Hacker News: layer8

New comment by layer8 in "Stanford grads walk out on Google CEO Sundar Pichai speech"

layer8 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 02:00:47 +0000

I'd take Steve Ballmer over most of the current big-tech CEOs, to be honest.

New comment by layer8 in "Perlisisms (1982)"

layer8 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 01:47:13 +0000

The parent alludes to the fact that the sentence could conceivably be read as "In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust [the machine]", i.e. reading "adjust" as transitive rather than as intransitive.

However, I think it's clear that the intended meaning is intransitive.

New comment by layer8 in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

layer8 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 01:42:41 +0000

I was referring to the claim that they couldn't phone someone to pick them up.

New comment by layer8 in "Perlisisms (1982)"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:19:57 +0000

It constantly varies.

New comment by layer8 in "Perlisisms (1982)"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:15:59 +0000

Also: 102. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

New comment by layer8 in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:03:19 +0000

The context was “Everyone does use the internet for everything today” and “most people don't even realize how the internet is running literally everything”. You don’t need the internet for your phone to have a battery charge.

New comment by layer8 in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:38:02 +0000

The cellular phone network doesn’t require the internet to work.

New comment by layer8 in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:25:22 +0000

> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years.

That’s a bit ironic, given the typical output of LLMs.

New comment by layer8 in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:15:04 +0000

I don’t think that’s it. AI mobile apps support voice conversations. And low literacy is rather a motivation for using AI to generate and summarize text.

New comment by layer8 in "The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:10:13 +0000

Because dropping a table effectively requires an exclusive lock on the table during that whole operation, affecting parallel transactions.

New comment by layer8 in "How to earn a billion dollars"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:37:19 +0000

Classic is based on votes from older accounts: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

It tends to filter out trite topics and lower-quality submissions, though I have the feeling that it has become less effective for that in recent times.

New comment by layer8 in "How to earn a billion dollars"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:33:00 +0000

Businesses are started without VC capital all the time, especially outside of the US and SV circles.

New comment by layer8 in "How to earn a billion dollars"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:26:54 +0000

He probably signed advertising contracts.

New comment by layer8 in "Human Routers of Machine Words"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:18:53 +0000

It’s a crutch, it’s rarely as good as from an experienced translator or native speaker, and often distorts the original to some extent. It can be the lesser evil when someone doesn’t know the language well, but it still tends to be a subpar experience.

New comment by layer8 in "How to earn a billion dollars"

layer8 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:17:49 +0000

It’s appalling that it is at the top of the front page.

(Edit: At the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/classic, at present.)

New comment by layer8 in "Trophic memory, deer, and a unique scientific object"

layer8 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:53:33 +0000

Impressive collection, but surprising it hasn’t burned down yet with all those lit candles on bookshelves.

New comment by layer8 in "Every Frame Perfect"

layer8 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:29:09 +0000

The issue is that we didn’t have these kinds of incongruent animations twenty years ago, and nowadays they are the norm, worsening user experience.

New comment by layer8 in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

layer8 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:03:08 +0000

It’s highly uncertain what will happen in 950 days.

New comment by layer8 in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

layer8 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:59:24 +0000

Read up here for example: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/...

New comment by layer8 in "A generic dynamic array in C that stores no capacity and needs no struct"

layer8 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:47:16 +0000

The C standard doesn’t guarantee that arbitrary integer values converted to a pointer and back result in the same integer values again. It only guarantees the other direction, that a valid pointer to void, when converted to uintptr_t and back again, will result in a pointer that compares equal to the original. The conversion from uintptr_t to pointer may for example clear or truncate some of the bits of the integer value, or normalize it in some other way.