Hacker News: pmdr

New comment by pmdr in "The desperation of NYTimes"

pmdr — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:44:09 +0000

I'd say 2015-2016.

New comment by pmdr in "The desperation of NYTimes"

pmdr — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:24:26 +0000

> C'mon developers, stand up to marketing for a change and stop writing these software nags.

Only things they ever stood up for were social issues (that's why you see banners with Ukraine and BLM, etc). Google kinda put an end to that when they fired 28 workers protesting Israel.

I never saw any banners protesting dark patterns.

Now, with (perhaps) most developers in the shadow of the AI-layoffs boot, there's really no hope for change coming from the inside.

New comment by pmdr in "If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?"

pmdr — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:58:50 +0000

> I know Ed Zitron is a divisive figure

The main counterarguments to his claims are "but Sam/Dario/Satya/Jensen said X" and that we should treat them as gospel.

New comment by pmdr in "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building"

pmdr — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:29:12 +0000

We're all grownups, why should we care about RAM prices? /s

This is insane. We've built our apps and websites to require ungodly amounts of memory and now AI scrapes away said websites while pricing us out.

Fast apps and websites need to make a comeback.

New comment by pmdr in "Shopify Is Down"

pmdr — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:22:31 +0000

I wonder if River is a reference to the Firefly character, which was known for being unstable and unpredictable.

New comment by pmdr in "Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release"

pmdr — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:17:18 +0000

KDE 3.5.x really was peak desktop at the time, especially when all the K* apps were working as intended. As a Windows user discovering Slackware 10.2 back 2005, I was really blown away. KDE 4 just didn't feel the same.

New comment by pmdr in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

pmdr — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:27:18 +0000

Can't directly outlaw VPNs? No problem, we'll have the the few corporations powering the internet block anyone who even thinks about anonymity!

New comment by pmdr in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

pmdr — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:21:23 +0000

This. What even is the point of blocking scapers if Google consumes your content anyway and serves it as an AI answer?

These are sad times we're living as far as openness of the web goes. People would have less of a scraping problem if their websites didn't ship with 20MB of JS.

New comment by pmdr in "Accenture to acquire Ookla"

pmdr — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:23:29 +0000

"speed" in Swedish and Norwegian. Probably Danish as well.

New comment by pmdr in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

pmdr — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:23:14 +0000

Alternative search engines are popular with the tech/HN bubble. Other than Bing, they have no palpable market share. Google does not care about said bubble because it mostly overlaps people who would use an adblocker anyway and who are capable of finding their way around other for-profit restrictions (i.e. downloading videos with yt-dlp instead of paying for YT Premium).

DDG has <1% market share, so +28%, while encouraging, means nothing for the monopoly. I use it. I use Brave Search as well. Paid for Kagi for a while.

But getting people to use anything other than Google (or the default Bing for on Windows) is nearly impossible at scale.

New comment by pmdr in "Can we have the day off?"

pmdr — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:55:29 +0000

Musk is in favor for 12-hour days 7 days a week and no unions.

New comment by pmdr in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

pmdr — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:47:37 +0000

> Have you ever looked at the browsing history of a non-technical, non-tech-addicted older person?

Search-wise, all they know is Google. I've seen people open Internet Explorer, search 'google' via a Bing search box, then click on google.com where they finally searched for a website they basically opened every day. IMO had they known Bing is also a search engine, they would've skipped searching for Google, so I'm a bit skeptical to people changing search habits. If anything, AI could be the replacement.

New comment by pmdr in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

pmdr — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:40:12 +0000

I was a paying customer for a few months. Good service, but severely limited by the 300 quota.

New comment by pmdr in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

pmdr — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:16:39 +0000

Yes, but at $5/300 searches they're trying too hard to squeeze $10 out of you for the unlimited plan. 300 searches is ridiculous.

New comment by pmdr in "Mini Shai-Hulud Strikes Again: 314 npm Packages Compromised"

pmdr — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:47:50 +0000

That and vendored HTMX. Nobuild. JS on the backend looks more and more like a very bad idea.

New comment by pmdr in "Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app"

pmdr — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:29:52 +0000

I found it actually thinks about architecture and tests and not just spit out code with TODO in it like Claude.

New comment by pmdr in "Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation"

pmdr — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:12:44 +0000

Every single word domain seems to have become some new AI company.

New comment by pmdr in "Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation"

pmdr — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:11:38 +0000

So we're supposed to believe that removing humans from customer support will lead to better outcomes?

> Ensure you only pay for the value Sierra delivers with outcome-based pricing.

Yeah... that won't last.

New comment by pmdr in "Ask.com has closed"

pmdr — Sat, 02 May 2026 14:33:48 +0000

The domain name is ripe to respawn as the name of some new AI company that no one really knows what it does and that has nothing to do with search. Agentic something something.

New comment by pmdr in "Grok 4.3"

pmdr — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:16:07 +0000

Because the same rocket man the same crowd here was worshipping a decade ago is bad now. And by extension everything anyone that works for him does must also be bad and evil.