Hacker News: pbrum

New comment by pbrum in "Two high-speed trains collide near Toledo, Spain"

pbrum — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:33:46 +0000

A catastrophe is, to use a tired analogy, the tip of the iceberg. The larger truth is that the Spanish rail system, along with most if not all European rail systems, is collapsing due to excess demand and underinvestment. Any random train ride in Europe at any time in the past few years has been an exercise in patience. Delays, cancellations, and other incidents are constant. A tragedy like this happens on top of a big pile of decay

New comment by pbrum in "Two high-speed trains collide near Toledo, Spain"

pbrum — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:29:03 +0000

Expand, I'm interested in this take

New comment by pbrum in "Two high-speed trains collide near Toledo, Spain"

pbrum — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:26:37 +0000

Tell that to the relatives of the dead. What you said was true and today is true. But will it be true tomorrow?

New comment by pbrum in "Spain train crash: 'At least 10 dead' in high-speed collision"

pbrum — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:24:58 +0000

East Asia: top-tier infrastructure, well maintained Europe: second-best-tier infrastructure, rapidly decaying and overwhelmed USA: Third World-equivalent infrastructure

New comment by pbrum in "Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11"

pbrum — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 14:50:07 +0000

This is what posting is all about

New comment by pbrum in "The Haunted Toys R Us"

pbrum — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:35:01 +0000

Strongly recommend the short novel Kentukis by Samanta Schweblin!

New comment by pbrum in "Apple HomeView"

pbrum — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:43:41 +0000

Nonstarter without YouTube and WhatsApp access

New comment by pbrum in "OpenAI begins rolling out GPT-6 Astra"

pbrum — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:28:57 +0000

Don't know if you're referring to the headline or the body (which is paywalled). The current headline reads "OpenAI says it has overtaken Anthropic with its latest AI model". Which makes me wonder whether FT itself changed a headline along the lines of what you wrote in the past few minutes?

New comment by pbrum in "Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos"

pbrum — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:07:25 +0000

"it brings up painful memories of when Oreo Coke (actually good, unlike Coke Oreo)"

Epic

New comment by pbrum in "Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos"

pbrum — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:05:56 +0000

The author is a superb writer. Actually made me lol:

"I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around. If your art is just one node in your business empire, if your albums are merely commercials for your cologne, if you’re trying to turn your first billion into your second billion, you are no longer an artist at all. You are a credit default swap with a discography attached."

New comment by pbrum in "As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program"

pbrum — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:11:50 +0000

Fantastic work by the compiler/author, and lovely work by all those developers and designers through the years. Great contribution to HN

New comment by pbrum in "Elevators"

pbrum — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:53:13 +0000

Awesome article. This being HN there must be a quibble right?:

Missed opportunity to entitle it "Elevator Action"

New comment by pbrum in "U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device"

pbrum — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:41:10 +0000

You cannot possibly be a full-time academic and your last name be "Papernot"!

New comment by pbrum in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

pbrum — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:59:05 +0000

I was going to say this too. And since we're at it: does anyone know how many launch pads the Chinese private space companies have, combined?

New comment by pbrum in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

pbrum — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:26:03 +0000

Not long ago I was looking at my favorite games of decades past. Unreal Tournament figured very prominently, made of course by Epic. So I wondered: why did they stop making Unreal games? I looked at their game chronology. On one hand, they made Gears of War, an Xbox exclusive that never interested me. And the other one? Oh, right: Fortnite. That's where Unreal Tournament went. They made tons of money for sure. But no company, including Epic, has made a competitive FPS + CTF game as solid as UT, UT2003, or UT2004 since that era

New comment by pbrum in "Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]"

pbrum — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:30:48 +0000

Update: Microsoft has taken the page down. But posterity being what it is...

https://archive.is/D9vEN

New comment by pbrum in "30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness"

pbrum — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:17:59 +0000

Loved the anecdote, very nicely CRAFTED

New comment by pbrum in "Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub"

pbrum — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 22:42:41 +0000

I resolutely approve of this comment. Bravo.

New comment by pbrum in "Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit"

pbrum — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 19:23:16 +0000

This is key

New comment by pbrum in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

pbrum — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 03:28:35 +0000

We are close to landing our first customer - an enterprise-level one at that! We're Geneva Business Messaging, a tool to centralize, persist, and if necessary escalate critical interactions between large companies and their partners. For actual collaborative cross-company work in fields like engineering, logistics, or security - not spam, marketing, sales, or the other frequent purposes of B2B apps.

We're at genevabm.com if you want to check it out!