Hacker News: pif

New comment by pif in "Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million"

pif — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:16:42 +0000

That's as stupid as it is old. Locals would do it for a proper salary. But the same locals do not want to pay the proper salary!

Turn the brain on from time to time!

New comment by pif in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

pif — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:58:32 +0000

Which is what thay should be in any sane environments. LLMs can be wonderful tools, but they cannot be trusted.

New comment by pif in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

pif — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:24:06 +0000

Display a warning and propose to edit instead of blocking the operation: your customers will be happier!

New comment by pif in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

pif — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:44:56 +0000

> Why did they give it any of that?!

Because they are idiots. You need to be a freaking idiit to trust AI.

New comment by pif in "C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers"

pif — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:09:59 +0000

Spending time on your hobby is wondwerful. Expecting the world to consider your hobby important is arrogant.

New comment by pif in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

pif — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:08:13 +0000

You may substitute StackOverflow with Quora and your answer would not get less valid.

New comment by pif in "C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers"

pif — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:55:17 +0000

Also, people confuse "good" with "ought to live forever". It's time to leave BSD and LISP in the history books.

New comment by pif in "The death of the brick and mortar toy store"

pif — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:52:57 +0000

> devastating for someone with a loan

Sorry, I can't understand why. Could you please expand a bit?

I don't get how decreasing the value of the building makes the loan more difficult to repay.

New comment by pif in "Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]"

pif — Sun, 17 May 2026 23:37:47 +0000

> some things are just not possible to do right

If git doesn't let you do them "right", your concept if "right" is wrong.

New comment by pif in "Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision..."

pif — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:07:15 +0000

All the comments I've been able to read are missing the elephant in the room: no high-quality entropy source can turn a "should" into a "must".

If you want something that is difficult to guess, ask the cryptography guys. But if you need something that is -_guaranteed_ unique, you must build it yourself.

New comment by pif in "I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards"

pif — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 11:03:18 +0000

I keep stating proudly to any team mate and any manager that I've never ever needed a board to know what I had to work on.

New comment by pif in "Girl, 10, finds rare Mexican axolotl under Welsh bridge"

pif — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:49:52 +0000

If you want it to be pronounced "sh", just write it "sh".

New comment by pif in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

pif — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:29:50 +0000

Which part of "mathematical operations don’t reset the NaT bit" did you not understand?

New comment by pif in "Saying goodbye to Agile"

pif — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:16:51 +0000

> if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough.

20 years ago, this was the meme about XML.

More seriously, this was also the answer about Communism.

New comment by pif in "Saying goodbye to Agile"

pif — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:15:13 +0000

> "We will do x and y as a compromise but not z"

This reminds a lot of this: "I'm going to try this extremely difficult pastry recipe at home, but I'll use margarin insted of butter because and a teasponn of stevia instead of the prescribed 200 g of sugar for ."

New comment by pif in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

pif — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:58:03 +0000

Wake me up when a heavily industrialized country will be in the list, thanks!

New comment by pif in "Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence"

pif — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:15:38 +0000

Hello, could you please elaborate about those laws?

New comment by pif in "Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts"

pif — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:58:58 +0000

> you now can annihilate them [...] from a comfortable distance

The problem is: they can, too.

New comment by pif in "A Tiny Camera Revealed a Hidden Passage in the Great Pyramid"

pif — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:56:34 +0000

Muons are not stable, thus you cannot tear them off matter as you'd do with electrons. And they have a mass of 105 MeV each, which means you need a nice particle accelerator to create a few of them.

Furthermore, if you want (most of) them to fly in a particular direction, you need to scale that accelerator up.

New comment by pif in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

pif — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 23:39:22 +0000

She taught me to only speak the truth.