Hacker News: fancyfredbot

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Nvim-treesitter (13K+ Stars) is Archived"

fancyfredbot — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 08:57:06 +0000

What will happen now is not clasons problem anymore I guess.

The point they seem to be making is that it never was their problem, but they were just solving it for everyone for free anyway, and in return they were doing it wrong and they should stop interacting with people.

Honestly even when people are being paid to work for you and their job is to do what you ask them to, speaking to them like that is never going to work out.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)"

fancyfredbot — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:05:03 +0000

Someone presumably pitched this idea within HP and other people agreed it was something they should try. I guess probably HP didn't put its best and brightest in charge of call centres but still, isn't that sort of amazing?

I wonder if it's the same people who eventually decided it was a bad idea after all, or whether some other group discovered what was happening and got them to stop.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive"

fancyfredbot — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:51:46 +0000

I was not evicting expecting to see OpenClaw here either. It's out of keeping with the rest of the article...

At least there's acknowledgement of limitations and it's not just hype. Overall a useful data point in terms of what's possible.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "What 81,000 people want from AI"

fancyfredbot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:45:38 +0000

Intrigued to see a blatant grammatical error ("took that logic farther" should be "took that logic further").

Is this incompetence or a deliberate error to indicate human authorship?

If the former then why aren't they using at least an AI to proof read? If the latter then what do anthropic think is wrong with AI written text?

New comment by fancyfredbot in "What 81,000 people want from AI"

fancyfredbot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:38:09 +0000

People derive genuine satisfaction from a job well done. A sense of purpose and of being useful is important to our wellbeing. There's nothing dystopian about a desire to do your work well.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

fancyfredbot — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:57:50 +0000

You can target the minimum instruction set and it'll run everywhere. Albeit very slowly. Perhaps you use a fat binary to get reasonable performance in most cases.

This isn't easy but it can be done (and it is being done on x86, despite constantly evolving variations of AVX).

New comment by fancyfredbot in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

fancyfredbot — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:51:30 +0000

So it's modular. This is normally considered a good thing. It means you don't have to pay for features you don't need.

The ISA is open so there's no greedy corporation trying to upsell you. I mean there's an implementation and die area cost for each extension but it's not being set at an artificial level by a monopolist.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user"

fancyfredbot — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:34:55 +0000

It's a good question. Costs will be lumpy. Inference servers will have a preferred batch size. Once you have a server you can scale number of users up to that batch size for relatively low cost. Then you need to add another server (or rack) for another large cost.

However I think it's fair to say the cost is roughly linear in the number of users other than that.

There may be some aspects which are not quite linear when you see multiple users submitting similar queries... But I don't think this would be significant.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Uber reported to the state that I was fired for "annoying a coworker.""

fancyfredbot — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:57:44 +0000

What made HR act in this way? They clearly felt they were protecting the company by firing this person, but they've done nothing wrong and it's unclear they posed any kind of threat to the company. Certainly the complaint about his co-worker would not be perceived as a threat.

I will give some weight to the possibility that Uber HR are utterly disfunctional, but on balance I'm left with the impression there's more to this story than we're being told.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Ask HN: How to be alone?"

fancyfredbot — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:35:10 +0000

Don't work remote.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

fancyfredbot — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:30:49 +0000

Is this what motivates Sundar Pichai to work harder for Google? More money? Surely there's nothing he could want that he doesn't already have.

I understand it's insulting to be paid less than other CEOs, and I get that it's a way of keeping score.

All the same I think he's doing it for the power, the respect, the fame. Would he have walked away if the number was only $100m? Would that have been rational?

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Data Center Intelligence at the Price of a Laptop"

fancyfredbot — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:21:24 +0000

Has anyone used qwen 3.5 9b? Did it really compare well to Opus 4.1 outside of synthetic benchmarks?

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Our Agreement with the Department of War"

fancyfredbot — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 13:43:24 +0000

In September 2025, Executive Order 14347 authorized the usage of "Department of War" as a secondary name, which is now preferred by the department.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Show HN: Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app"

fancyfredbot — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:28:12 +0000

If you'd bought every fad coin your brother recommended to you, even though it was a bad idea in your own judgement then I think you'd have zero dollars.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking"

fancyfredbot — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:57:05 +0000

This isn't a particularly acute or interesting comment but I feel the need to say: This is a fantastic, well written, and quite sympathetic account of the excesses of the world silicon valley VC has created. It's weirdly beautiful.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

fancyfredbot — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:22:16 +0000

Simple prompts which illicit incorrect responses from recent LLMs will get you on the front page of HN.

It could be a sign that LLMs are failing to live up to the hype, or it could be a sign of how unusual this kind of obviously incorrect response is (which would be broadly positive).

New comment by fancyfredbot in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

fancyfredbot — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:29:54 +0000

It's all trade offs. The router works most of the time so most free users get the expensive model when necessary.

They lost x% of customers and cut costs by y%. I bet y is lots bigger than x.

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Court orders Acer and Asus to stop selling PCs in Germany over H.265 patents"

fancyfredbot — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:54:01 +0000

I have a feeling the days of patent encumbered video codecs will come to an end soon and be replaced with some kind of autoencoder, or at least the decoder part. It should be possible to match or exceed the compression achieved by H.265, although the decoder would probably consume more energy and cost more. The cool thing about autoencoder compression is that at high compression rates it'll still look like a high resolution image, it'll just be of the wrong scene!

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Slop Terrifies Me"

fancyfredbot — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 11:45:37 +0000

> You get AI that can make you like 90% of a thing! 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.

Based on the Adobe stock price the market thinks AI slop software will be good enough for about 20% of Adobe users (or Adobe will need to make its software 20% cheaper, or most likely somewhere between).

Interestingly workday, which is possibly slightly simpler software more easily replicable using coding agents is about the same (down 26%).

New comment by fancyfredbot in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

fancyfredbot — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 08:32:34 +0000

Is it still a decent gamble after you've been trying (and failing) for a decade, and numerous well funded competitors are going the easy way, and when there is huge upside to being first, and when the value of FSD easily covers the rapidly falling cost of LIDAR?

No. It's not a good idea. It's not a good gamble. It's stupid, and the engineers can see it's stupid. A lot of them have quit, reducing the very slim chances of it working even further.