Hacker News: throwaway_20357

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989"

throwaway_20357 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:35:11 +0000

Doom was released end of '93. In 1992 most of us were in the 286 -> 386 upgrade wave and a 486-33 was easily at $2.5k+ ($5.5k in today's terms). The 486 DX2 66 was a good choice even 1994-1996.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?"

throwaway_20357 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:34:33 +0000

There surely must be some BBS backup tapes somewhere that at least contain some of the boards?

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "Darkrealms BBS"

throwaway_20357 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:43:58 +0000

Has anyone captured a Fidonet forum archive anywhere or is this form of human communication forever lost?

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

throwaway_20357 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:08:54 +0000

Problem is: this list gets shorter every year, without any new additions in the recent decades (!)

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

throwaway_20357 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:03:55 +0000

What would the appropriate strategy have been after realizing China had decided to squeeze foreign cars out of the market? The "obsolete business model" still sells many cars world-wide.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

throwaway_20357 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:01:02 +0000

They are on par or better than their Chinese counterparts but they are a hard sell being 30-50% more expensive.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

throwaway_20357 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:57:31 +0000

It's 24 months at the moment, which is way too long. A buffer period for companies to allow for necessary adjustments should be one quarter, max two.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

throwaway_20357 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:43:46 +0000

How can manufacturers fight EV adoption? If an EV is a superior offering it will find its market. Germans are free to buy Teslas, BYDs or domestiv EVs. There are reasons why the EV market share in Germany was still only 4.1% in 2025 (most likely: high electricity prices, relatively low gasoline price) but manufacturers "fighting adoption" is not one of them.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

throwaway_20357 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:29:09 +0000

There must be more to it. German automakers did belong to the top 10 (for some periods even top 5) R&D spenders world-wide. It seems they just did not spend it wisely. Similarly, the claim they "kept wages down" seems to require some nuance. VW workers are known to be very well paid. From the outside it seems like these companies became large behemoths who were not able to spend their R&D money wisely and their outsized pay packages forcing them to offer their products at uncompetitive prices.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "Agentic Engineering Patterns"

throwaway_20357 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:38:39 +0000

I see where Simon is coming from with these patterns but I wonder where large software companies stand regarding their agentic engineering practices? Is Google creating in-house code using agents against its monorepo? Has Microsoft outsourced Windows source code advancements to a dark factory yet?

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs"

throwaway_20357 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:57:53 +0000

This is going on for decades and I wonder what the actual business model for the EU economy is in the future. With all factories soon gone, will Europe rely on agriculture, tourism and some services only? Back to a "developing country" economy?

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns"

throwaway_20357 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:33:02 +0000

If news sites opt out of being archived by the Internet Archive, are their archives available anywhere or just lost? Will there be no way to access the headlines of a certain day or the reporting about a certain topic in the past even for research or scientific purposes?

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "TSMC to make advanced AI semiconductors in Japan"

throwaway_20357 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 08:22:02 +0000

Not sure what you're talking about. The last "forward facing" government was about 50y ago, the last one at least driving meaningful reforms almost 25y ago. To me it seems the more Europe got integrated, the more Germany lost the plot.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "The Waymo World Model"

throwaway_20357 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:11:13 +0000

Like London? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvctCbVEvwQ

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "Television is 100 years old today"

throwaway_20357 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:08:16 +0000

Wasn't all this early TV experimentation based on Nipkow disks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipkow_disk)?

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

throwaway_20357 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 11:27:45 +0000

Why "abundant cheap energy is a key requirement to survive in today's globalized markets" has not made it into the EU leaderships' mindset is beyond comprehension.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities"

throwaway_20357 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:52:03 +0000

What are some of the niche search engines build on Google's index affected by this?

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update"

throwaway_20357 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:15:42 +0000

Yes, what I think happens is the following: User A's price ceiling is $10, User B's $12. When both reveal their max price early, the item will go to $10.50 ($0.50 increment over A's max price). User A then has plenty of time to notice the item being valued at $10.50 by someone. In many cases users then adjust the value they assign to the item and increase their bid. The result: User B has to pay more than $10.50 they would have paid when sniping the item seconds before auction expiration.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "Eight European countries face 10% tariff for opposing US control of Greenland"

throwaway_20357 — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:40:18 +0000

Indeed. As the US abandons it, the EU seemingly has no other choice than to find ways to align with Russia now.

New comment by throwaway_20357 in "Show HN: CommerceTXT – An open standard for AI shopping context (like llms.txt)"

throwaway_20357 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 14:07:08 +0000

Can shops not just embed Schema/JSON-LD in the page if they want their information to be machine readable?