Hacker News: ethagnawl

New comment by ethagnawl in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

ethagnawl — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:30:04 +0000

We're all going to end up as Elon's serfs, aren't we?

New comment by ethagnawl in "S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic"

ethagnawl — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:07:38 +0000

That is a great question re: accounting and I can readily see both sides of it playing out. On one hand, they know not to trust the output and on the other, they're way too high on their own supply.

New comment by ethagnawl in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

ethagnawl — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:28:12 +0000

> they look at your Bedrock and LLM API calls as well as Claude Code history.

This is fucking insane. How does this correlate with productivity in any way? The results are all that matters, who cares how you got there?

New comment by ethagnawl in "The desperation of NYTimes"

ethagnawl — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:51:04 +0000

I couldn't find a direct email or submission form, so I went with a Bluesky message. Hopefully these drops in the bucket amount to something.

New comment by ethagnawl in "The desperation of NYTimes"

ethagnawl — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:26:49 +0000

I will do this. Thanks for the nudge.

New comment by ethagnawl in "The desperation of NYTimes"

ethagnawl — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:23:50 +0000

I've actually been meaning to move back to Firefox, so this is encouraging. I didn't realize you could do that sort of thing with uBlock, though? I thought it was just for blocking ads, etc.

New comment by ethagnawl in "The desperation of NYTimes"

ethagnawl — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:19:38 +0000

The UX anti-pattern of theirs which really grinds my gears is the "Continue reading in the app -- it's better." modal which appears when reading articles on the web. There does not seem to be a way to permanently opt out of it. I'm sure I could use GreaseMonkey or whatever to dismiss it for me but I mostly read articles on my phone, which makes any of that harder. The larger point, though, is that I shouldn't have to! I'm already paying for your service, please let me use it the way I want to.

New comment by ethagnawl in "Ask HN: So what happened to Facebook "localhost" tracking?"

ethagnawl — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:42:57 +0000

> not so much to get better working conditions but

... why not both?

New comment by ethagnawl in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"

ethagnawl — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:54:08 +0000

Location: New York / NYC Metro

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Make me an offer!

Technologies: Python (app dev, ML ops, uv maximalist), all things AWS, DevOps, IAC (Terragrunt/Terraform/OpenTofu), Docker, DuckDB, Postgres (pgvector), Rust, Linux sysadmin, security, etc.

Website: https://peterdohertys.website/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pdoherty926/

Résumé/CV: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pdoherty926_misc/d8759e47...

Email: pdoherty+hn@protonmail.com

I'm just coming off of a very fun project where I helped a VFX company streamline their cloud render setup (AWS Deadline Cloud) and the work is saving them a significant amount of time and money. If your studio has similar needs and/or if you have Mac M-series hardware you'd like to utilize for render jobs (i.e. instead of renting AWS compute!), I can help make this happen.

Day-to-day, I run a micro-consultancy (me!) called 21st Century Alchemy. I work with clients in many industries but have a strong preference for creative tech, experiential, museums, architecture, etc. and have worked with many of the major players in this space (Fake Love (RIP), Deeplocal, Hush, ESI/NBBJ, etc.) on big and ambitious projects (Meta Store, Force Awakens red carpet, Charter HQ, etc.).

I also work with lots of startups (video platforms, medtech, manufacturing, etc.) and traditional media companies (Bleacher Report, Conde Nast, MediaStorm, etc.).

At the moment, I'm very excited by DuckDB and have been writing a series of blog posts about it (https://peterdohertys.website/blog-posts.html). If you need help giving structure to unstructured data, exploring historical documents, putting dashboards in front of your logs, etc. please reach out!

New comment by ethagnawl in "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion"

ethagnawl — Sun, 31 May 2026 11:33:46 +0000

I haven't read California's "Stop Killing Games" bill but I wonder how close this comes up against it or similar laws?

New comment by ethagnawl in "AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers"

ethagnawl — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:18:42 +0000

Yeah, they tried hard to sound academic at the outset but the repeated references to Reddit vote counts was an obvious tell.

New comment by ethagnawl in "AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers"

ethagnawl — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:15:46 +0000

> we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.

I wish we lived in this reality. After what's happened in the last 10-12 years (in the USA, specifically) I think a significant enough number of people would rather watch their neighbors starve than give them or vote to give them anything they "didn't earn".

New comment by ethagnawl in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

ethagnawl — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:57:13 +0000

This really resonates. I'm a dev/sysadmin/whatever with 15+ years of experience and I've been seriously considering applying for a job at my local Tractor Supply.

I've been having trouble finding consistent work for the last year but was recently accepted into a recruitment network. Almost every posting on the network's job board is for AI/agentic bullshit (many of them in defense contexts) and I just can't bring myself to apply for any of them. I won't be able to fake the required enthusiasm. I've been through 4/5/6? hype cycles over the course of my career and I'm just over it all. Maybe the AI bubble will burst? Maybe it won't? Either way, it takes the fun out of what I've enjoyed doing -- even if it's because it's all anyone wants to talk about. Layer all of the surveillance* and age verification crap on top of that and ... I want off this train.

*Anecdote: I was a chaperone on an elementary school field tried yesterday and there were >8 cameras on the bus. This amount of surveillance and accompanying normalization of it hasn't prevented or even helped rectify multiple incidents my child has had while riding on school buses. So, all of the downsides and no upsides.

New comment by ethagnawl in "Volkswagen blocks Home Assistant by requiring client assertion"

ethagnawl — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:41:53 +0000

Right? I imagine there would be a non-trivial sales/marketing boost for the one/first company (in any segment) to fully embrace HA. IKEA is arguably a good example of this.

A Double Shot of DuckDB

ethagnawl — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:19:24 +0000

Article URL: https://peterdohertys.website/blog-posts/double-shot-of-duck.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314060

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by ethagnawl in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

ethagnawl — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:12:55 +0000

Let's not give them any ideas, please.

New comment by ethagnawl in "FBI arrests CIA official with $40M in gold bars in his home"

ethagnawl — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:04:22 +0000

I had no idea this was an option. Libraries are the best.

New comment by ethagnawl in "Incident with Pull Requests, Issues, Git Operations and API Requests"

ethagnawl — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:11:59 +0000

And/or move more contextually aware humans with 10K+ hours of hard won experience and fear of failure/sense of pride back into the loop.

New comment by ethagnawl in "Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking"

ethagnawl — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:55:32 +0000

I know you're being facetious but there may well be docs. It's just that the same AI most likely wrote _them_, too.

Did anyone (person or competing LLM) bother to verify that they're correct, though? Who knows! Let the next generation of models worry about that.

New comment by ethagnawl in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

ethagnawl — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:50:34 +0000

This is my current experience, too. There are a lot of "empty nest" houses on my street. Wouldn't it figure that those people are all upset about the apartments that are being built in the neighborhood which are all being scooped up by young families ...