Hacker News: skeeter2020

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Tesla 'Cannot Guarantee' Roadster Reservation Holders Will Ever Get a Car"

skeeter2020 — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:37:27 +0000

do you normally commit to - and pay a sizeable deposit - ten years before you take deilvery of a new car?

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Super Intelligence"

skeeter2020 — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:02:34 +0000

oppo FB: you need to add a "the". THE Best Intelligence... that's your name right there.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

skeeter2020 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:45:41 +0000

but even the smallest modern programs would be monsters in Assembly, so it's simplicity doesn't help much, and you're juggling a lot more than 3 bean bags.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

skeeter2020 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:44:11 +0000

by the 90's more like struggle through a single, one-semester course that had a unit and some labs on assembly.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

skeeter2020 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:42:34 +0000

but this is not how people use - or providers sell - LLMs. They don't ask questions about how to do small steps, they just ask it to do the entire project, finish quickly and learn nothing. If the workflow was many, tight iterations it would be closer to a tool than an automation.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Solar panels that plug into your wall"

skeeter2020 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:06:16 +0000

you know journeyman electricians bring more than "passed one exam on the solar unit", right?

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Solar panels that plug into your wall"

skeeter2020 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:04:11 +0000

also a distinctly American regulatory entity!

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Character.ai Files for Bankruptcy"

skeeter2020 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:55:16 +0000

accrete means grow or make larger/greater; this is the opposite were a bunch of value moved around, some was lost (from an efficiency / opportunity cost perspective) and a bunch was concentrated into the hands of a few. That's not value growth.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy"

skeeter2020 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:52:06 +0000

webvan and pets.com have entered the chat.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "DuckDB Ducklake"

skeeter2020 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 02:44:05 +0000

I don't want to complain too much about free stuff, but when they say "Early Release - Raw and Unedited" they are not kidding. It's not just layout, illustrations or organization; it reads like the authors' notes for a future book project.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe"

skeeter2020 — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:39:25 +0000

not in this case where a thermosensor can do nothing but monitor a temperature.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack"

skeeter2020 — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:38:08 +0000

this definitely does not require a fridge be "online" and have the ability to be remotely programmed. At the very least have the monitoring and potentially I/O capabilities in a different device that can easily be removed from the system. Integrated smart fridges deserve to Suck it, Jin-yang!

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers"

skeeter2020 — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:34:48 +0000

that's more about a desire not to read, with the (IMO flawed) strategy of multitasking, vs. format. The % of people who have read a book in the past year is abysmal and continues to decline.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Launch HN: Agent37 (YC F26) – Low-cost agent sandboxes for running agents"

skeeter2020 — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:29:49 +0000

unless the startup has gobs of free money how can they do this against an incumbent? note: nobody has gobs of free money anymore, except the incumbents. Startups competing on price is typically not a winning strategy, unless they have some technical advantage that shifts the price curve; subsidizing a move on it doesn't work.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B"

skeeter2020 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 21:28:07 +0000

>> TLDR: There's a lot of value in thinking ahead and seeing the future. The clones are nice and exciting but they give me "I could have built this first, yes but you didn't" vibes. I hope they manage to keep it up and push the space forward again

This all sounds intelligent and likely, and yet we can come up with countless counter examples where the first mover is not the big winner, and nobody cares about who did it first. There is typically way more value in nailing the execution of a big idea someone else came up with, rather than "seeing the future".

New comment by skeeter2020 in "The Deeply Impersonal Personalized Recruiter Mail"

skeeter2020 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 19:50:40 +0000

there are good recruiters out there; if you find one they'll probably get you several jobs over your career. The baseline is so shockingly low that you'd think more recruiters would put in the exceeding low level of required effort that would put them in the top 5%. Go figure...

New comment by skeeter2020 in "The Deeply Impersonal Personalized Recruiter Mail"

skeeter2020 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 19:48:51 +0000

you're using the domain-typo squatting trick for good - kudos!

New comment by skeeter2020 in "OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled"

skeeter2020 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 19:40:50 +0000

>> "Oracle ... and other artificial intelligence companies"

Uhm, that's definitely not their business, despite what they want to you to believe.

New comment by skeeter2020 in "I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold"

skeeter2020 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:46:07 +0000

>> You're probably aware of this already but luckily a lot of service manuals can be found online in PDF form.

Not official ones for John Deere tractors unless they were leaked from authorized service agents!

New comment by skeeter2020 in "I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold"

skeeter2020 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:44:34 +0000

the issue is not that this information is undocumented, it's that an "authorized service center" gets information that an "owner" does not. Also cars are not "small open source utilities" with undocumented arguments; do you think that an auto manufacturer has hidden, untested diagnostics that only the dealer uses?

>> don’t think there should be any requirement that they are forced to do additional work

At one time seatbelts, airbags, emission controls, etc were all viewed in this category. Now we have regulations enforcing aspects of all of these. Why would diagnostics be different?