Hacker News: pc86

New comment by pc86 in "Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026"

pc86 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:25:21 +0000

This seems like a distinction without a difference. In the context of CEOs sacrificing the greater good for their bonus, [basically] nobody has done that for a $250k bonus. We're often talking 8 figures, tens of millions of dollars.

Is this really a categorically different thing if we're talking about $85 million vs. $12 million?

New comment by pc86 in "NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart"

pc86 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:57:52 +0000

> I'm assuming that, if this rumor is true, somebody in the Trump campaign forced somebody at NASA to do this out of some misguided nostalgia.

Why would you assume that?

New comment by pc86 in "Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use"

pc86 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:47:11 +0000

This doesn't seem like the type of comment it makes sense to create a throwaway for.

New comment by pc86 in "US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS"

pc86 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:12:53 +0000

In what universe is the judiciary not part of the government?

New comment by pc86 in "I'm Tired of Being on the Network"

pc86 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:07:14 +0000

Is it your contention that most people in the country constantly deal with drug addicts stealing their packages? Because it's not true.

New comment by pc86 in "I'm tired of being on the network"

pc86 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:08:33 +0000

I find it hard to believe that all but a very, very narrow segment of society can't go 3 or 4 days without tracking a package?

New comment by pc86 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

pc86 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 01:52:47 +0000

What hyperbolic nonsense, just because something doesn't affect me doesn't mean it can't be bad policy. Wealth taxes are a fool's errand and serve only to damage and slow the economy.

New comment by pc86 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

pc86 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:08:20 +0000

I think not wanting to pay some yearly tax on that $1.4 million because the government pretends that the same as having $1.4M cash in the bank, or making $1.4M in a year, is fine.

Not wanting to pay the property taxes associated with a $1.5M home is the problem.

New comment by pc86 in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

pc86 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:07:12 +0000

And care about the rule of law. You cannot pass retroactive laws, you cannot pass laws that target individual people. If you pass a general law (which could very well have reasonable objections), people have to have a chance to leave.

"I'm passing this law that is effective the exact millisecond I sign it, tough shit if you don't like it" is tyranny and despotism. But based on your comment I think you know that.

New comment by pc86 in "Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta"

pc86 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:40:00 +0000

> why on earth do you think every other person out there will only use these for innocuous nerdy reasons?

I don't, which I why I didn't say that :)

New comment by pc86 in "Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta"

pc86 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:06:15 +0000

It's kind of an interesting catch-22 if that's the right idiom. Places with these laws do generally have a higher rate of property crime when comparing like to like, e.g. urban areas of similar size, to those without it. However that higher crime rate often leads to installation of security cameras covering more private areas.

New comment by pc86 in "Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta"

pc86 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:02:31 +0000

How do these glasses "enable" it any more than a gopro, a security camera, or the phone that nearly every person in the developed world already has?

New comment by pc86 in "Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta"

pc86 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:01:13 +0000

I don't know if I agree that man-on-the-street pseudo journalistic stuff is one of the "typical scenarios." Any time I see a product like this I think:

    1) Can I use it to watch a more immersive movie without bothering people who may be in the next week?
    2) Can I use it to make my games more enjoyable, either console or PC?
    3) Can I use it to record IPSC/USPSA matches?
    4) Can I use it for work?

I don't think these will make more people bother strangers on the street, it's just another way the same people can do that.

New comment by pc86 in "Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta"

pc86 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:57:37 +0000

What does this have to do with WhatsApp?

Also as much as you might like to punish investors (most of whom just have it in their 401k) because you don't like people with money, there are legal protections and the government can't just do something like that without an actual reason.

New comment by pc86 in "People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes"

pc86 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 03:36:22 +0000

I don't know the movie or show but there is a scene where someone asks a woman who quick smoking a long time ago (10 years maybe?) if she ever thinks about smoking and she says "every time someone lights up next to me at the bar I want to suck the smoke out of their lungs."

I smoked more than a pack a day for probably 7 or 8 years and quit a couple years after college, not quite cold turkey but basically just trying to wait a little longer between each cigarette. Eventually when the last half of the pack is stale and disgusting but you smoke them anyway because they're expensive, you just kind of stop one day. It was many, many years of no nicotine at all before I stopped thinking about it every day though.

New comment by pc86 in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

pc86 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 03:17:23 +0000

> For a long time...a lot of online news stories would reference websites, papers, polls, etc. without linking to them.

The "$CITY_NAME Business Journal" websites are the absolute worst with this. They'll refer to something specific, for example "$BIGCO's 2025 10-K filing" and it will be a link. That link will go to the 10-K, right? Nope! It goes to another page at the same business journal. Maybe that page is a summary of the 10-K, but probably not. Maybe it's just the general index page for all the articles about $BIGCO at that journal. What it links to, it definitely won't be the specific thing described by the text of that link.

New comment by pc86 in "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"

pc86 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 02:50:11 +0000

OK but you talked about people going fast. 84% YOY increase in volume shows people are going a lot faster.

You can move the goalposts to "yeah but it's not any good" but 90% of everything is crap anyway, and that was true long before AI.

New comment by pc86 in "How to Write with an LLM"

pc86 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:49:35 +0000

> But I often do need to understand why this change was made.

This is the reason (and IMO the only reason) code should be commented. The why can often be hundreds of characters explaining technical limitations at the time, business considerations, or even just "we know this will break in a non-trivial number of instances but it's an incremental step forward to our end goal so we're just doing it."

New comment by pc86 in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

pc86 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:16:34 +0000

I agree with everything you said except I would simply add that "the average freelance designer online" is simply an AI meat proxy (which does, by definition, make them worse than AI since you could just use AI in the first place and get the same results).

New comment by pc86 in "Asking authors about their own papers"

pc86 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:12:32 +0000

This triggers a much bigger question for me - why does nothing happen to these authors based on this feedback? I don't mean "oh you missed a meeting or withdrew your paper so you get fired" by any means, but why isn't there a way for academic committees or employers to look up PhDs and see "oh interesting this person has a history of submitting solo-authored papers then being completely unable to answer all but the most high-level questions about it."

Short of just the general "vibes" type of reputation that follows someone around this type of behavior seems pretty low risk, which is a large part of why people engage in it. Perhaps the risk should increase a couple orders of magnitude to stop it from happening.