Hacker News: foobarian

New comment by foobarian in "Why does paper fold so well?"

foobarian — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:19:23 +0000

One thing I find interesting about paper is that wetting and drying it turns it uneven. Even when drying it under a press.

And then another ridiculous process not involving paper, but super cool nonetheless is creating a flat surface by grinding 3 not-flat objects against each other in round-robin manner.

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

foobarian — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:11:20 +0000

This is actually a fun one, and kinda has some parallels to building a nuclear weapon.

I tried this as a grownup because I finally managed to get my hands on saltpeter (could only dream of it when kid). Followed the instructions, mixed everything in correct ratios, lit it with great care and fanfare and... hiss fizzle. I was so disappointed! I think it came down to purity of ingredients and not enough surface area.

Point is, there are certain details of the process required to make it truly work, that are not readily known; in a similar way with nuclear energy, the theory is pretty well known but some nitty gritty details like the implosion or detonator design are not.

New comment by foobarian in "Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items"

foobarian — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:06:20 +0000

Same, my brain is pretty visually oriented so I kind of like the icons. To be clear I don't really use the icons to pick out a particular item, but they just look nice. It's kind of like pleasant background music in a hotel lobby.

New comment by foobarian in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

foobarian — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:14:00 +0000

Reminds me of stories from ex-Yu during high inflation periods (e.g. yearly doubling; not counting periods when there were runaway spikes of almost daily doubling) when people would go to remote areas where shops didn't yet get the updated prices from headquarters and basically walked away with a bunch of near free stuff.

New comment by foobarian in "Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4B Resort Triggers'Flamingo Revolution'"

foobarian — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:30:38 +0000

So... it's like a kickstarter for real estate!

New comment by foobarian in "Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4B Resort Triggers'Flamingo Revolution'"

foobarian — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:27:46 +0000

What would be doubly ironic is if the gold course windmill farm was sponsored by big oil.

New comment by foobarian in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

foobarian — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:34:31 +0000

I didn't build tools in the classic sense of something you build and run semi permanently, like baked into your setup or home server or whatnot; but I found myself building bespoke tools with most new projects at work. Get a new Jira ticket, figure out which components will be involved, often times the tool goes collecting logs and parsing them into a Web UI with buttons to toggle various features or params. And it tends to be different for every project. It's like the oldschool shell oneliners but more powerful and easier to write.

New comment by foobarian in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

foobarian — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:30:15 +0000

How soon until we can just share a prompt://make-me-a-react-app-showing-a-summary-of-war-news-as-a-star-wars-crawl ? :-D

New comment by foobarian in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

foobarian — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:58:54 +0000

Elderly people in our village in east Europe used to be super suspicious of the EU project and would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns." Hopefully they were wrong :-)

New comment by foobarian in "APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs"

foobarian — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:12:36 +0000

The other nice feature is using standard utility blades.

I have several Stanley type box cutters and blade retraction is an infuriating experience on each one because it gets stuck, the lock button gets stuck, it doesn't slide properly, often doesn't click into place, etc. I can definitely see the appeal of an object that is actually designed to work properly.

New comment by foobarian in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

foobarian — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:53:54 +0000

My related question to this was why isn't China or India better at soccer? Given the population sizes and some reasonable talented soccer player probability you would think they would be outsized. Then you have the tiny East European countries that get medals. It's fascinating

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

foobarian — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:02:42 +0000

I wonder if they are more than happy to let someone else take on the burden of the massive writedowns that are bound to hit in a couple of years.

New comment by foobarian in "Accidentally deleted subscriptions for chat integrations (Slack and MS Teams)"

foobarian — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:40:58 +0000

Enterprise pricing is a huge factor.

New comment by foobarian in "India's surprise baby bust"

foobarian — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:51:56 +0000

Maybe that is exactly the mechanism this happens with. People don't necessarily make these choices consciously, they might be railroaded into them by the environment in an industrialized society

New comment by foobarian in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

foobarian — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:19:50 +0000

I'm sure you turned out just fine and don't use goto in Python ;)

New comment by foobarian in "They’re made out of weights"

foobarian — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:35:48 +0000

Mostly I have a hard time accepting that a Turing machine can experience "consciousness"/awareness. Therefore I also have a hard time with simulatable chemical processes; it feels like there is some missing link there.

All just feelings/vibes unfortunately.

New comment by foobarian in "They’re made out of weights"

foobarian — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:33:22 +0000

It's too bad it's so hard to pin down a definition, but in practice I feel like most animals with brains experience degrees of qualia. Some mornings after a night of poor sleep when I wake up super-slow I wonder if that's how animals experience thinking.

My biggest problem with "brains are machines" arguments is that there is a risk there is unknown physics at work that is not representable as a Turing machine. What if there is some quantum field effect powering everything?

New comment by foobarian in "Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts"

foobarian — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:11:19 +0000

Similar, except I saw a bunch of our neighbors doing the same thing which told me it wasn't a branch or similar that would affect just our house.

I've never experienced this before so I figure we've witnessed something truly rare and special that might not happen again in our lifetimes.

New comment by foobarian in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

foobarian — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:51:58 +0000

> There are no moving parts, I dont think memory chips or GPU chips deteriorate naturally

I believe they do, but I too would love to know more details because there are several ways this can happen. Electromigration, package failures, VRAM failures, dielectric breakdown... Hopefully there will be studies soon similar to that old Google paper on HDD failures!

New comment by foobarian in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

foobarian — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:58:19 +0000

I suppose it makes sense, back then you wouldn't think there would be an existing supply chain of companies like Mopar just waiting for a car manufacturer to spin up and start buying their stuff