Hacker News: IneffablePigeon

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Recreate famous water profiles using supermarket bottled water"

IneffablePigeon — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:12:02 +0000

I always thought this was baloney but James Hoffman’s recent video where he steamed water with the steam wand instead of boiling it normally for an americano changed my mind. I tried it and it was a genuinely different tasting drink. Not sure what causes it but different dissolved gases seems plausible.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions"

IneffablePigeon — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:23:13 +0000

I had been paying monthly for 13 years straight and they still demanded a cancellation fee because it turned out I was on an annual commitment (which by the way they hiked the price of by 50% with a month’s notice and by the time you notice the larger payment go out you are in a whole new 12 months).

So yes, I complained about that.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"

IneffablePigeon — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:44:36 +0000

Looks, no need for bird caging to stop nests underneath the panels, and I don’t believe it is particularly more expensive if you do it when replacing the whole roof. It’s more expensive if you don’t want to replace your roof.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"

IneffablePigeon — Sun, 17 May 2026 05:50:19 +0000

The middle ground is integrated solar panels, where you have normal sized panels but they are flush with the rest of the roof and there are no tiles underneath them. There are normal tiles surrounding the panels. This is the style I tend to see now for new builds, but it’s more expensive than just layering on the panels if your roof is already in good shape.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "UK Fuel Price Intelligence – Market analytics from reporting stations"

IneffablePigeon — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:42:12 +0000

Baffled that there is now a fuel price API and yet there is no such electric charger price API

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "iOS 27 is adding a 'Create a Pass' button to Apple Wallet"

IneffablePigeon — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:28:28 +0000

Yeah I had to turn that off when I lived near the train station.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "1966 Ford Mustang Converted into a Tesla with Working 'Full Self-Driving'"

IneffablePigeon — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:25:53 +0000

Aero is driving a lot of EV design choices yes but it’s not as much of a limitation as you are implying - see the Ioniq 5, Cybertruck, F150 lightning or any of Rivian’s vehicles for examples where they’ve traded a bit of range for a boxier, less aero shape (admittedly often with _some_ rounded corners still).

It’s a trade off most manufacturers are not making because the US market is _so_ range conscious but I think it is fairly small margins we’re talking.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys"

IneffablePigeon — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:17:41 +0000

Thank you for putting into words what I dislike about that refrain so eloquently. It’s a cop out.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

IneffablePigeon — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:24:01 +0000

Well yes, hydro and geothermal are the easiest (and earliest perfected) renewable sources to provide consistent base load. It would be odd if the first countries to achieve fully renewable power weren’t making use of those technologies.

Other countries will have to be more reliant on interconnects, diverse renewable mixes and batteries. Luckily this is now almost always cheaper and more secure than fossil fuels and the trend lines point towards that continuing to be more and more true over time.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "NHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns"

IneffablePigeon — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:13:42 +0000

You can absolutely see a GP you’re not registered with if you are travelling and need to. I have done it multiple times. I have been offered it same or next day after calling 111.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Sodium-ion EV battery breakthrough delivers 11-min charging and 450 km range"

IneffablePigeon — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:13:29 +0000

This article is about a sodium-ion battery which is a different chemistry to the one BYD claimed those results on (that was LFP).

Sodium-ion is exciting because it has the potential to have less degradation over time, much less sensitivity to cold and less reliance on rare earth metals. Could also end up significantly cheaper. However it has struggled to reach the same energy densities and so hasn’t been practical thus far.

This seems like a big step towards it being a practical technology choice for certain models, if it bears out.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars"

IneffablePigeon — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 14:57:25 +0000

This “nobody cycles in bad weather” is a tired myth. Yes, there’s some truth in it but cycling numbers past the traffic counters in my city in the UK (very similar climate) dip by 10-30% in winter months, and the higher end of those is mostly leisure routes not commuting ones. The Netherlands has a lot of rain and much more cycling than most other places.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Supply-chain attack using invisible code hits GitHub and other repositories"

IneffablePigeon — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:36:11 +0000

A linter that disallows any code that uses eval in any form seems like a good start to me.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Lock Scroll with a Vengeance"

IneffablePigeon — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:47:54 +0000

Except the other examples used to work like Apple’s and have switched to the scroll locked implementation.

I think I prefer that mode to be honest, because it leaves you in a consistent place for up/down to take you to instead of it potentially depending where your selection is in the row.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "The first sodium-ion battery EV is a winter range monster"

IneffablePigeon — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:09:16 +0000

Because batteries are still expensive, this is a tough sell for most of the market. You would be removing lots of things that most buyers associate with more luxury cars, but not actually saving much of the cost and therefore not reducing the price that much.

I think (hope) this niche will start to make a comeback as the underlying tech continues to get cheaper. You are starting to see glimmers of it in the low low end with some micromobility cars in Europe just providing phone holders instead of screens.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed"

IneffablePigeon — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:43:51 +0000

The legionella thing is a little overblown fwiw. 50 degrees is perfectly adequate, and you can go lower with very little risk if you set it to briefly bump up to 60 every week or two. Even that is not hugely necessary in a domestic setting.

https://www.heatgeek.com/articles/legionella-and-water-tempe...

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Parasites plagued Roman soldiers at Hadrian's Wall"

IneffablePigeon — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:43:39 +0000

My partner researches one parasite named in this study (a type of whipworm) and they actually get their eggs for in vitro work from another researcher abroad who infected himself with the parasite because he finds it helps with his autoimmune disease. He harvests the eggs and distributes them to other teams.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?"

IneffablePigeon — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 20:58:20 +0000

Road bikes are reasonably standard. Tubes will generally fit some range of tyre sizes so in practice a single size will fit most road bikes.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted"

IneffablePigeon — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:48:53 +0000

I too am irritated by their software but they do make nice hardware. I’d have their headphones if I trusted their software, the hardware is perfect IMO. Open and upgradable is not really their forte though.

New comment by IneffablePigeon in "Creating an all-weather driver"

IneffablePigeon — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 09:20:57 +0000

What learnings? Google maps can’t even reliably tell me what lane to be in for the next junction, or what the speed limit of the current road is.