Hacker News: pjfin123

New comment by pjfin123 in "Farmers Are Aging. Their Kids Don't Want to Be in the Family Business"

pjfin123 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:44:56 +0000

Realistically food prices need to go up to make this an attractive business for people to get into

New comment by pjfin123 in "Wood Gas Vehicles: Firewood in the Fuel Tank (2010)"

pjfin123 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:33:52 +0000

I wonder if a wood powered tractor for farming would be more practical than a wood powered car for transportation

New comment by pjfin123 in "McMaster Carr – The Smartest Website You Haven't Heard Of (2022)"

pjfin123 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:23:54 +0000

I've been doing more and more web dev with JQuery recently. I learned it in high school and I think most of the new JS frameworks are probably worse.

New comment by pjfin123 in "McDonald's is losing its low-income customers"

pjfin123 — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 21:11:35 +0000

I'm not sure where this number comes from but McDonald's profit margins may be misleading due to their franchise and real estate based model. If you spend $10 at McDonald's that's paid to the franchise and the central McDonald's corporation isn't necessarily profiting $3.

New comment by pjfin123 in "AI-powered open-source code laundering"

pjfin123 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 20:42:37 +0000

Is the allegation here that a LLM generated code that was very similar to the author's copyright protected code or that they copied the code and then tried to use AI to hide that fact?

New comment by pjfin123 in "If the University of Chicago won't defend the humanities, who will?"

pjfin123 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 20:28:35 +0000

U.S. schools are facing a huge and permanent drop in enrollment as the fertility decline starts hitting too.

New comment by pjfin123 in "I built an ADHD app with interactive coping tools, noise mixer and self-test"

pjfin123 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 18:59:20 +0000

How is $5/mo a cash grab? Psychiatrists charge more

New comment by pjfin123 in "Executive order directs federal funding cuts to PBS and NPR"

pjfin123 — Fri, 02 May 2025 18:24:50 +0000

I couldn't get Bluetooth to work on a car ride recently, wasn't able to listen to Spotify from my phone, and had to listen to FM radio. NPR was by far the best option. Everything else was just ads and annoying disk jockeys.

New comment by pjfin123 in "Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup"

pjfin123 — Fri, 02 May 2025 18:17:20 +0000

LibreOffice is still fast to start

New comment by pjfin123 in "Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes"

pjfin123 — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 20:07:59 +0000

The Federal government making funding to a university contingent on them "reforming" specifically named departments whose foreign policy views the executive branch disagrees with (Israel/Palestine policy) seems like a clear violation of the First Amendment.

New comment by pjfin123 in "Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor"

pjfin123 — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:58:32 +0000

New comment by pjfin123 in "Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)"

pjfin123 — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 14:47:33 +0000

Blow's talk made me realize I'm not crazy when I get frustrated about basic things being incredibly difficult. Drawing a button to the screen when you want to build a software application has become so difficult that most people just use a progressive web app which is 100x slower than is possible. Are the best options for GUI applications in 2025 really Java Swing and Qt?

New comment by pjfin123 in "Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data"

pjfin123 — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 17:19:36 +0000

Copyright law needs major reform. We need to figure out a way to let authors monetize their work while not making complying with the law so burdensome. We've created a system where people who (understandably) ignore the law benefit at the expense of people trying to do the right thing.

New comment by pjfin123 in "DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL"

pjfin123 — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 20:19:08 +0000

It's hard to tell if they're telling the truth about the number of GPUs they have. They open sourced the model and the inference is much more efficient than the best American models so it's not implausible that the training was also much more efficient.

New comment by pjfin123 in "No Billionares at FOSDEM"

pjfin123 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 19:46:11 +0000

It absolutely is. If security is standing in front of the door to the stage are they going to push past? How is security supposed to remove them from the stage without using force? It's force that's designed to make the protesters look like they're the victim if anyone tries to get in their way.

A peaceful protest would be standing outside on the sidewalk with signs.

New comment by pjfin123 in "No Billionares at FOSDEM"

pjfin123 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:56:55 +0000

Disrupting a talk isn't really "peaceful". You're physically obstructing the talk and daring the conference organizers who rented the room and other participants who want to hear the talk to use force to remove you.

New comment by pjfin123 in "WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)"

pjfin123 — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:53:49 +0000

> This is "never-cracked-a-history-book" levels of incorrect. Severe depressions recurred about every other decade, and practically every decade had some sort of Global Financial Crisis-esque financial meltdown. Back then, most of these were called "Panic of " instead of "depression" or "recession", until you got to the Long Depression, which was called the Great Depression before the Great Depression itself actually existed.

This is all true. However, average economic growth rates for the American economy were dramatically higher in the 1800s than they have been in the last 50 years.

New comment by pjfin123 in "WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)"

pjfin123 — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:38:17 +0000

Yeah I think the sites broader point is that a lot of indicators of the health of American society start trending definitively down with an inflection point around 1970. The fact that the U.S. went off the gold standard on 1971 might be related to that but it's clearly not the sole causal factor.

New comment by pjfin123 in "WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)"

pjfin123 — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:35:20 +0000

I calculated historical American wages in gold terms if anyone's curious: https://github.com/argosopentech/American-Real-Wages

TLDR: wages in 2025 are roughly comparable to wages in the early 80s

New comment by pjfin123 in "Updates to H-1B"

pjfin123 — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 16:16:16 +0000

An auction is a great idea. If a foreign worker is valuable enough then companies should be willing to pay up for them. Then the American People can benefit in multiple ways, we get the revenue paid into the auction, and we get the economic benefits of high skill foreign workers. Let the market decide.

Currently the lottery gets spammed by IT outsourcing firms: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-staffing-firms-game-...

The American People built this country into the economic powerhouse it is today; we should reap the benefits of all this economic activity not random outsourcing firms.