Hacker News: passive

New comment by passive in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce"

passive — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:34:33 +0000

My response to this, as a generally satisfied CloudFlare customer who was excited to try out agentic email, is that it's not a good time to increase the amount of business I do with them.

New comment by passive in "MiMo-v2.5-Pro"

passive — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:58:15 +0000

I am curious about this myself, as it's a major company that I would think is worth taking seriously. But this and the previous release got suspiciously few comments.

New comment by passive in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2026)"

passive — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:41:18 +0000

I applied to the Head of Engineering and Infrastructure role two months ago, and got a fairly generic rejection almost immediately that suggested I had been automatically screened out.

I've cleaned up my LinkedIn a bit since then, so perhaps that would help?

Given that you're still looking, and technically it's almost identical to my last role, seems like it's worth having a conversation about.

New comment by passive in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

passive — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:55:14 +0000

Yup, completely confusing Warner Bros and Disney. Thanks for catching that!

New comment by passive in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

passive — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:42:46 +0000

So Ellison's big investors wouldn't back his ridiculous (-Disney) Warner Bros bid without him juicing the performance of Oracle in this way?

(thanks for the reply correcting the company)

New comment by passive in "FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers"

passive — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:37:56 +0000

This is terrible, perhaps the worst thing this administration has done (which is an incredibly high bar.)

Because it provides a pathway to full government control of the internet.

Content that demonizes the current administration's enemies will become easier to find. Evidence of their crimes will vanish.

When they murder someone in the street, fewer people will find out about it, and those that do will be more likely to hear the government's side of the story.

Mobile networks are already owned by the billionaires, and they've shown plenty of willingness to shape traffic for their interests.

Managing this kind of information at scale is an incredible challenge, but one that LLMs are very well suited for.

Even if you are confident the current administration doesn't have the competence or longevity to exploit this (as I mostly am,) we can easily predict future admins of either party will happily make use of these capabilities.

Bad for the US, but also very bad for the world, because it will make it much easier to manufacture consent for or hide future international crimes committed by the government.

We've excused the complete loss of traditional journalism with a reliance on the Internet instead. Not anymore.

Can savvy individuals work around it, of course. But the general public will treat them like conspiracy theorists, because all they will see is content that reinforces the administration.

The technical discussions in here sound like: "silly Caligula, his horse won't be able to sign his name to cast a vote in the Senate."

New comment by passive in "FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers"

passive — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:09:40 +0000

Yes, that's what is happening here, except it goes beyond surveillance.

This is about full domestic control of the internet. For both ingress and egress.

Remember how Iran likely murdered thousands of protestors a few months ago, but we don't actually know? They want to be able to do that here.

New comment by passive in "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"

passive — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:09:08 +0000

In the US, automakers are still a big source of union power, which is at least part of the reason Trump is pushing them to drop EVs. In a fascist state, you want all powerful industries closely tied to the rulers.

New comment by passive in "MiMo-V2-Pro LLM nearing GPT-5.2, Opus 4.6 performance at a fraction of the cost"

passive — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:18:36 +0000

Make that $6.91, despite only having $5 in my Anthropic account. I would love to know why it took so much more and didn't finish the job, but I'll have to set up a smaller experiment context.

New comment by passive in "MiMo-V2-Pro LLM nearing GPT-5.2, Opus 4.6 performance at a fraction of the cost"

passive — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:05:20 +0000

Considering I just paid $5 to have Sonnet 4.6 fail to complete something Gemini Flash 3 was doing for ~$1, I'm very curious to try it out on more models, in particular cheap ones like this. :)

New comment by passive in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)"

passive — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:25:58 +0000

Applied to the Product Manager role. Most of my experience is on the engineering side, but I've done a fair amount of developer advocacy and SDK building, along with a bit of product management, so it seems like it could be a good fit.

New comment by passive in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)"

passive — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:11:22 +0000

  Location: Halifax, NS, Canada
  Remote: 15+ years
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: If it runs on something smaller than a Cray and bigger than an ESP32, I can help you build it
  Email: alec munro at gmail
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alec-munro-2a5b51204/

I've been bringing folk together online to build software for almost 30 years, and I want to help a struggling engineering department. CTO/VP/Director is generally the elevation I'm looking for, but if the title is manager and the rest is a good fit, that won't bother me.

If you have an engineering department with any sort of significant struggle, reach out and let's talk about how I could help. Whether it's digging out of deep technical debt, facilitating difficult conversations, designing events for org alignment, or leadership coaching, I've done it before, and I want to help you with it.

New comment by passive in "Gov workers say their shutdown out-of-office replies were forcibly changed"

passive — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 19:32:25 +0000

This weaponization of public resources for partisan purposes is hardly surprising, but given the government is shut down, I would imagine black or even grey hats might feel like it's open season on .gov, so I would be surprised to see much durability in their attempts.

New comment by passive in "Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce"

passive — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:36:32 +0000

Yes, but there was also a step 0 where DOGE intentionally sabotaged existing federal employee workflows, which makes step 2 far more likely to actually happen.

New comment by passive in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)"

passive — Fri, 02 May 2025 13:45:49 +0000

Says REMOTE, but you have to be in commuting range of a handful of cities, so maybe not actually remote?

New comment by passive in "Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta"

passive — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 20:13:19 +0000

This order was toothless, and the administration has already flouted it.

All John Roberts is doing is asking Trump to go further next time. Whether it's intentional or just cowardice on his part doesn't really matter to the rest of us.

New comment by passive in "Glubux's Powerwall (2016)"

passive — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:57:36 +0000

My sad brain keeps insisting this headline contains the phrase "thousand year old laptop batteries", which said brain also assures me is impossible.

New comment by passive in "Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo completes first ever sub-57 minute half marathon"

passive — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 16:01:05 +0000

"Kiplimo ran at an average speed of 22.3 kilometers-per-hour"

I'm not sure I could sustain this pace for 1 minute, let alone 57. Incredible.

New comment by passive in "Fluoxetine promotes metabolic defenses to protect from sepsis-induced lethality"

passive — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:55:20 +0000

My kid just went on this for anxierty a few weeks ago, happy to hear to has some side benefits.

New comment by passive in "Apple Invites"

passive — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 23:35:00 +0000

My wife is an event planner, and events as a technology space has never been great. At this point there's basically Facebook and Eventbrite, both of which are very established in their lanes and face very little competitive pressure.

I don't love the idea of Apple dominating this space either, but there's a lot of opportunity to improve things, so I'm glad to see it.