Hacker News: foobarbecue

New comment by foobarbecue in "US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects"

foobarbecue — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:16:02 +0000

And whales, don't forget the whales https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-...

and the noise causes cancer

New comment by foobarbecue in "QGIS 4.0"

foobarbecue — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:26:36 +0000

Hmmmm... even though I'm a cheerleader for it, I wouldn't recommend starting with FreeCAD. Learn on something more feature-complete and with a less idiosyncratic UI, like Onshape. I learned Solidworks at work and without that foundation I wouldn't understand what's wrong / missing about FreeCAD (which is still a lot).

New comment by foobarbecue in "QGIS 4.0"

foobarbecue — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:54:26 +0000

I think ra is complaining because changlog.qgis.org appears to be inaccessible. HN hug of death I guess. qgis.org itself seems fine.

New comment by foobarbecue in "QGIS 4.0"

foobarbecue — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:50:50 +0000

I believe in freecad! It's not there yet, but the latest release is a lot of progress!

New comment by foobarbecue in "QGIS 4.0"

foobarbecue — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:47:39 +0000

I used it to write papers about glaciovolcanism early in my career. Later, I used it to study caves on the Moon.

New comment by foobarbecue in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"

foobarbecue — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:41:58 +0000

Hard agree. Before LLMs, if there was some bit of code needed across the industry, somebody would put the effort into writing a library and we'd all benefit. Now, instead of standardizing and working together we get a million slightly different incompatible piles of stochastic slop.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Don't become an engineering manager"

foobarbecue — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:04:33 +0000

I just got a new job, hired as level 5 with official title Software Engineer (Mid-career) although my boss tells me I'm Chief Engineer. All the level 2 people on my team seem to be Senior Engineer or Lead Engineer.

New comment by foobarbecue in "NASA announces overhaul of Artemis program amid safety concerns, delays"

foobarbecue — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:51:37 +0000

> If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.

There's more to NASA than Artemis! NASA's robotic spaceflight programs generate extremely high science return at relatively low cost. Missions like Psyche, Europa Clipper, and Dragonfly are humanity's real explorers.

And their aeronautics work is valuable as well. Low-boom, etc.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

foobarbecue — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:27:03 +0000

use of "crux" is a little punny here too

but yeah faiths are into faith

shrug

New comment by foobarbecue in "Web Components: The Framework-Free Renaissance"

foobarbecue — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:56:17 +0000

I skimmed this. I use web components a lot. Unless I'm mistaken, they don't provide reactivity; you have to write that yourself. Reactivity was the feature that launched modern js frameworks so I think the article really overstates the case.

The article also misses something more important: broad native ES module support in browsers means you don't need a build step (webpack).

The "AI makes it easy!" part of the article makes me want to hurl as usual. And I'll stop short of an accusation but I will say there were some suspicious em dash comparison clauses in there.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Poor Deming never stood a chance"

foobarbecue — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:40:02 +0000

For the millionth time, would it kill ya to spell out the abbreviation the first time you use it? My googling suggests we're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectives_and_key_results , but my googling isn't always right.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Why does aluminum foil have one shiny side and one with a matte finish?"

foobarbecue — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:21:56 +0000

It's cold and lonely here on the moon. -- Jonathan Coulton

New comment by foobarbecue in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened"

foobarbecue — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:09:41 +0000

I presume you meant "fantastic," not "fantastical"?

New comment by foobarbecue in "LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio""

foobarbecue — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:13:28 +0000

Oh, it's a mostly nonsense (IMO) document that a design contractor did for a new Pepsi logo. I don't really know much about it but it gets posted on HN frequently when someone makes fun of designers. I dunno if it leaked or what, but here's a reddit thread about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/hspqgd/pepsi_logo_r... . I'd bet the GP post of this had their opinion formed at least in part by this document.

New comment by foobarbecue in "LiftKit – UI where "everything derives from the golden ratio""

foobarbecue — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:44:06 +0000

Obligatory https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

New comment by foobarbecue in "MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake"

foobarbecue — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:02:39 +0000

How would / does Moltbot try to prevent humans from posting? Is there an "I AM a bot" captcha system?

New comment by foobarbecue in "Where did all the starships go?"

foobarbecue — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 13:29:59 +0000

Maybe, but the most compelling scifi to me personally is the generation ship stuff, like Ring by Steven Baxter.

New comment by foobarbecue in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

foobarbecue — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 03:38:59 +0000

*rationale

New comment by foobarbecue in "Deterministic Governance: mechanical exclusion / bit-identical"

foobarbecue — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 04:17:39 +0000

Ah, LLMs. I should have guessed.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Deterministic Governance: mechanical exclusion / bit-identical"

foobarbecue — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 01:42:52 +0000

What do you mean by "exclusion"?