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The difference for me is that 20+ years ago if you went to an online community there was no filter to protect you. You’d have to choose wisely what to say and avoid being confrontational because there was the very possible chance of someone more knowledgeable than you putting you in place. With social media that exposure diminished because everyone can build a bubble of like-minded people. I like been corrected, while it hurts on a personal level it also helps you evolve as a human being because you become more knowledgeable. An Internet where everyone agrees with you is boring. And because everything is a bubble we went full circle and now there are culture wars everywhere. You can’t have a decent conversation where people just present their arguments without throwing punches and accusations all around. I feel like Hacker News is the last bastion of civilized conversations at scale.

Try posting something that majority of HN disagrees with and see the barrage of downvotes.

I love tailwind. AI chatbots are useless. Old internet was bad. Asians are proven to have the highest IQ. There's no logical reason for humans to exist. DOOM was a bad game.

This assumes everyone’s sitting on a fast fiber connection which is hardly the case. Even metropolitan areas in most cities don’t have universal fiber connection.

Have you tried mechanical keyboards? They were a life saver for me. I can type more than 100k keystrokes/day without any pain whatsoever.

Yep. On a keyboard with 8 thumb cluster keys per side, and custom 35g switches to lower the force needed to actuate, that helped a lot, but still not enough to be pain-free. Unfortunately once the damage is done on certain joints you can only do so much short of not using those fingers at all. 30 years of hammering keys pretty hard eventually catch up to you.

You should try 20g springs, they are really good for typing. I also removed the keycaps and replaced them with small pieces of band-aid on top of the switch stems which also helped. Also dictating plain text like comments and typing only for correcting errors in dictation and for short actions is better. It's easier to press a button rather than say a lengthy command, because vocal cords can also be damaged by speaking too much.

Where have you been able to find ultralight springs available to consumers? I was looking into this last week and the 10-20g ones were only available straight from the factory in South Korea with shipping costing $200... I was happy to get them and swap them out, but that shipping pricetag was too much of a highway robbery.

Would appreciate any advice here :)

And, intrigued about the idea of not using key switches at all. Are there any aftermarket alternatives available online for "keycaps" that are better at softening the impact on the finger, something softer and bouncier perhaps? Seems like something people would have experimented with.


Here is an interesting discussion about low-weight springs old.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/ojk0em/experiences\_with\_very\_low\_weight\_8\_to\_25g\_spring/. It has a link to rndkbd.com /products /sprit-springs?variant=43822770782442, where I purchased my springs. They have a full range starting from 12g, but they are currently out of stock. You can ask about the next restock on their Discord server.

One thing I discovered about lightweight springs is that lubing the switch doesn't work at all, it just stops resetting. I also think that with traditional MX-style switches going with weight less than 20g might not work out well because even with 20g springs some of my keys are not resetting properly, they remain stuck when I lift my finger, and I get "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"s instead of just "a" for example.

As for removing keycaps, my keyboard looks like this: m.youtube.com/watch?v=647FeK3\_Bek, except I left the spacebar keycap on, and I have a small piece of adhesive plaster tape on top of the plastic parts that resembles a plus sign "+" on every switch to increase friction. But I don't think removing keycaps works for switches box type switches with stems that look like [+]. I also had to open the space bar switch and add a little aluminum foil ring inside where the spring is located because it consistently wouldn’t reset.

Lightweight springs also slightly reduce the key travel distance, and the actuation point becomes very high, practically no actuation point. It produces a keystroke the moment you touch it. This is now possible with harder springs too with the advent of Hall effect keyboards, but the lightest spring available for that type of keyboard is 28g, which is a bit too heavy.


Thanks for sharing all that, appreciated. I had looked at that particular store last month and they were sold out of the lighter springs, but I'll check with them again to see if that's changing. And great point around switches being stuck with the lighter springs, definitely something I'll have to watch out for if I ever get that far.

I've also enjoyed Topre switches in the past, I remember those feeling pretty light as well, although I can't quite recall how my injured joints worked with them, that was in the healthy days.


The next best thing then is to try weight lifting exercises for the hands. This also helps a lot because it strengthens the muscle.

Contextual ads is the answer. You sell shoes, go and advertise on fashion related sites. I don't want to see a shoe ad while I'm browsing a gaming site just because I did some relative search a week ago. It's so fucking annoying and I never understood why Google never bothered to try some alternative too. I don't mean completely replace behavioral targeting but at the very least try some contextual one too.


Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't even play a decent arcade game. Fiber is not universal so that all of this to be transferred to the cloud. We tend to forget that computing is universal and it's not just PCs.


An important thing to add: the gaming industry was basically the R&D that (partly) led to this AI in the first place. GPUs were gaming devices first and foremost. The programmable pipeline came about because people wanted their video games to look better.

Furthermore, Stable Diffusion was (is) absolutely a large component to all of this. And a lot of that effort was grass roots: random people online can't together to figure out ways to generate better images.

It would be quite ironic if the next revolution comes about on Intel or AMD (or some Chinese company's) hardware because those GPUs were more affordable.


I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy

I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implications of this might have a lot of impact too and I feel is already a big enough financial crisis itself if we think about it coupled with all the other major glaring issues.


Based on the article, demand exceeds supply by 10%. It seems that companies are taking advantage of this gap nothing else. I won't be surprised if the demand is kept this way for a while to extract profits. GPUs saw a similar trend during crypto. Then there were affordable GPUs at one point.


"OMEC" (Organization of Memory Exporting Countries) NAND production quotas lowered by ~10%? https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423

  Samsung Electronics has lowered its target for NAND wafer output this year to around 4.72 million sheets, about 7% down from the previous year's 5.07 million. Kioxia also adjusted its output from 4.80 million last year to 4.69 million this year.. SK hynix and Micron are likewise keeping output conservatively constrained in a bid to benefit from higher prices. SK hynix's NAND output fell about 10%, from 2.01 million sheets last year to around 1.80 million this year. Micron's situation is similar: it is maintaining production at Fab 7 in Singapore—its largest NAND production base—in the low 300,000-sheet range, keeping a conservative supply posture.
China's YMTC and CXMT are increasing production capacity, but their product mix depends on non-market inputs, https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-su...

  The Chinese government directed CXMT to convert production from DDR4 to DDR5 as soon as the company was able. The order was said to have been given in the 4th quarter of 2024, and the price transition changed from a decrease to an increase in the middle of March 2025.. A wholesale conversion from DDR4 to DDR5 would probably be very expensive to perform, and would thus be unusual for a company that was focused on profitability. As a government-owned company, CXMT does not need to consistently turn a profit, and this was a factor in the government’s decision to suddenly switch from DDR4 to DDR5.


   > bid to benefit from higher prices
et tu 'law of supply and demand'?


Constrict the supply, and price goes up. It works like textbook economics.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting "et tu" here.

Or maybe you meant "free markets" instead. Modern RAM production requires enormous R&D expenses, and thus has huge moat, which means the oligopoly is pretty safe (at least in the short to medium term) from new entrants. They "just" need to keep each other in check because there will be an incentive to increase production by each individual participant.

I do like the "OMEC" name as a paralel for OPEC.


Old devices work just fine. I've upgraded my old iPhone XS last year to the latest and greatest 16 to see what changed (not much), the old one was still fast (in fact faster than a most upper-midrange Androids, its insane how much of a lead Apple has) and the battery was good. I considered selling it, but quickly had to realize it was worth almost nothing.

Also, when treated right, computers almost never break.

There's so much hand-me-down stuff, that are not much worse than the current stuff, that I think people even in the poorest countries can get an okay computer or smartphone (and most of them do).


Well the industries the most impacted by it are homelabbing/datacenters imo.

Like in current circumstances, its hard to get a homelab/datacenter so its better to postpone these plans for sometime

I agree with your statement overall but I feel like till the years that these ram shortages occur, there is a freeze of all companies providing vps's etc. ie. no new player can enter so I am a bit worried about those raising their prices as well honestly which will impact everyone of us as well for these few years in another form of AI tax


Bleh. I was already sad but I hadn't really thought about that specific impact, I can imagine smaller (read: small to big) VPS providers will be forced to raise prices while meta providers (read: AWS) can probably stomach the cost and eat even more of the market.


Exactly. I was thinking of building my own VPS provider on the pain points of development I felt and my father works in broadband business and has his own office and I was thinking of setting up a very small thing there almost the same hardware-alike of homelabbing

But the ram prices themselves are the reason I am forced to not enter this industry for the time being. I have decided right now to save my money for the time / focus on the job/college aspect of things to earn more so that when the timing is right, I would be able to invest my own money into it.

