Hacker News: gilbetron

New comment by gilbetron in "Delta flight hit by firework while landing at Midway Airport on Fourth of July"

gilbetron — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:57:50 +0000

At least for where I grew up, you seem to have history backwards. 40-50 years ago fireworks were largely outlawed - the best I could play with as a kid were smokebombs, snaps, sparklers, and small fountains. Now fireworks are pretty much completely legal, even municipal grade cannons. This is why they are going off all over the place on July 4th.

New comment by gilbetron in "AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers"

gilbetron — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:14:58 +0000

1. Test scores have increased 2. Simpson's Paradox - we are educating a far great % of young people then we used to be, so we're pulling in disadvantaged kids that would've been left out of the education system, or simply left out of testing. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-average-isnt-good-en...

A parallel is when I looked into home births versus hospital births when my wife was pregnant. The statistics of home births crushes hospital births in terms of outcomes. But that's because only healthy women who don't have complications are in the home birth category. Hospitals must admit anyone that shows up in labor, and must handle any negative situations.

Schools now handle so many more kids than they used to, and try to meet the challenge. They are failing because the challenge is too great given the funding, not to mention the corruption of the bureaucracy that inflates administrations.

New comment by gilbetron in "Steam Machine launches today"

gilbetron — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:59:30 +0000

Very late to the discussion, but many people see the price of the Steam Machine and balk at the high cost, even if they understand the reasoning. However, this isn't about the Steam Machine. Computing has just gotten more expensive. This is the new reality going forward, Steam Machine is just on the front edge of the wave. (Until, and if, RAM manufacturers catch up).

New comment by gilbetron in "There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing"

gilbetron — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:46:35 +0000

Ah yes, so we should have corporations controlling it? Because they can't be corrupt or evil?

The whole point of government control is at least everyone has some say in it, if we build the government decently. It has to be controlled by one or more human institutions, so choose your poison: government, nonprofits, forprofits, ... ?

New comment by gilbetron in "Siri AI"

gilbetron — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:07:10 +0000

I don't care much about Siri, and not a lot about Apple (other than as an investment), but Apple is generally really good about putting out polished tech, and so I'm curious if Siri AI will be up to their usual standards, because if so, it represents a significant usage of AI that has solved hallucination issues.

But that's a big If!

New comment by gilbetron in "AI is slowing down"

gilbetron — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:03:28 +0000

> So, judge the book by it's cover?

It is literally judging the book by it's author, which is an extremely rationale judgement to make.

New comment by gilbetron in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

gilbetron — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:01:32 +0000

Having lived through all of that as a professional dev, AI is completely different. There was no career anxiety of any significance for OOP or Code Gen (certainly no code gen) or TDD or Agile - there was annoyance at it by some, sure, but not the existential angst the industry is currently experiencing.

New comment by gilbetron in "Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers"

gilbetron — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:29:47 +0000

Many people's understanding of "Google's hiring processes" is from a few articles over a decade ago. They had done numerous studies, switched things up, and now have a pretty solid approach to interviewing. This is one of the articles that was going around back then, and most of the conclusions are how Google still interviews: https://www.workforce.com/news/laszlo-bock-just-google-him

I work with many ex-Googlers that did a lot of interviewing and they process has been pretty consistent for many years now, and seen largely successful.

New comment by gilbetron in "US healthcare still stupidly expensive, with pathetic outcomes, study finds"

gilbetron — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:16:32 +0000

Choice and competition greatly alleviate that in other markets. With the medical system in the US, you often don't have much of a choice as switching doctors can be tough, and even if you can find one accepting patients, they are all controlled by the same administration and effectively collude to maximize their profits.

New comment by gilbetron in "The Problem with the Ferrari Luce EV Offers a Lesson for Every Leader"

gilbetron — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:02:13 +0000

Charging it is an interesting choice:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13-ZdXDJTIfhe1vkAuzssvRx9bOQ...

New comment by gilbetron in "The real cost of owning a home"

gilbetron — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:03:15 +0000

I live in the midwest and there never has been a time where any lawn I owned, nor was owned by anyone that I know, needed mowing 3x a week. You might like to do it to keep a perfectly manicured lawn, but it definitely isn't needed.

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

gilbetron — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:10:57 +0000

Hmmm - I think the scalper just adds the escrow amount on to the cost as the purchaser will get it back at the end.

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

gilbetron — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:05:55 +0000

Ok, random scalper prevention scheme:

What's the difference between someone that wants to transfer their tickets from someone the know versus a scalper? Trust.

So when you buy a ticket you put, say, $1000, in escrow. The tickets have your name and ID on them. You can transfer the ticket to someone else. However, after the concert, the $1000 gets returned to the final person named on the ticket.

If the transfer is between trustworthy people, then the final ticket holder will give the money back to the original person.

There is no incentive to transfer money to the scalper, however. (Especially if scalping is illegal).

This doesn't eliminate scalping, but it significantly reduces it.

Critique?

New comment by gilbetron in "The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization"

gilbetron — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:53:43 +0000

Terrible math is terrible.

Better napkin math that is still being unrealistic compared to the true costs of space-based datacenters: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1quvbi4/sel...

Just contemplate what the radiator array and solar array needed a 1GW datacenter and all the cooling equipment and coolant, and imagine the harsh environment in space degrading it constantly.

The only point of the space-based datacenter idea is to pump the Spacex IPO

New comment by gilbetron in "Walking slower? Your ears, not your knees, might be the problem"

gilbetron — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:17:49 +0000

Sports are much more likely to result in injury, and as you get old, staying in the game (of life) is more important. It can take a long time to recover, if ever, from an injury as you age. I loved playing soccer, and did so until I was almost 50, but many of my issues, physically speaking, are from soccer. I loved doing it, and it is far more fun than strength training, but too many injuries result.

Strength training and controlled cardio is much better for continuous health.

New comment by gilbetron in "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons"

gilbetron — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:16:49 +0000

Hyundai and Honda (especially Honda) have brought back more physical buttons in the past several years. The CRV especially has a great button/control layout. A big reason we went with the Ioniq 5 is due to the physical controls.

New comment by gilbetron in "The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)"

gilbetron — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:44:46 +0000

Click on one of the other previews that come up, last I looked there were 4 options, at least one had the full article

New comment by gilbetron in "The Importance of Being Idle"

gilbetron — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:29:24 +0000

This easily could be AI generated, there is little character to it, and if you told me it was AI generated, I would believe you.

New comment by gilbetron in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

gilbetron — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:14:51 +0000

That's undoubtedly to detect frustration signals, a useful metric/signal for UX. The UI equivalent is the user shaking their mouse around or clicking really fast.

New comment by gilbetron in "I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog"

gilbetron — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:40:44 +0000

Decades? Wasn't it created in 2020?