Hacker News: Avalaxy

New comment by Avalaxy in "France pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain"

Avalaxy — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:37:59 +0000

The netherlands as a whole should do this. Not just holland.

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

Avalaxy — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:02:01 +0000

Does anyone here still have television? Ever since I moved out of my parents house (15 years ago), I never had a TV subscription. I did own a TV screen, but only to run apps like Netflix and Youtube. I'd rather have a simple monitor without the TV options to do so, but strangely that never existed or was too expensive.

Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years.

New comment by Avalaxy in "EU moves to ease 2035 ban on internal combustion cars"

Avalaxy — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:24:45 +0000

Absolutely ridiculously unambitious plan. I thought the 2035 deadline was already void of any ambition or urgency. Imho it should have been 2030 or earlier... Every single year counts, we are past several tipping points already. We don't have the luxury to sit on our hands for another 10+ years, as much as people would love to close theirs eyes and pretend that all of this isn't really happening...

Databricks Is Raising Funds at $134B Valuation

Avalaxy — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:52:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/databricks-is-raising-funds-at-134-billion-valuation-4a2efaea

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288489

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by Avalaxy in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

Avalaxy — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:59:44 +0000

I spent 2014 to 2016 working on crypto. I built crypto apps for a lot of companies, including some that are very very big now. Back then, I really believed in crypto. But after the Xth crypto bubble popping, I gave up. So much time had passed, and nothing was changing (for the better). Banks were NEVER going to adopt this (at least not any blockchain that the general public can profit from) and it would NOT dramatically transform the financial system the way I thought.

I had a ton of bitcoins and ethereum. I even bought ethereum in the presale. Present day value would have been around 5 million euros. But I sold it all back then, because I saw that crypto was never going to make a significant impact.

It turned out, I was right. Most of the bitcoin ATMs disappeared, most webshops stopped accepting it, it plays almost no role at all in the financial world. But I overlooked one major factor: the value of these cryptos isn't based on anything else than thin air. People are willing to pump anything as long as they can personally profit from it. And yes, the famous saying applies here: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I saw the fundamentals correctly, but the sentiment wrong.

Databricks in talks to raise capital at above $130B valuation

Avalaxy — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:17:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/business/databricks-talks-raise-capital-130-billion-valuation-information-reports-2025-11-18/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968220

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by Avalaxy in "Ryanair tries forcing app downloads by eliminating paper boarding passes"

Avalaxy — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:14:36 +0000

The elderly had more than a decade to learn how to use a phone.

New comment by Avalaxy in "Ticker: Don't die of heart disease"

Avalaxy — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 12:52:53 +0000

You can order all blood tests you want online in NL. E.g. bloedwaardentest.nl, mijnlabtest.nl, perfectlab.nl. But it isn't cheap so you need to know what to test for to keep the price reasonable.

New comment by Avalaxy in "Ticker: Don't die of heart disease"

Avalaxy — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 16:53:49 +0000

Funnily enough, the things you can do to prevent stroke line up entirely with the things you can do to avoid heart disease.

New comment by Avalaxy in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

Avalaxy — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 08:31:37 +0000

That didn't hold true for Intel, which once had a monopoly.

New comment by Avalaxy in "Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high"

Avalaxy — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 21:05:09 +0000

Why not? That's what Grad-CAM is for right?

New comment by Avalaxy in "Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel"

Avalaxy — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:57:59 +0000

Why would there be?

New comment by Avalaxy in "Immunotherapy drug clinical trial results: half of tumors shrink or disappear"

Avalaxy — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 22:25:19 +0000

I'm so sorry for your loss :(

New comment by Avalaxy in "China is eating the world"

Avalaxy — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 17:14:51 +0000

I would love to NOT have those chains in my country. Especially mac donalds, I associate with trash. Both trashy people, as well as literal trash laying on the streets.

New comment by Avalaxy in "I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains"

Avalaxy — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:34:38 +0000

This actually killed my motivation to do some of my side project ideas. I would spend a lot of time writing very good specifications, setting everything up for succes by really finetuning my prompting and context, but then the AI would output something that looks impresssive but is completely full of mistakes. And it would take SO many tries to make the AI fix it, but every time it creates more and more bloat, and introduce more and more issues. Until the point I decide to throw away everything the AI produced, and try it from scratch again with a different prompt.

Eventually I spent so much time trying to make it work, only to remain empty-handed.

New comment by Avalaxy in "One diet soda a day increases type 2 diabetes risk by 38%"

Avalaxy — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 09:00:00 +0000

> Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad. A healthy person would just pick soda sweetened by sugar.

What a bizarre statement. I have no health problems and will always pick the 'zero' variant of any soda, because to me it tastes exactly the same, but minus all the calories.

New comment by Avalaxy in "I drank every cocktail"

Avalaxy — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:00:35 +0000

> A bartender uses copious amounts of ice. It's for a reason.

$$$$$$$$$

New comment by Avalaxy in "Largest piece of Mars on Earth fetches $5.3M at auction"

Avalaxy — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 15:42:20 +0000

> It had a very noticable, distinct smell.

The smell of people's hands touching it repeatedly?

New comment by Avalaxy in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2025)"

Avalaxy — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:38:24 +0000

SEEKING WORK | Amsterdam / Remote

Experienced (15 years) Data Engineer with a background in software engineering (BSc) and data science (MSc). I know all the ins and outs of building data pipelines, integrating various systems, preparing data for machine learning and deploying ML models. I also very much enjoy helping the customer brainstorm and coming up with a lean approach to reaching your goals.

Technologies I'm most familiar with include Python, C#, SQL, Azure, Spark, Databricks, DBT, Postgres.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoncullens/

Email: leoncullens@gmail.com

New comment by Avalaxy in "Ask HN: Using AI daily but not seeing productivity gains – is it just me?"

Avalaxy — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 07:19:13 +0000

Interesting read! My personal experience with Cursor aligns with this. The initial result of my prompt was stunningly good, but adjusting the code afterwards was not a great time. It also aligns with the software 3.0 concept pitched by Andrej Karpathy, making the english language (or other natural language) the new 'code'.