Hacker News: CraigRo

New comment by CraigRo in "Asbestos found in children's play sand sold in UK"

CraigRo — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:25:19 +0000

Sounds like the risk is negligible, and kids will be denied the opportunity to play with this stuff.

Win for the lawyers

New comment by CraigRo in "Tested: 1981 Datsun 280ZX Turbo (1981)"

CraigRo — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 08:12:09 +0000

You can get a Nissan Pathfinder or a Honda Odyssey minivan with automatic 6 cylinder engines, faster performance, better gas mileage, and room for an entire family

New comment by CraigRo in "New bill would revive single-room occupancy apartments in NYC"

CraigRo — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 22:50:31 +0000

Challenge is that NYC regulates the operation of sros so much that you'd have to be insane to build them under the current rules.

Kind of a shame, as lots of people basically just want a room to sleep in and a place to sit

New comment by CraigRo in "Two long-lost organ pieces by JavaScript Bach performed for first time"

CraigRo — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:30:04 +0000

Can't wait until they find new pieces by C++P= Bach!

New comment by CraigRo in "It's Mainframes All the Way Down"

CraigRo — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:49:16 +0000

I've done migrations off my. Savings were 8+ figures/year, so worth it, but, the application didn't have a lot of development. Several companies tried and failed; in addition to all the issues described, you find random bugs in the source coffee that just happen to work.

Cobol also has goto statementsv and unions, which lend themselves to really hard to follow code.

New comment by CraigRo in "Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society"

CraigRo — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 01:12:47 +0000

When banks created derivatives that could only be fairly valued by the bank, with 5% profit margins built in, it got them a trip to Congress.

SGPs have margins that would make options traders blush and were sold to people with no financial sophistication whatsoever. These things turn your phone into a vampire, and have no socially redeeming value. Please ban them!

New comment by CraigRo in "Hertz' AI System That Scans for "Damage" on Cars Is Turning into a Disaster"

CraigRo — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 10:57:55 +0000

Cue the class action lawsuits

New comment by CraigRo in "Vienna has been declared a renters' utopia – here's why"

CraigRo — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 11:15:59 +0000

So the mostly poorer half subsidize the rich through employment taxes

New comment by CraigRo in "21 Day Experiment #2 – No Sugar"

CraigRo — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:28:45 +0000

8# is not unusual for a new low carb diet. 2-3 of fat loss plus a lot of water due to ketosis

New comment by CraigRo in "AMC Says It Will Show More Ads Before Movies"

CraigRo — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 04:17:29 +0000

Company is in dire financial straits and depends on selling stock and subscriptions to super fans. So why not extract more revenue from them?

New comment by CraigRo in "Wyze just built a camera into a light bulb, and it only costs $50"

CraigRo — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:53:29 +0000

You can also get an Edison screw to nema base and stick a USB adapter in it and use that to power a camera for about the same price

New comment by CraigRo in "Banks will "maybe" be done with COBOL in ten years"

CraigRo — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 16:31:53 +0000

Theres a whole mainframe ecosystem of schedulers, databases, disk formats, batches, 3270 screens etc that are hard to replace piecemeal

New comment by CraigRo in "Why Exchange Rebate Tiers Are Anti-Competitive"

CraigRo — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 02:24:14 +0000

Written by someone who stands to gain, but the argument is still good

New comment by CraigRo in "School phone bans do not improve grades or wellbeing, says UK study"

CraigRo — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 19:53:06 +0000

One school that did this reported more face to face time. Unfortunately they used it to gamble on poker games, so I'm not sure it improved well-being

New comment by CraigRo in "It takes 3k sheep to maintain solar panels on rural land"

CraigRo — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 03:25:38 +0000

Make mutton great again

New comment by CraigRo in "Uber will need to fingerprint drivers in California to transport teens"

CraigRo — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 22:35:44 +0000

This is terrible. Taxis don't require fingerprints.

This drives up the cost of providing a service for a population that doesn't have much money to begin with. It is ostensibly safer, but that value has not been quantified. On the margin, it will encourage kids to take less safe forms of transit (e.g. drunk friend) due to higher costs and reduced availability.

New comment by CraigRo in "Why is European productivity so poor and how can it be improved?"

CraigRo — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:24:30 +0000

Very rigid labor markets combined with high marginal tax rates and generous subsidies for the young. If you are ambitious, you channel your energies into non commerical things, emigrate, or quickly realize that making 2x what your friends make doesn't actually improve your quality of life

New comment by CraigRo in "New York City Council Votes to End Broker Fees Squeezing Renters"

CraigRo — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:44:46 +0000

Tenants have more money, and there are more tenants who now qualify who might not have already saved up for a broker fee. I'm sure landlords have factored this in.

New comment by CraigRo in "New York City Council Votes to End Broker Fees Squeezing Renters"

CraigRo — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:43:37 +0000

Tenants will have more cash each month. Tenants bid up rents to the point of affordability, and they'll become more affordable. Furthermore, there will be more would-be tenants b/c you don't need to save up a for a broker fee -- as long as your income is high enough, you can get a unit, at least in theory. So more competition....

New comment by CraigRo in "New York City Council Votes to End Broker Fees Squeezing Renters"

CraigRo — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:39:31 +0000

Most people here don't realize that there are two different markets:

1) Free market apartments: with tenants not having to pay broker fees up front, LLs can and will come up with workarounds. E.g. 'move-in-fee' of 5k or a 'move-out' fee. They will be able to charge more, especially on renewal leases.

2) Rent regulated apartments: LLs can't play those games, but they can say 'only available if you hire such and such a broker', or they might only list the apartments on a website that operates on a subscription basis where they get a cut somehow. Or, at the margins, this is a significant cost for money-losing units, so they might just add those units to the list of units permanently off the market.

I do expect brokerage fees to decline somewhat, and this may affect pricing for streeteasy and zillow and the other advertising portals, but this is not going to be a huge change, and is going to hurt a bunch of low-income tenants.