Hacker News: xhkkffbf

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Sam Bankman-Fried loses bid to appeal against fraud conviction in FTX case"

xhkkffbf — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:10:59 +0000

I think the victims were helped quite a bit by the runup in crypto assets. So even though some was lost, the run up in what was left ended up being quite a bit.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"

xhkkffbf — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:55:40 +0000

And if management decides we don't need those 6 hours of human work, will everyone still be complaining?

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Amazon employees ask Seattle to put the brakes on new data centers"

xhkkffbf — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:41:50 +0000

Could this headline be rewritten, "Employees of X ask Government to Stop Competition?"

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet"

xhkkffbf — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:16:20 +0000

Alt=old in German, but Alta=high in Spanish. And vista is pretty much a Spanish word. A high observation point is a pretty good metaphor for a search engine.

New comment by xhkkffbf in ""Terrorists?": The Suffragette Arson and Bombing Campaign – Egham Museum"

xhkkffbf — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:57:03 +0000

I think the point is that they weren't "forgotten" but deliberately repackaged. And this action is going on today. Scroll down to the dead posts. There's one that gives a very factual account of how some suffragettes joined up with the Fascist movement in the 1930s. They were probably rooting for Hitler. Yet, someone quickly down voted that factoid out of the main stream.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "The Grad Student Who Broke Microplastics Research"

xhkkffbf — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:20:00 +0000

Science is hard. It was easier when Newton was dealing with bigger things like apples. Now just a tiny bit of contamination is enough to skew things.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "The Case for Space Datacenters"

xhkkffbf — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:03:38 +0000

You're right that some parts of life on earth are cheaper. There are plenty of counties, but are they near the net backbone? Do they have power to spare?

And remember that the semi trucks still have bottles of explosives that may not be as big as a rocket, but are still far from safe.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "The Case for Space Datacenters"

xhkkffbf — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:40:05 +0000

The most interesting argument I've heard is that in space there are no NIMBYs to protest or local (or state) politicians to extract donations. Yes, there aren't many slots for geostationary orbits, but in most other cases there's plenty of room.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Motorola effectively bricked its entire line of WiFi routers without explanation"

xhkkffbf — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:37:01 +0000

I don't know what happened here, but if someone told me that a manager fired all of the dev team and replaced them with cheaper overseas replacements, I wouldn't be surprised.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic"

xhkkffbf — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:31:38 +0000

The population is very hard to count, believe it or not. In many places, the birth rate is well under replacement and in the others it's dropping quickly. Furthermore there's widespread fraud and deliberate miscounting which also makes it hard to really know.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

xhkkffbf — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:22:15 +0000

I remember the MIT press release. I wonder if they've found any commercial success.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

xhkkffbf — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:24:58 +0000

Go read the story that Richard Feynman tells of betting an abacus user. He used his knowledge of some strange numbers. It's in _Surely You Must Be Joking_.

I suspect his facility with numbers and his knowledge of tables like this really helped him do physics research.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

xhkkffbf — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:27:40 +0000

IBM researchers won a few Nobel prizes themselves.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

xhkkffbf — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:20:58 +0000

Read up on Kobe Bryant or Bronny James.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Declassified CIA Cartography Maps from the 1980s"

xhkkffbf — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:06:24 +0000

Do they have pointers to the bars with the best vodka?

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Anna's Archive hit with $19.5M default judgment and global domain takedown order"

xhkkffbf — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:19:19 +0000

Uh, this is the authors' choice. They don't have to cut any deal with the publishers.

If they want to hold out for some big (or even small) payout, they have every right to do so. But they don't. Why? Because it's the best deal available for the scientists. The journal publishers actually do something. And if you think you can do it for much less, I hope you will step forward and help humanity.

There are so many sanctimonious piracy defenders here. If they really believe what they say, someone could easily step forward and slap together a website for next to nothing.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble"

xhkkffbf — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:11:24 +0000

Now that RAM is getting more expensive, I hope the OS builders will rethink how they use so much memory. An OS that's lighter weight lets us save money on RAM.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

xhkkffbf — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:06:18 +0000

This is actually good news for society as a whole. There are way too many people who spend time in grad school only to discover that society doesn't have a job for them. Yes, it's not nice for the people who don't get in, but there's been way too much overproduction.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house"

xhkkffbf — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:59:40 +0000

I know some kids who had a really bad time in school because some teachers treated them badly. Yes, it's not as bad as what the cops can do, but it was still pretty life altering.

New comment by xhkkffbf in "Solar on canals reduces water evaporation by 70% and algae growth by 85%"

xhkkffbf — Sat, 09 May 2026 15:19:06 +0000

Why do we arch the panels over the water? I've heard some say they need to send boats down the canal for maintenance. Okay. But why not just have lower panels that can be lifted in case of trouble? They're less likely to get blown around by wind and that should make them cheaper to build. And they could reduce evaporation and algae even more.