Hacker News: pmontra

New comment by pmontra in "Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others"

pmontra — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:37:25 +0000

A data point: the parent of an about 140 IQ son told me that her son was in a room with other 120+ IQ kids. They started to talk and quickly formed groups. Those groups turned out to include kids of very similar IQ. The ones between 140 and 143 thought that the ones between 137 and 139 were not interesting to talk with.

New comment by pmontra in "AWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy"

pmontra — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:42:42 +0000

A customer of mine is running on Ubuntu 22.04 and the plan is to upgrade to 26.04 in Q1 2027. We'll have to add performance regression to the plan.

New comment by pmontra in "The Document Foundation ejects its core developers"

pmontra — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:54:21 +0000

TDF is https://www.documentfoundation.org

New comment by pmontra in "Show HN: Made a little Artemis II tracker"

pmontra — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:20:59 +0000

Developers and their customers mostly gave up design many years ago and used frameworks like Bootstrap because they are good enough, they are cheap to create, they increase speed to deliver with no external designer in the loop, etc. That made many sites look alike. AI designed web sites are the next natural step.

New comment by pmontra in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

pmontra — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:19:04 +0000

20 year olds are bewildered when they see me opening a computer and replacing stuff instead of bringing it to a shop. "Where did you learn to do that?" It used to be the only way, everybody with a computer did it. The strange thing is that it's still possible but they don't think about it.

New comment by pmontra in "Why Vibe coding is eating software"

pmontra — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:40:00 +0000

I've been working on a Rails + Vue project for 3 years. Plenty of experience of Rails (all of its years) but not much experience of SPA frameworks before then. The first year has been slow on the Vue side because I had to learn its weirdnesses (among the top 5: how you have to call dispatch("file/function") instead of calling that function right away and all the contort ways of passing data up and down between component trees). Then LLMs started to help and after three years I noticed that I could handle the code made alone. I would have probably reached this point in six months. On one side LLMs are crutches that slow down learning. On the other they made me deliver software faster, at least at the beginning.

New comment by pmontra in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

pmontra — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:25:15 +0000

That's correct. Furthermore if RAM prices keep going up and staying up, many people won't buy a new PC and they will switch everything on their phones. So the current market could be the undoing of Windows.

New comment by pmontra in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

pmontra — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:33:06 +0000

Fighting sports are divided by weight (boxing, judo, etc) but no woman would even be close to winning in the same weight category of men, so we will never see a woman in those sports at the Olympics or anywhere it matters.

And who would pick a woman to play in a team of volleyball, basketball, soccer? I think that historically the only sport in which men and women are absolutely equal is shooting. Maybe curling but it's usually the man that sweeps the ice (a little bit of extra strength.)

New comment by pmontra in "Firefox Adds Tab Notes"

pmontra — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:04:43 +0000

That could be a useful feature. It's got vibes from the 90s, when there were a lot of different browsers and some of them allowed users to annotate pages and links [1]. I'm sure that there are a number of extensions to do that and still it's OK to have it in the browser by default.

[1] https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/04/30/iannotate-wha...

New comment by pmontra in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

pmontra — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:21:40 +0000

From what I see on the other side of the ocean, the same applies to Europe, at least to Italy. Add to the list: wake up early, drive to customers all the day long, learn to always smile and be kind to customers even when they don't deserve it.

New comment by pmontra in "Ask ChatGPT to pick a number from 1-10000, it generally selects from 7200-7500"

pmontra — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 07:56:14 +0000

If I care a little bit about that random number I might reach for my phone and look at the digits of the seconds of the current time. It's 31 now. Not appropriate for multiple lookups.

New comment by pmontra in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

pmontra — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:16:49 +0000

It's not a deterrent, far from that, but it's probably what I'll have to do to be able to carry with me a sane device.

New comment by pmontra in "NanoGPT Slowrun: 10x Data Efficiency with Infinite Compute"

pmontra — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:13:38 +0000

That happened at toddler stage of brain development and of knowledge buildup.

Let's suppose that you meet adults that never saw cats and dogs. You show them a picture a cat and a dog. Do you expect that they need to see 100 of them before telling the difference?

New comment by pmontra in "NanoGPT Slowrun: 10x Data Efficiency with Infinite Compute"

pmontra — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:06:45 +0000

If you see one picture of a zebra, fly to Africa, see a real zebra, you recognize it as a zebra. But zebras are really unmistakable.

If you see a picture of an oryx and a picture of a kudu, maybe you remember the shape of their horns and a picture is enough.

Enter waterbucks and steenboks. That starts to require a little more training.

Go all the way from mammals to insects. Bees and wasps and ants are still in the one picture is enough category. But what species of ants those on the wall of my house belong to?

I believe that ease of detection depends on how much things stand out on their own. Anyway, we do use a fundamentally different way of training than neural nets because we don't rebuild ourselves from scratch. However birds and planes fly in totally different ways but both fly. Their ways of flying are appropriate for different tasks, reach a branch or carry people to Africa to look at zebras.

New comment by pmontra in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

pmontra — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:36:39 +0000

They don't operate in my county AFAIK. However that reinforces my idea that the endgame will be a pristine Android phone in a drawer at home with the banking apps required for accessing their sites with 2FA and another phone in my pocket for daily use.

New comment by pmontra in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

pmontra — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:47:10 +0000

You have to wait one day only once, when enabling the feature. I agree that enabling developer mode could be a problem but mostly because it's buried below screens and multiple touches. As a data point, I enabled developer mode on all my devices since 2011 and no banking app complained about it. But it could depend by the different banking systems of our countries.

New comment by pmontra in "Honda is killing its EVs"

pmontra — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:22:13 +0000

I think that parties can win elections by pointing fingers at what people do with their phones, but they can't create enough concern by pointing fingers at the Canbus and at hacking cars.

New comment by pmontra in "Wander – A tiny, decentralised tool to explore the small web"

pmontra — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:08:04 +0000

Before webrings and the very first directories and search engines, the tools for exploring the web were memory, bookmarks and the links sections of web sites.

New comment by pmontra in "Honda is killing its EVs"

pmontra — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 06:08:34 +0000

It's not only bug fixing. It's what happens to phones too: updates for a fixed number of years.

I don't see the point to pay a premium for a new car (it's not a tool for my work) so I always buy second hand. My Citroën C3 from 2016 never upgraded to the new backward incompatible Android auto from the late 2010s. I bought it in 2020 and I wasn't able to connect to it with my phone from 2019 which came with the new Android auto. BTW iPhones could connect. Last time I checked was 2024.

This particular problem is not important because I put my phone in a holder close to my wheel and I get a better navigator than my car could ever be with its 3 colors LCD panel, but cars can last much more than phones and stopping support at any time during their lifetime could be a problem. I understand that supporting a 2016 car in 2036 could be a problem too, so just give us the mechanical part with the firmware of engine, brakes etc and the usual knobs and buttons. Each passenger has a personal infotainment system in their hands and spend their time liking at it with earpieces in their ears. No need to duplicate that in the car.

I'm past 130k km now so I'll be looking for another second hand car a few years from now. I'm afraid that it will be from the middle of the worst period of the car dashboards. Maybe I'll be partially saved by looking at a low price point.

New comment by pmontra in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

pmontra — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:35:46 +0000

That's done by arranging a demo (the very old way) or (better) by deploying to a staging server. The customer meets with you for a demo not very often, maybe once per month, or checks what's on the staging server maybe a couple of times per week. They have other things to do, so you cannot make them check your proposal multiple times per day. However I concede that if you are fast you can work for multiple customers at the same time and juggle their demos on the staging servers.