Hacker News: KevinAiken

New comment by KevinAiken in "My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded"

KevinAiken — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:32:09 +0000

The GR Corolla isn't really the same as a Corolla. Different engine, drivetrain, brakes, wheels, exterior, interior, suspension, and more, all built to be a sports car.

It's also very highly acclaimed for being fun to drive, comparable with the other fast hatchbacks (Golf R, Honda Civic Type R, etc), and is pretty fast.

New comment by KevinAiken in "In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution"

KevinAiken — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 18:16:28 +0000

The article speaks to this as well, "Pricing led to a drop in pollution across the greater metropolitan area, according to the study, published in the journal npj Clean Air."

So while this was/is a common sentiment about congestion pricing, looks like it luckily didn't pan out.

New comment by KevinAiken in "Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)"

KevinAiken — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 14:55:22 +0000

I love "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian". It's a fantastic cookbook, especially if you don't have a lot of cooking experience.

New comment by KevinAiken in "Ask HN: Have you stopped reading books?"

KevinAiken — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 18:22:15 +0000

As long as I have books queued up on my kindle I'll read fiction pretty much every single night before going to sleep, and I really enjoy it. Books feel like they scratch an itch that's unrelated to any of the other mediums that involve reading. At the same time, I won't read anything that's not on my kindle, primarily because I read in the dark before falling asleep and the kindle is backlit.

If I run out of books to read on my Kindle I'll stop reading, sometimes for months until I have time to find books I'm interested in reading, buy/download them, find my now dead Kindle, charge it, and transfer the books to it. I love reading long fiction series in particular because I don't have to figure out what to read next.

New comment by KevinAiken in "Things I wish someone told me about getting a promotion"

KevinAiken — Thu, 13 May 2021 14:21:05 +0000

>You have to be performing at the next level for several months

I worked at a slow pace large US tech company and this was an absolutely critical part of being promoted, which could only happen during the one or two promotion cycles a year.

For a bit of context, this was a place where the best of the best during good years (so not the last year) may get promoted from a junior engineer to an engineer II in 2 years, so climbing was pretty slow.

New comment by KevinAiken in "World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)"

KevinAiken — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 15:52:00 +0000

Mollusks include Cephalopods like octopus and cuttlefish, which are on the higher side of the consciousness gradient.

New comment by KevinAiken in "America's True Unemployment Rate"

KevinAiken — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 14:06:33 +0000

I live in Metro Atlanta (midtown) without a car, and I don't find it too bad. I'm walking distance from work and various amenities. Grocery delivery and Lyft makes it a whole lot easier, and the ~150$ a month saved not owning a car gets you a lot of Lyft, or a rental car if needed.

Camping and visiting family is definitely a bit tricky though.

New comment by KevinAiken in "Ask HN: What is a better approach to interviewing?"

KevinAiken — Sat, 12 Sep 2020 21:01:08 +0000

I really liked one place I interviewed at that gave an option for the technical portion of the interview. You could choose a 4 hour homework, whiteboarding, or talking someone through a significant non-proprietary project of yours.

New comment by KevinAiken in "I don’t have time for coding challenges"

KevinAiken — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 22:37:25 +0000

I interviewed somewhere that offered 3 options for the technical part of the interview. The options were a take home assignment, whiteboarding, and walking the interviewer through a non-proprietary project. I thought that was a great way to make the interview process more fair.

New comment by KevinAiken in "Ask HN: Dell XPS 13/15 best developer laptop? Preparing for Black Friday"

KevinAiken — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 13:26:19 +0000

I bought a refurbed Dell XPS 15 9550 a little over a year ago. I love it. I run Ubuntu on it and I've yet to have any problems.

Only negatives are that the webcams in an odd place, the speakers are awful, and it's a bit heavy.

The only XPS competitor I considered was various comparable Thinkpad models. They have a very different look and keyboard feel, so it's really down to personal preference or what specific deals you can find. Older but still reliable Thinkpads can be incredibly inexpensive, and are also very easy to modify.

New comment by KevinAiken in "A slack bot, to automate your office using a Raspberry Pi"

KevinAiken — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 10:41:23 +0000

My very large company uses slack and Microsoft teams. Mostly engineers use slack, managers mostly use teams.

It's probably because of how much nicer slack is to use.

New comment by KevinAiken in "America’s sex recession could lead to an economic depression"

KevinAiken — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 18:33:25 +0000

Thought the sentence near the end about specifically AI having a strong effect on decreasing interest in sex was odd, seeing as basically none of the technology mentioned in the article is AI related.

New comment by KevinAiken in "Researchers identify sleep as a reason why personality traits predict longevity"

KevinAiken — Tue, 07 May 2019 17:55:39 +0000

I don't know what specific devices they may have had in mind, but one accessible way to track sleep is with a smartwatch.

I use a Huawei Watch 2, and it tracks pretty accurately from what I've seen. Other Wear OS devices are probably similar.