Hacker News: estimator7292

New comment by estimator7292 in "Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit"

estimator7292 — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:00:29 +0000

We are, quite notably, in a huge hiring crisis where vast numbers of programmers and researchers can't even get interviews. It really is not that simple

New comment by estimator7292 in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"

estimator7292 — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:40:40 +0000

That's an incredibly impractical and expensive place to put it. Frankly, I don't believe you purely because it'd be $200 cheaper for the manufacturer to put the antennas in the shark fin on the roof with all the other antennas

New comment by estimator7292 in "Man finds $1M worth of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in a dumpster"

estimator7292 — Sat, 09 May 2026 05:22:21 +0000

No, it's wrong (and illegal) to hold ransom someone else's stolen property.

The phone belonged to Apple. The phone was stolen (illegal). The stolen phone was then knowingly purchased as stolen property (illegal), and then the reporter demanded payment for the stolen property (once more, illegal).

New comment by estimator7292 in "My first in-prod corrupted hard drive problem"

estimator7292 — Fri, 08 May 2026 22:01:55 +0000

N=1, but I had a drive show catastrophic SMART failures once. I figured I'd take the opportunity to tinker with the exposed serial port on the drive's PCB and wiped the SMART values.

Funny thing was, I didn't actually observe any data loss. I stressed the drive for several days, no errors. It went back in my daily driver for the next 5 years with no failure. It's been 15 years since that happened and the drive still hasn't failed.

I don't trust SMART anymore.

New comment by estimator7292 in "Utah data center: Projected daily heat equivalent to 23 atomic bombs"

estimator7292 — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:14:08 +0000

It's also completely wrong. Doc Brown's time machine did not require 1.21 gigawatts.

Very explicitly, it's 1.21 jigawatts. Completely different unit. What's a jigawatt? It's a movie, neither jigawatts nor flux capacitors are real things.

New comment by estimator7292 in "Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI"

estimator7292 — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:23:58 +0000

Buy a $300 motherboard now in case you need future features, or buy a $100 motherboard now that does everything you currently need and then buy a second or even third $100 motherboard if you ever actually need those future improvements.

Then you get a new board designed for the new features instead of something several years old and you come out $100 on top.

Futureproofing is nonsense. PCs just don't work that way, and haven't for decades.

New comment by estimator7292 in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

estimator7292 — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:45:48 +0000

Yes it did. Billionaires are a relatively new thing, but successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history.

And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire. That's a bad thing to be.

New comment by estimator7292 in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

estimator7292 — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:43:16 +0000

How else would you deal with people who are too old to do the job, and too senile to realize they can no longer perform and should abdicate?

Because we have politicians who can barely walk and talk on their own they're so goddamn old. These aren't the best and brightest of our country, these are old people who can no longer string together enough thoughts to understand their mere presence is hurting the entire country.

New comment by estimator7292 in "RAM prices are forcing companies to choose higher prices, worse specs, or both"

estimator7292 — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:24:00 +0000

My company has tens of thousands of people on a waitlist for our new product. We had planned to ship this year, but we simply can't get enough memory at any price. Even if we cut the installed memory to bare minimum functional requirements, the unit cost goes up by a few hundred dollars and functionality is drastically reduced.

So, we can't ship. This could kill our business. Thanks, Sam.

New comment by estimator7292 in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

estimator7292 — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:18:22 +0000

I see your point, however: EA sports has been doing this for literally the entire lifetime of gaming as an industry

New comment by estimator7292 in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

estimator7292 — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:16:30 +0000

At least "mentions of LOC" is now a great metric for "how clueless is this person"

New comment by estimator7292 in "Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy"

estimator7292 — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:45:42 +0000

Cloudflare gets a cut though, so it's valuable. As long as number go up, all good

New comment by estimator7292 in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

estimator7292 — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:29:03 +0000

Because due to Google having a near-monopoly on the entire goddamn Internet, a shocking number of websites and services will refuse to work with non-chrome browsers.

New comment by estimator7292 in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

estimator7292 — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:48:02 +0000

You and I wouldn't because we're engineers. An executive with ulterior motives would want to call it production for "Marketing"

New comment by estimator7292 in "The fun has been optimized out of the Internet"

estimator7292 — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:13:39 +0000

"The Internet" as always actually means "the top six websites".

The old internet still exists, you just have to look for it. There are still personal blogs and forums and webrings.

It's just that you can't find those things on reddit and Facebook.

New comment by estimator7292 in "Apple Cuts More Mac Studio and Mac Mini RAM Options as Memory Shortage Worsens"

estimator7292 — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:09:21 +0000

It would take 5-10 years to design and verify a RAM design that comes anywhere close to the performance of modern day memory. Plus millions in NRE.

New comment by estimator7292 in "DHS demanded Google surrender data on a Canadian man over anti-ICE posts"

estimator7292 — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:13:12 +0000

We could, but then these companies would just go on ignoring the law like they do now. The current state of American governance has made it very, very clear that following the law is strictly optional if you have enough money or power

New comment by estimator7292 in "Kids bypass age verification with fake moustaches"

estimator7292 — Tue, 05 May 2026 10:56:45 +0000

There's age verification and then there's "age verification" (mass surveillance dragnet)

One of these is clearly a very extremely bad thing

New comment by estimator7292 in "I am worried about Bun"

estimator7292 — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:19:22 +0000

Yeah, I'm none too happy with anthropic right now, but what's happening to Claude code is just your typical garden variety mismanagement of a project that grew way too fast for its owners to reasonably handle.

New comment by estimator7292 in "Days without GitHub incidents"

estimator7292 — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:15:48 +0000

If you pay someone full price to do a job, they know they can't fulfil the terms up front, accept the work, deliver less than the agreed upon terms and still charge you full price, you'd probably call that transaction fraudulent.

GitHub is promising service they know they cannot meet, not telling you that, and still charging you full price. What's more, one can argue quite convincingly that they're lying about their level of delivered service by not reflecting the actual level of uptime on their status page.

To give benefit of the doubt requires that the other party is not blatantly and overtly acting in bad faith. When they are, you're just apologizing for fraudulent behavior.