Hacker News: flatline

New comment by flatline in "Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware"

flatline — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:11:11 +0000

When I was 7 or 8 a friend and I crimped the heads off strike-anywhere match sticks, wrapped them in foil, and struck them with hammers and rocks. They were quite loud, one even set off a sound-activated toy inside the house.

I make no claims as to how well adjusted I am, but I've at least survived 40-odd years of life since then.

New comment by flatline in "Claude Fable 5"

flatline — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:45:14 +0000

I don't think anyone has a firm grasp on actual inference costs -- including the research and training that has gone into those models. We've got near-frontier capabilities from open source models from China at pennies on the dollar compared to US big tech rollouts. OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily subsidizing their inference -- no wait, they are charging the most they can get away with before going public. Where is the truth?

New comment by flatline in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

flatline — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:48:12 +0000

The HN crowd is, by and large, not the target audience for his self promotion. I guarantee there is one and this is more or less effective.

New comment by flatline in "Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup"

flatline — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:47:26 +0000

Nothing new. I used to work with .NET and went to some meetups and conferences. There are some hardcore Microsoft fanboys out there. Didn’t even mix the kool-aid, ate it right from the packet. They only know MS products and seem scared of anything else.

Maybe not your typical HN crowd but marketing absolutely works on developers.

New comment by flatline in "Various LLM Smells"

flatline — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:31:36 +0000

I don't disagree about the probability, but the current frontier models are not completely useless for writing even in areas where I have significant knowledge. I would not have said that a year ago. You have to watch them like a hawk -- they are good at spitting out plausible sounding nonsense that is hard even for an expert to discern. But the dice roll going on behind the scenes is continually more biased towards being correct/useful than not.

New comment by flatline in "The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients"

flatline — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:25:35 +0000

I also think this is an interesting topic of research. I have had lifelong issues with chronic pain and always felt like diet influenced it, but I’ve never been able to isolate a single factor. I’be stopped cooking with low smoke point oils but it’s all guesswork at this point.

Your phrasing about politics was potentially ambiguous, so I asked for clarification. People can mean many different things when they say something is political.

New comment by flatline in "The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients"

flatline — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:48:58 +0000

That could be a valid observation for n=1. There could be any number of reasons seed oils cause inflammation for you but do not the general populace, or not at numbers large enough to offset recommending them as a general rule.

The politicization is coming directly from the Trump administration, as the article states - making spurious claims and eliding the science that backs up the contrary conclusions. Did you have some other idea of how this is being politicized?

New comment by flatline in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

flatline — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:14:05 +0000

It really doesn't have to come for everything to feel like it's taking everything. If it eliminates 10% of white collar jobs over the next decade, the impact will be felt everywhere.

New comment by flatline in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

flatline — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:41:48 +0000

AFAIK all these companies have SOTA or near-SOTA models available under enterprise licenses. AI companies are not interested in your secret sauce, they are trying to capture the SDLC wholesale.

New comment by flatline in "Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions"

flatline — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:04:01 +0000

It certainly thought it did all that -- this was (presumably) not written by a human.

New comment by flatline in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

flatline — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:08:28 +0000

I'm skeptical that B is fully possible. You can create a PQ fork of bitcoin but you cannot automatically bring vulnerable wallets along - and there are a lot of vulnerable wallets, especially from the early days. There's a catastrophe ahead for bitcoin with an apparent probability of 1.0. That's hard to account for in this scheme.

New comment by flatline in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

flatline — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:03:40 +0000

The bitcoin white paper was released in 2008.

New comment by flatline in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

flatline — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:02:27 +0000

There was an EO, but that is not law. Cannabis is still schedule I last I checked. The order is to make it schedule III.

New comment by flatline in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

flatline — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:42:26 +0000

People often cloak their power grabs behind a move to control some vice. It was just a bunch of us nerds on BBSs back in the day. Now everyone is online. The stakes are completely different.

New comment by flatline in "Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)"

flatline — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:33:40 +0000

I think it's more the consistency of product design than the manufacturing process. Everything around me, especially in the software world, seems to change for no good reason on a frequent basis. Companies change products all the time for reasons other than utility/functionality. A consistent specification over 50+ years is an outlier.

New comment by flatline in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

flatline — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:51:59 +0000

I, too, am able to get interviews. The last time I made a serious search was in 2022-23, and companies were clearly eager to hire at competitive rates. This past fall, they were not. My salary requirements stopped at least two interview processes when the question was raised. In other cases it was not clear that the company was serious about moving forward with hiring for the position at all. A three month search ultimately came up dry, which is fine because I'm currently employed, but I do not think the hiring landscape is promising at all right now.

New comment by flatline in "Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning"

flatline — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:58:16 +0000

There's a lot that's not being said in (2). That warrants more extensive justification, especially with the issues presented in the parent post.

New comment by flatline in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

flatline — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:34:45 +0000

One person's waste is another's value. Do you have any idea how "wasteful" tik tok or any other streaming platform is? I'll grant that AI is driving unprecedented data center development but it's far from the root cause, or even a leading clause, of our climate issues. I always find it strange that this is the first response so many have to AI, when it poses other more imminent existential threats IMO.

New comment by flatline in "How to stop being boring"

flatline — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:21:33 +0000

I think speaks more to a certain personality type than a set of general social protocols. This person feels like their personality was worn down to something boring by trying to fit into social systems that arguably were not designed for them. What I see here is two systems that operate at different levels of abstraction. The author's is focused on special interests, systemic critique ("be polarizing" from the post), and meta-conversation. The other is focused on lived experience, emotional shorthand, shared cultural assumptions, and relational smoothing. Neither is right or wrong, but there can be a cultural clash and misunderstandings if the two are not both recognized as valid and rich in their own way.

Not everyone is going to value weirdness. That doesn't necessarily make them boring. It doesn't mean they are incapable of revealing interesting truths about themselves - but the author may be unable to detect those for what they are due to his own cultural bias.

New comment by flatline in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"

flatline — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:41:06 +0000

I can kill someone with a rock, a knife, a pistol, and a fully automatic rifle. There is a real difference in the other uses, efficacy, and scope of each.