Hacker News: hx8

New comment by hx8 in "Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU"

hx8 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:38:58 +0000

I'd rather have slower and better output than worse and faster output.

New comment by hx8 in "Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity"

hx8 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 23:50:37 +0000

It's complex and imperfect, but in this situation the most direct ROI would be the cost of recruiting a newly graduated doctor by increasing the salary until someone accepts compared to the cost of providing the scholarship.

New comment by hx8 in "I Learned to Read Again"

hx8 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 23:16:37 +0000

While this is just a rule of thumb, I consider moderate exercise, reading, and socializing to be roughly equivalent in positive health benefits. I try to get a little bit of each every day, and then try to have longer sessions of each once or twice a week.

New comment by hx8 in "Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity"

hx8 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:57:25 +0000

This is common for teachers in many US states too -- spend X years teaching where we need you the most and we cover your degree.

In the US a teaching degree might be $50,000, and medical degree might be $500,000. I'm not sure I want my state government covering half a million in education costs for one person... I know that we need doctors but I'd want to see some ROI numbers to justify such a high expense.

New comment by hx8 in "FAANG Simulator"

hx8 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:45:07 +0000

I think IRL has more implications to not taking promotions than is coded into the game. I wouldn't use this game as career advice.

New comment by hx8 in "FAANG Simulator"

hx8 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:40:34 +0000

Many strategies have an early adopter advantage.

New comment by hx8 in "Resetting Xbox"

hx8 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 23:32:57 +0000

It's not uncommon to have a PC at the desk and a console for the couch.

New comment by hx8 in "Resetting Xbox"

hx8 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 23:19:12 +0000

Wouldn't a fair way to count the value be all of the money selling them produced minus all of the money you spent producing them?

New comment by hx8 in "Resetting Xbox"

hx8 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:15:21 +0000

The people I know that like Xbox like Game Pass and Buy Once Play Anywhere. Xbox is the value proposition for people that want to play on Console + {PC/Handheld}.

New comment by hx8 in "Resetting Xbox"

hx8 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:54:14 +0000

Exactly. The inflation rate is about 3%, so the people at Xbox worked very hard all year to have about the same value they put into it.

New comment by hx8 in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

hx8 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:12:33 +0000

I own a decent library of retro games, sized in the hundreds.

Part of my intake process is to rip my games onto a digital format. Owning the physical media, and acquiring the backup legally, gives me a strong legal foothold for creating backup discs or using emulation.

New comment by hx8 in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

hx8 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 04:49:33 +0000

I would recommend looking at a wide variety of sources of information. Some YouTube channels, GamersNexus being one, focus heavily on spinning a gloomy narrative. By wide variety of information channels, I don't mean a different YouTube channel.

1. Q1-26 wasn't the worst performing YoY quarter for new PC sales since Covid.

2. The biggest sector hit was the low end computers. That's not usually what we are talking about with pc gaming.

3. Costs go up on PC gaming, but the costs are going up for consoles too.

4. New memory fabs are going to start coming online in 2027 and 2028. This is a short term crunch.

5. The whole interviewing someone in their living room about their bad professional experience and representing it as journalism feels icky to me.

New comment by hx8 in "Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland"

hx8 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:54:13 +0000

If PR value gets panels installed faster than they otherwise would be who cares. The most important thing is we install as much solar as possible as quickly as possible, because we're killing ourselves fighting wars for other energy sources that poison our entire planet to use.

New comment by hx8 in "Papa Johns Can Predict When Your Fridge Is Empty"

hx8 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:53:12 +0000

It's just good utilization of marketing budget.

New comment by hx8 in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

hx8 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:28:54 +0000

1. An Xbox Live/Playstation Plus is required for any online multiplayer functionality.

2. DRM Free still matters with multiplayer games. Minecraft is a perfect example, where you can run your own client/server and play with people, and there really doesn't need to be any other middle man involved.

3. With how good home internet is now, it's not a big deal to host game servers from your home on an old computer. Running big central servers really only matters if you care about matchmaking or games with a lot of simultaneous players.

New comment by hx8 in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

hx8 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:18:21 +0000

Consumer protection is a type of regulation, but if you can brand a rule as "Consumer protection" it will poll better than "regulation" because that's how marketing works.

New comment by hx8 in "Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland"

hx8 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:48:06 +0000

1. That was 20 years ago. I wonder how it would pencil out now.

2. Yeah it was kind of dumb to put the panels into a high wear environment like a road.

3. What matters more is which projects pencil out the best. There are too many to choose from that have a positive ROI.

New comment by hx8 in "Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven't progressed enough"

hx8 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:45:31 +0000

Zuckerberg was always excellent at knowing how to capture the attention of the internet....

New comment by hx8 in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

hx8 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:35:35 +0000

I don't see this as "regulation". I see this as extending the same consumer protections that existed in the era of analog physical media to the digital age.

New comment by hx8 in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

hx8 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:32:06 +0000

Yes. Look at the market research. It's growing specifically fast in Asia, but there is also strong growth with North America.

Having a PC to check your email, order off amazon, and download recipes is dying. Buying a PC and using it for video games is raising. The PC hardware is getting more expensive, but the upgrade cycles are also extending. If you look at the steam hardware survey most gamers are 1-3 GPU generations behind.

If you look at the total cost of ownership PC gaming is not awful compared to consoles. It's higher, but not as high as the initial price tag makes it look. There is no monthly Playstation Plus or Xbox Live subscription. These can run between $80/yr to $240/yr. PC games often have access to deeper discounts. The PC has additional utility, and modern PC components are holding exceptional resell value.