Hacker News: pogopop77

New comment by pogopop77 in "No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s"

pogopop77 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:11:38 +0000

Information was so much more scarce back then. Made programming feel like a black art. I remember when I learned about overlays in Turbo Pascal, it felt like I learned a new spell :)

New comment by pogopop77 in "After Town Bans Flock, Councilmember Crashes Out, Proposes Internet, Phone Ban"

pogopop77 — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:56:50 +0000

In a small town of 900 people, it seems odd a council member would be THAT upset about removing license plate reading camera systems, when it's clear the town doesn't want it. To get flustered enough to start proposing sarcastic bills, it's not a stretch to immediately think that there's at least some political maneuvering behind it, if not blatant kickbacks.

New comment by pogopop77 in "Apple signs meaningless deal to make some less-important parts in America"

pogopop77 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:38:50 +0000

The irony is that on-shoring high-end manufacturing would be a good thing. But the approach of "do it right now, or I'll put tariffs on your product(s)" is not the way to get any lasting change. It's a way to get the performative changes we're seeing, that will drift right back offshore when this administration mercifully ends.

New comment by pogopop77 in "XZ Utils Backdoor"

pogopop77 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:30:18 +0000

Given this was backdoor was likely funded by a nation-state actor and very carefully obfuscated, the fact that it was discovered within a month and never rolled out to production releases, shows that the open source process mostly worked. Not saying it couldn't be better.

New comment by pogopop77 in "Deep Down the Rabbit Hole: Bash, OverlayFS, and a 30-Year-Old Surprise"

pogopop77 — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 17:58:25 +0000

Interesting investigation, good read. Definitely illustrates how new paradigms (i.e. overlay filesystems) can subtly affect behaviors in ways that are complex to track down.

New comment by pogopop77 in "My "Are you presuming most people are stupid?" test"

pogopop77 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 21:18:12 +0000

"Be curious, not judgemental" -- Ted Lasso (via Walt Whitman?)

New comment by pogopop77 in "Graduate Degrees Are Overrated"

pogopop77 — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:21:03 +0000

If the software development is mostly stock and standard, I would agree, it doesn't matter if staff have advanced degrees or not. But developers with advanced degrees tend to have a better understanding of what is actually going on "under the hood". When tackling unorthodox, challenging problems, they use that knowledge to make better design decisions, resulting in better quality software. For those types of cutting-edge projects, I think there is value to having staff with advanced degrees.

New comment by pogopop77 in "Boom Supersonic's XB-1 prototype aces 2nd test flight"

pogopop77 — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 16:28:05 +0000

I hope Boom can make supersonic travel commercially viable. Would be nice to have a faster option for long-distance travel, even though the cost will probably be too high for most. I'd sooner spend money on that vs. edge-of-space tourism (a la Virgin Galactic/SpaceX).

New comment by pogopop77 in "uBlock Origin could soon stop working in Chrome"

pogopop77 — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 14:02:56 +0000

As advertising is a huge part of Google's revenue, I'm surprised they've let an extension like uBlock Origin work on Chrome as long as they have. If you haven't tried Firefox in a while, it's time to give it another shot. If I could get Firefox to handle Microsoft Teams meetings, I wouldn't even have Chrome installed.

New comment by pogopop77 in "Google Chrome Will Track You for the Next 200 Days–Then It May Get Worse"

pogopop77 — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 16:17:58 +0000

Mozilla is a non-profit that made a couple of poor decisions. Meanwhile Google's whole business model is based around it. It is not the same thing at all.

New comment by pogopop77 in "‘Tesla syndrome’ explains why tech is making us miserable"

pogopop77 — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 19:53:34 +0000

I understand where you are coming from. I've done that with a few selected items, but in general I have chosen the newer options. There always seems to be a feature or two I find worth the hassle.

New comment by pogopop77 in "‘Tesla syndrome’ explains why tech is making us miserable"

pogopop77 — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 18:30:51 +0000

Newer tech has added vast amounts of new functionality at the expense of making the older, simpler functions a bit more cumbersome and less reliable. Not everyone likes that trade off. For example, in the early 1980s, landline phones were indestructible, never dropped calls, and had 99.99999% uptime. VOIP phones are nowhere near that reliable, by any metric, but that's the price for fully redirect-able calls/messages among dozens of other useful features.

New comment by pogopop77 in "C and C++ prioritize performance over correctness"

pogopop77 — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 17:27:09 +0000

C and C++ are most often used when performance is the highest priority. Undefined behavior is basically the standards committee allowing the compiler developers maximum flexibility to optimize for performance over error checking/handling/reporting. The penalty is that errors can become harder to detect.

It appears the author is a Go advocate. I assume they are valuing clearly defined error checking/handling/reporting (the authors definition of correctness) over performance. If that's what you are looking for, consider Go.

New comment by pogopop77 in "No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game"

pogopop77 — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 20:39:32 +0000

Very impressive. If my understanding of how the AI works is correct, it is using a pre-computed strategy developed by playing trillions of hands, but it is not dynamically updating that during game play, nor building any kind of profiles of opponents. I wonder if by playing against it many times, human opponents could discern any tendencies they could exploit. Especially if the pre-computed strategy remains static.