Hacker News: skywhopper

New comment by skywhopper in "Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI"

skywhopper — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:38:38 +0000

Yeah because it has an actual correlation, whereas BMI is a ridiculously oversimplified measurement designed for population statistics based on what data is easily available, not individual assessment.

New comment by skywhopper in "The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist"

skywhopper — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 09:28:39 +0000

So, your name is also this sort of identifier. But an “identifier” is not an “identity” in the way you mean it. Sometimes words are used in multiple ways.

New comment by skywhopper in "Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas"

skywhopper — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:02:02 +0000

You don’t seem to know much about where these datacenters are being built. They are usually greenfield sites, often in relatively rural areas where there may not actually be any local zoning regulations. Or when they are on brownfield urban sites, they are using “temporary” gas turbines that are incredibly loud and break all air pollution laws, taking advantage of loopholes and a complete lack of enforcement by the current EPA.

New comment by skywhopper in "Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas"

skywhopper — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:01:02 +0000

You think the folks who are successfully organizing against datacenters can’t use the same techniques and support networks to do the same thing against other nuisance uses?

New comment by skywhopper in "Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country"

skywhopper — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 01:15:15 +0000

I hope you get paid for apologizing for the worst people in the world.

New comment by skywhopper in "Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country"

skywhopper — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 01:13:39 +0000

They could (and should be required to) build out their own solar/wind/battery infra as part of standing up a new datacenter. So much money is being wasted on poisoning our air and further enriching the richest companies in the history of the world.

New comment by skywhopper in "Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country"

skywhopper — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 01:12:02 +0000

Batteries exist, and are getting better all the time.

New comment by skywhopper in "Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country"

skywhopper — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 01:09:07 +0000

Yes, they said that.

New comment by skywhopper in "Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery"

skywhopper — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:44:38 +0000

What a terrible outlook. “It’s not possible to do this thing safely at Meta’s scale” is an apologist cop-out. First of all, yes it is, Meta makes tens of billions of dollars of pure profit every year. They were that profitable while blowing tens of billions on the Metaverse debacle! They are not resource-constrained in any meaningful sense.

Secondly, if I’m wrong and it’s not possible, then you stop providing the dangerous service! There’s no reason Meta has to exist in its current form. If it can’t meet basic standards of human dignity in its product offerings, then it should change or cease to exist.

New comment by skywhopper in "Universities would prefer no AI"

skywhopper — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:34:04 +0000

This author has a ton of axes to grind and a poor grasp of computing history or how industry works. Pretending like it’s strange or even bad that industrial datacenter builders with tens of billions of leveraged capital can outbuild the GPU capacity of chronically underfunded grant dependent universities whose mission is not to create industrial scale compute resources is like complaining local technical school auto-mechanic program isn’t out-producing Ford’s auto manufacturing numbers.

But then as soon as the author rolled out complaints about DEI and ethics, you knew what was going on. Okay, please leave higher ed and work for the industry you love. As you say, they are doing just fine.

New comment by skywhopper in "No Data Centers in My Backyard"

skywhopper — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:58:51 +0000

Yes, the new ones often use dirty generators 24/7, and probably will for years. They are loud and toxic to the local community.

New comment by skywhopper in "No Data Centers in My Backyard"

skywhopper — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:57:22 +0000

They tend to use coal and natural gas, instead, often in especially dirty forms. The fact that they can use solar doesn’t mean they do.

New comment by skywhopper in "No Data Centers in My Backyard"

skywhopper — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:55:04 +0000

“Disability, the new form of welfare”? How old are you exactly?

New comment by skywhopper in "Go 1.27 Interactive Tour"

skywhopper — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:01:28 +0000

Is it worse than having to create endless functions for each type pair?

    (b IntBox) MapToStringBox(f func(int) string) StringBox
    (b IntBox) MapToBoolBox(f func(int) bool) BoolBox
    (b StringBox) MapToIntBox(f func(string) int) IntBox

Etc etc etc?

The T, U, and f names are the cognitive load here, because they are meaningless variables. For a specific solution, those would have meaningful names that would make it easier to understand.

New comment by skywhopper in "Google has abandoned Google News?"

skywhopper — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:34:21 +0000

And they all, universally, are terrible, slow, buggy, confusing, constantly changing, and have terrible UX. It’s no wonder people think it would be a good idea to use an AI to disintermediate their interactions with their computers: it’s because 99% of software is absolute trash.

New comment by skywhopper in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

skywhopper — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:12:23 +0000

Who told you that? FIFA?

New comment by skywhopper in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

skywhopper — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:10:50 +0000

This statement is weak and wishy-washy compared to the blunt UEFA statement. Kudos to Europe. Here’s hoping CONCACAF can get brave enough to take the moral stance as well.

New comment by skywhopper in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

skywhopper — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:56:48 +0000

And they took a 15% commission on both sides of every aftermarket transaction. I’ve never seen such an overtly avaricious “marketplace”.

New comment by skywhopper in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

skywhopper — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:55:31 +0000

FIFA has announced they plan to officially sell off everything to private investors, dropping all pretense of being a steward of a common good.

New comment by skywhopper in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

skywhopper — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:53:42 +0000

Based on the quality of their World Cup ticketing website, I’m not surprised. That was the worst ticketing experience I’ve ever endured.