Hacker News: snarfy

New comment by snarfy in "Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why"

snarfy — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 14:03:14 +0000

When they can all share the same Electron implementation instead of individual copies it reduces memory quite a bit. I'm not trying to defend Electron way of development but I can see why they pushed WebView2.

New comment by snarfy in "AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt"

snarfy — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 12:31:33 +0000

AI winter is coming.

We are in still in the the good ol' days of AI. Like the internet, there was usenet, irc, blogs, slashdot, slackware, archie, gopher, ncsa mosaic. Now we have reddit, discord, facebook, tiktok, chrome. The early adopters build a community, then everybody else shows up and turns it to shit.

It will happen with AI and it won't be pretty. It will stop being useful and start being annoying and turn to outright danger. Fridges spoiling food is only the beginning.

New comment by snarfy in "AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt"

snarfy — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 15:12:56 +0000

Quality software is out there, but you have to pay for it.

New comment by snarfy in "Show HN: Wikihack – HackerTube, but for Wikipedia articles mentioned on HN"

snarfy — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 10:45:18 +0000

All the "Hackernews but for X" posts want me to make one for games.

Except it would just be as link to Factorio

New comment by snarfy in "US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans"

snarfy — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 12:33:37 +0000

The next wave after AI hype will be all of the security issues and real world fall out. Refrigerators spoiling food is only the beginning.

New comment by snarfy in "Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible"

snarfy — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 17:47:22 +0000

You forgot cost. Performant software is out there, but you have to pay for it.

With most software being free, cost is optimized for the developers not users and we end up with Electron apps

New comment by snarfy in "The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI"

snarfy — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:08:43 +0000

Too late, already got promoted for being a 10x er

New comment by snarfy in "AI promised less work. I've never worked more"

snarfy — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:40:49 +0000

Aluminum used to be more expensive than platinum. Now we crumple it up and throw it in the bin. AI has done the same thing to the cost of a line of code.

New comment by snarfy in "SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller"

snarfy — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:56:41 +0000

They are pretty hard to beat. I just bought some RP2040 for a project but am replacing them with ESP32-C3 for bluetooth support. 5 pack was like $20-30

New comment by snarfy in "Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce"

snarfy — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:21:52 +0000

The engineers are fine. The system is a mess. It reminds me of the recent post about "SimCity - but with permits."

Even basic things like fixing the pothole doesn't get done because, well, permits.

New comment by snarfy in "Writing Is Closer to Thought Than Code"

snarfy — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:23:19 +0000

Mel the real programmer would disagree.

[1] - https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

New comment by snarfy in "IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem"

snarfy — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:17:09 +0000

I like this analogy a lot.

It reminds me that coin-op SF2 champion edition was like $6000 new, and you rented time with tokens. Eventually you could play a very good but more limited SNES version of SF2 at home for no tokens. And then PC hardware matured to the point where you can play the exact bits via emulator at better than original fidelity.

It will be very nice when AI gets to the emulator stage.

New comment by snarfy in "We should be more ambitious with the software we build"

snarfy — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 13:42:56 +0000

If you got into software because there was something you wanted to make with it, now is the best time to be doing it. I can't stop building and might need the max plans.

New comment by snarfy in "The Quake Fan who built the map editor everybody uses"

snarfy — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 11:55:48 +0000

I am working on a new project and looked at both TrenchBroom and NetRadiant. Neither of them were very usable for me. I am familiar with old and new UnrealEd so I ended up using that since it is a free download now with the OldUnreal release.

New comment by snarfy in "Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines"

snarfy — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 01:22:15 +0000

swamps everything except for the health benefits

New comment by snarfy in "Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you bought"

snarfy — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:45:52 +0000

It's nice being able to rent 300k of hardware for $20/mo coding subscription. I look at these little strix halo things and think nope I'm good.

New comment by snarfy in "Starcraft: Ashfall"

snarfy — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:06:28 +0000

A friend asked if this was fair use. I lol'd.

New comment by snarfy in "There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]"

snarfy — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:09:21 +0000

> If your primary purpose was rent-seeking so you could play with puzzles

Yes, this is overly harsh. Some of us are interested in the craft, not the solution. Is that not the "right" reason?

New comment by snarfy in "OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI"

snarfy — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:27:09 +0000

Yes this is why I don't invest in hardware. TPU is better than GPU when you have a good model already. The models are already good enough to sell as an accelerator card made as a TPU. I would buy an Opus 5.5 card.

New comment by snarfy in "JetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history"

snarfy — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:39:09 +0000

probably ai related