<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: rotten</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rotten</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:13:37 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=rotten" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Show HN: Turn images into audio that can be decoded with a spectrogram"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Better than playing a record backwards to find the hidden messages.  Instead you can find hidden images in recordings.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Jun 2026 09:28:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696623</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696623</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696623</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Working as a feeelance consultant means you have to do marketing AND sales.  (and backend paperwork as well).   You need to be able to float through stretches of no work, and you need to be able to deal with clients who won't pay you.<p>Your product is yourself, so you start with brand building.  What are your differentiators?  (human) Networking is the most common way to market your services, but some write books, speak at conferences, have a substack, and blog too.<p>Setting rates and closing sales is another challenge.  There are whole schools of materials to help with this.<p>Lastly remember you are trading your time for money.  Your time includes the marketing, sales, and finance/taxes/billing.  You may need liability insurance as well.  With all that said your time is finite and not scalable - even if you charge top dollar there is a ceiling on how much you can make.  Don't expect to get rich in this line of work by itself.  (Side note:  "ownership" - real estate, stocks, intellectual property, etc - are the scalable wealth builders)<p>I went down this route for a while, but ultimately decided I would rather just do the technical work and leave the rest to others.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:53:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823657</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823657</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823657</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "AGI Is Mathematically Impossible (3): Kolmogorov Complexity"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The human brain does not have perfect memory.  It is not always logical.  And more often than not it is motivated and influenced by "external" forces - health, hunger, sex drive, environmental conditions, luck, spiritual inspiration, or whatever.  The perfect worker is purely logical and has perfect memory and no external influences - never gets hungry or sick or wants to be the boss themselves.  The AI race is funded by folks interested in creating the perfect worker, not a human.  I have to agree with the conclusions of this paper that they won't be able to make humans.  (But they don't really want to.)  The Vatican has also published interesting works on this idea.  The question is - if you take out everything that makes it human, can you call it intelligent?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 13 Jul 2025 10:47:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549288</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549288</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549288</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "US science is being wrecked"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's the old " I never used algebra in my job, but I did use things the football coach taught me" mindset.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:18:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44190910</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44190910</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44190910</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "American Science and Surplus is fighting for its life. Why Should You Care?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For that matter, American Science is fighting for its life too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:12:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44190857</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44190857</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44190857</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Getting a sql query to optimal performance is still much more of an art than a specific science.  Having the LLM generate a query that appears to work (correctness issues aside), is much more likely than the LLM generating an optimal performing query.  While this may not matter for one-off queries common in analytics, when you start worrying about scalability, even the tiniest tweaks can make a huge difference.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 May 2025 13:22:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43915328</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43915328</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43915328</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Floating nuclear power plants to be mass produced for US coastline"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wonder how hard these would be to steal?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Feb 2025 01:34:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43179668</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43179668</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43179668</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "US airlines transported passengers over two light-years since the last crash"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The new head of the FAA promises to make flying safe again by getting rid of minority and women pilots.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2024 11:12:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42295026</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42295026</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42295026</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Intel is trucking a 916k-pound 'Super Load' across Ohio to its new fab"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Don't worry, us taxpayers will cover the damage.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Jun 2024 01:32:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40665028</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40665028</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40665028</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Bay Area restaurants react to new Calif. law with anger, shock"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Several hotels I've stayed in recently charged an "amenities" fee.  When I asked what amenities one said it was for the free wifi and use of the lounge.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 May 2024 16:53:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40258838</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40258838</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40258838</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Algorithmic Mathematical Art (2004)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Check out this guy's work:  <a href="https://bleuje.com/animationsite/2023_1/" rel="nofollow">https://bleuje.com/animationsite/2023_1/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 Mar 2024 01:25:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39786507</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39786507</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39786507</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "The Nineteenth-Century Banjo"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm another long time hackernews reader and banjo player.  Back in the days when we used to work in data centers, I was pulling a long late night for some server maintenance with my banjo and I heard the night security guard come in on his routine patrol.  I played a bit of dueling banjos (from behind a rack).  He spun on his heels and got out of there.  He didn't come back through again that night.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 Dec 2023 18:44:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38490555</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38490555</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38490555</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Working with Docker containers with the dexec bash script"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use this one all the time to list the containers I currently have running:<p><pre><code>    docker_names() { docker ps | awk '{print $NF}'; }</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 27 Jun 2023 13:24:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36492365</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36492365</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36492365</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "AWS us-east-1 down"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They have 41 services listed now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Jun 2023 20:18:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36316399</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36316399</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36316399</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "AWS us-east-1 down"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I worked with a devops person who moved everything we had set up in other regions _to_ US-East-1 because that is where you are supposed to run stuff.  According to him, the other regions were just for DR stuff.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Jun 2023 19:48:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36315920</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36315920</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36315920</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "AWS us-east-1 down"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Looks like it is a problem with lambdas.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Jun 2023 19:17:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36315458</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36315458</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36315458</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Kombucha cultures can be turned into flexible electric circuit boards"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I look forward to the AI enhanced SCOBY life forms taking over the world.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Feb 2023 16:58:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34926684</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34926684</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34926684</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Last undersea Internet cable connecting Vietnam with the world breaks down"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even if another world war isn't starting, think of the data pollution from all those leaking bits!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Feb 2023 20:17:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901986</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901986</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34901986</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Amazon acquires 400 acres near new Intel development in Ohio"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The Project, not Intel.   It is Intel Project motivating the improvements which are making it possible for AWS, the box stores, the fast food joints, Google, and others to move in too.  Intel the focal point for the money from the local governments, the state government, and the federal government to help make this happen.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Jan 2023 02:03:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34541577</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34541577</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34541577</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rotten in "Amazon acquires 400 acres near new Intel development in Ohio"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Food comes from farms.  Every time we wipe out a few more farms, we have less land to produce food on.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2023 02:07:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34526876</link><dc:creator>rotten</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34526876</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34526876</guid></item></channel></rss>