Hacker News: falkensmaize

New comment by falkensmaize in "The RAM shortage is bringing back DDR4"

falkensmaize — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:37:47 +0000

Honestly I think a slowdown in the "pace of improvement" might be positive. These days it feels like you can't catch your breath.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Hitchcock and Herrmann: The friendship and film scores that changed cinema"

falkensmaize — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 01:50:12 +0000

Thanks OP for posting this enjoyable read. It’s always fun when my first love - music, and film music in particular - somehow leaks into my world of software engineering.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Claude Opus 5"

falkensmaize — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:27:29 +0000

If the price keeps going down, how are they ever going to be able to make back all the money they’re spending? If the price stays high, how are they going to undercut the cost of labor?

New comment by falkensmaize in "You Opened a Credit Card. ICE Now Knows Where You Live"

falkensmaize — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:57:36 +0000

I assume they already have access to all that information via IRS records, right?

New comment by falkensmaize in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

falkensmaize — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:34:50 +0000

My wife too was a public school teacher for a decade, and resigned from sheer frustration and exhaustion. It became abundantly clear toward the end of her tenure that no amount of effort or technique was going to make the situation better. It’s really a completely broken system.

The primary reason I became a software engineer at middle age was to make enough money and have good enough health insurance that she could have the freedom to leave a job that was killing her mentally and physically.

New comment by falkensmaize in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

falkensmaize — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:32:21 +0000

If your goal is high academic achievement, the only real answer is a stable home life, parent-enforced discipline and high parental expectations (note I said expectations not involvement - highly “involved” parents can be worse than the neglectful ones). That’s it. That’s the big secret. Show me a school full of tired/neglected/hungry/unruly students and I’ll show you a school full of students that are going to be almost impossible to teach effectively. There will be exceptions of course, but kids who aren’t parented properly at home will struggle massively to learn at school.

You can throw all the money, new techniques and technology you want to at the problem. It will not get better without fixing that fundamental issue.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center"

falkensmaize — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:55:25 +0000

It seems like there’s very little upside to allowing one in your state. They don’t bring in large amounts of new jobs once construction is done, they leech power and water like vampires increasing costs and depleting resources, they add noise and light pollution to nearby areas, they’re ugly. They only seem to benefit large tech companies.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

falkensmaize — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:29:48 +0000

That’s fine because an enforced TLD system would default to them being allowed to access social networks and parents having an easy way to block them. It makes it easier for parents to do their jobs and doesn’t affect everyone else. Want your kids to have access to social media? Just…do nothing.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

falkensmaize — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:04:19 +0000

One very simple way to give parents control over what their children see and participate in without violating everyone else’s privacy is to create adult and social TLDs and require these sites to migrate to them. So instagram.com becomes instagram.social, etc. Then mandate that all consumer network equipment mfrs and internet providers provide easily accessible ways to block these TLDs. Maybe combine that with some public education materials to teach less savvy parents how to do this.

Now you’ve given every parent a way to easily mass block all adult/social sites/apps if they want and no one’s privacy need be compromised.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Why the smart home bubble popped"

falkensmaize — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:49:36 +0000

Like a lot of tech trends, home automation tends to be a solution looking for a problem. Video doorbells are a useful exception, but light switches, kitchen appliances and thermostats just aren’t something I need to be connected to the internet.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans"

falkensmaize — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:04:25 +0000

Given that Plex just bumped their lifetime subscription price to $750, I can no longer recommend them. They are clearly more interested in becoming another streaming service, and are I think trying to push out their core users who probably make them very little money.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

falkensmaize — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:36:09 +0000

The problem is that code it spits out on the fly is untested and untrustworthy. Identify the parts of your workflow that could be accomplished with regular code - write and unit test that code, with LLM help if you want, and use the llm as the orchestrator only.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?"

falkensmaize — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:17:11 +0000

I’m a bootcamp grad (although it was an intense 5-night a week, year long bootcamp, not some 6-week build-a-demo class). I have a college degree but it’s in the arts.

I do try to continually improve my skill set, refresh on design patterns, etc. I’m currently employed and have been for the last six years. I don’t really know if I fall in category 3 or not.

What, in your opinion are the “foundational” CS skills the #3 people are missing?

New comment by falkensmaize in "Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45%"

falkensmaize — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:59:04 +0000

"get obsolete in months"

If you mean obsolete in the sense of "no longer fit for purpose" I don't think that's true. They may become obsolete in terms of "can't do hottest new thing" but that's true of pretty much any technology. A capable local model that can do X will always be able to do X, it just may not be able to do Y. But if X is good enough to solve your problem, why is a newer better model needed?

I think if we were able to achieve ~Opus 4.6 level quality in a local model that would probably be "good enough" for a vast number of tasks. I think it's debatable whether newer models are always better - 4.7 seems to be somewhat of a regression for example.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7"

falkensmaize — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:52:17 +0000

I mean...yeah?

If your child says they've learned their multiplication tables but they can't actually multiply any numbers you give them do they actually know how to do multiplication? I would say no.

New comment by falkensmaize in "DaVinci Resolve – Photo"

falkensmaize — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:59:15 +0000

Yeah this is the way. Blender has a higher learning curve than AE but it’s ultimately much better at actual 3d than AE is, and the recent improvements to the interface have made it a lot more usable.

New comment by falkensmaize in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

falkensmaize — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 02:08:21 +0000

There is a whole world of expensive virtual samples instruments that can very convincingly replicate an orchestral performance in a DAW. See Spitfire Audio, EastWest, Cinesamples, etc.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Post Mortem: axios NPM supply chain compromise"

falkensmaize — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 03:39:53 +0000

I guess the point I’m making is that a lot of popular JavaScript libraries were created to address deficiencies in the core api that don’t exist anymore, but we keep using these libraries mostly because of entropy and familiarity.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Post Mortem: axios NPM supply chain compromise"

falkensmaize — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 03:50:24 +0000

The fetch api has been widely available in browsers for a decade now. And in node since 18. A competent developer could whip up a more axios-like library with fetch in a day easily. You can do all the cool things like interceptors with fetch too.

Yet most developers I work with just use it reflexively. This seems like one of the biggest issues with the npm ecosystem - the complete lack of motivation to write even trivial things yourself.

New comment by falkensmaize in "Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M"

falkensmaize — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:08:33 +0000

I guess to me this doesn't seem like that big of a deal? I mean if you have a 100 million subscribers, do you really care much about a few $million increase? I thought the big players like Youtube had already moved to open source codecs already anyway.