But basically Ram prices themselves are the thing which force us out of this market for the most part. I researched a lot about datacenters recently/ the rabbit hole and as previous hardware gets replaced/new hardware gets added/datacenters get expanded (whether they are a large company or small), I would expect an increase in prices mostly

This year, companies actually still took the cost but didn't want the market to panic so some black friday deals were good but I am not so sure about the next year or the next next year.

This will be a problem in my opinion for the next 1-3 or 4 years in my estimate

Also AWS is really on the more expensive side of things in the datacenters and they are immensely profitable so they can foot the bill while other datacenters (small or semi large) cant

So we will probably see a shift of companies towards using AWS and big cloud providers(GCP,AWS,azure) a bit more when we take all things into account which saddens me even more because I appreciate open web and this might take a hit.

We already see resentment towards these tri-fecta but we will see even more resentment as more and more people realize their roles / the impacts they cause and just overall, its my intuition that average person mostly hate big tech.

It's going to be a weird year in my opinion for this type of business and what it means for the average person.

Honestly for the time being, I genuinely recommend hetzner,upcloud,(netcup/ovh) and some others that I know from my time researching. I think that they are cheaper than aws usually while still being large enough that you don't worry about things too much and there is always lowendtalk if one's interested. Hope it helps but trust me, there is still hope as I talked to these hosting providers on forums like lowendtalk and It might help to support those people too since long term, an open web is the ideal.

Here is my list right now: hetzner's good if you want support + basic systems like simple compute etc. and dont want too much excess stuff

OVH's good: if you want other things than just compute and want more but their support is something which is of a mixed bag

Upcloud's good: if you want both of these things but they are just a bit more expensive if one wants to get large VPS's than the other options.

Netcup's good: Their payment processing was really painful that I had to go through but I think that one can find use case for them (I myself use netcup but although that's because they had a really steal deal once but I am not sure if I would recommend it if there are no deals)

There are some other services like exe.dev that I really enjoy as well and these services actually inspire me to learn more about these things and there are some very lovely people working in these companies.

There is still hope though. So never forget that. Its just a matter of time in my opinion that things get back normal hopefully so I think I am willing to wait till then since that's all we can do basically but overall, yea its a bit sad when I think about it too :<


Now here's someone who did their homework. Thank you.

We are now moving to a post human economy. When AGI automates all human labour, the consumer i.e. the bulk of humanity stops mattering (economically speaking). It then just becomes Mega corps run by machines making stuff for each other. Resources are then strictly priorities for the machines over everything else. We are seeing this movement already with silicon wafers and electricity.


You only get 80Gbps network bandwidth. There's your bottleneck right there. Infiniband in comparison can give you up to x10 times that.


I think the op meant pipeline parallelism where during inference you only transfer the activation between layers where you cut the model in two, which shouldn't be too large.


Probably compute isn’t enough to serve everyone from a frontier LLM.


More important for me is how you identify news sites, let alone 200k of them. Is there any online source that lists them? Or do you cherry pick them one by one?


It's a whole thing... I run a project called websitelaunches, so I have index of basically the whole internet (500M+) sites. I took the top ~200k news related sites from there that had rss feed.


And to add to the above, is there a list of the websites you use and any information on sampling methodology? Is it perfectly random or weighted? Do you trust the timestamp from an RSS feed?


Games eventually will move to consoles and the whole PC industry will take a huge hit.


I don't know if the term console even makes sense any more. It's a computer without a keyboard and mouse. And as soon as you do that, it's a PC. So I don't see how this makes any sense or will ever happen.


Actually, a console is worse than a PC. It's main reason for existence is to enforce DRM on the user to protect copyright/IP.


Consoles are increasingly becoming PCs, so I don't see this happening


console ram isn't magically cheaper


Because then the ISPs have to provide support on how to secure those devices.


I will say most of the time the ISPs themselves provide the routers at residential homes


Sure, but if they now go out and say do this and that to secure them a big portion of the users will have support issues. They don't understand the instruction, the pressed the wrong button, they entered the wrong value, all sorts of things could go wrong and the ISP has to dedicate resources in fixing it while they don't gain anything in return.


Most routers shipped by ISPs have remote management enabled, they can be reconfigured by the ISP themselves without having to involve the end user in the process.


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