am a paid user. I use Thunderbird on my desktop. This is a waste of time and money. Put the money into proper EU based data centres instead.

New comment by entropyie in "I only use Google Sheets"

entropyie — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 18:35:55 +0000

For those who hated the unmaintainable mega spreadsheet of death, MS Access was actually a quite decent solution. It allowed you to sprinkle some structure and maintainability onto a spreadsheet without losing the accessibility and ease of development. You could whip up really functional UIs without much coding knowledge. 20 years later and I still don't know what the replacement for Access is in today's world...