Hacker News: Konnstann

New comment by Konnstann in "Open Source Low Tech"

Konnstann — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:50:13 +0000

https://www.buffalobicycle.com/storage/documents/Buffalo_com...

The buffalo bike is one that was specifically made for developing nations and the project prioritizes local assembly and repair, while the bike is designed to sacrifice weight and aerodynamics, instead offering heavier-duty parts like thicker rims, puncture-proof tires, high-capacity racks, etc. This bike has two chains to reduce the likelihood of a critical failure and an internal coaster brake hub which is more robust to the elements.

Your average low-cost bike isn't intended to be used in environments with rough terrain and high contaminant concentrations without regular maintenance, and especially older bikes with things like cup and cone bearings which are more susceptible to dirt getting in, thinner tires which puncture more easily, and nonstandard bits and pieces like derailleur hangers which predate the UDH standard.

New comment by Konnstann in "The past was not that cute"

Konnstann — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 15:19:49 +0000

The immune response to diseases has to be developed over time, not to mention the fact that the introduction of those drugs drastically accelerated the evolution of the bacteria, viruses, etc. I can't speculate as to the health of hunter gatherer civilizations but modern diets and until recently the prevalence of antibacterial soaps and products in homes have definitely changed immune systems. Just look at covid, where in just a period of a few years the amount of infections due to other common diseases like influenza or strep have shot up due to kids not being exposed to germs during the lockdowns.

New comment by Konnstann in "Apparently my Samsung fridge has ads now"

Konnstann — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 21:01:54 +0000

The cheapie appliances are the ones that will be subsidized by the insane data collection policies, just like TVs are now.

New comment by Konnstann in "Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)"

Konnstann — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 18:41:32 +0000

The problem arises when there's outside pressure to use the tools, or now you're maintaining code written by someone else through the use of the tools, where it could have been good enough for them because they don't have to deal with downstream effects. At least that's been my negative experience with AI coding assistance. You could say "just get a new job" but unfortunately that's hard.

New comment by Konnstann in "Hacker News – The Good Parts"

Konnstann — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 15:25:08 +0000

The last libertarian post I saw wasn't getting downvoted and it was by a guy who wanted to set up meetings with cartels to improve the efficiency of their drug dealing business.

New comment by Konnstann in "What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on"

Konnstann — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 21:21:31 +0000

The causes of obesity in the US are well known and reported on, just not as "health" pieces. Food deserts, car-centric infrastructure, poor work-life balance, rising costs of groceries, low access to preventative screens. The only novel research in my opinion would deal with micro plastics and the effect they have on hormones.

New comment by Konnstann in "The collapse of the econ PhD job market"

Konnstann — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 20:57:46 +0000

You forgot about administrators, who are climbing in number relative to the number of students for no good reason.

New comment by Konnstann in "YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers"

Konnstann — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:21:31 +0000

A number of YouTubers have made the claim that their views were affected but not revenue, so it seems like the monetization is based on ad-watching views at least.

New comment by Konnstann in "The elegance of movement in Silksong"

Konnstann — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 13:45:00 +0000

Elden Ring is a great example of a game where the difficulty is largely self-imposed, if you play using all the tools the devs give you like summons, magic, certain weapons, etc the game becomes almost trivialized. Not saying that's a bad thing necessarily, in fact the opposite, I think FromSoft's "difficulty slider" replacement is one of the best ways of going about it, however I think the difficulty overall is overstated by the "real souls players" who hamper themselves so as to experience all of the mechanics.

New comment by Konnstann in "Major rule about cooking meat turns out to be wrong"

Konnstann — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 01:28:00 +0000

If you sous vide for a long time, the entirety of the steak will be at the same temperature, while pan searing cooks the outside to a higher temperature than the inside, which results in the core temperature going up a few degrees during resting.

New comment by Konnstann in "Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars"

Konnstann — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 18:21:19 +0000

The income inequality in Norway is roughly half that of the US, and the quality of life of the bottom income bracket is much higher there, due to social policies. Why lie about things that can easily be looked up?

New comment by Konnstann in "Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs"

Konnstann — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:27:53 +0000

When I first started my current job I was upset that I'd have to pay $20/paycheck to get some unknown level of benefits, which comes out to around $500/year but all I had to do to understand the benefit was compare my health insurance premium to someone working a non-union gig for the same employer and realize that they're paying a way higher percentage of the monthly premium than I was. Not to mention that the union provides guaranteed unemployment benefits if you get laid off and help finding jobs, transportation funds, childcare funds, and guaranteed me a salary increase this year when the employer has declared a freeze on raises for non-union positions. I agree there should be more advertising on the part of the union with regards to benefits but they are pretty obvious if you do any reading.

A lot of the benefits my union provides might not matter to the average HN user making $X00,000/yr though so who knows?

New comment by Konnstann in "AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected"

Konnstann — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:55:25 +0000

Depending on your definition of AI, a pipeline for drug repurposing my team used was able to identify a therapeutic for a rare disease that was beating the state of the art in every test they threw at it, eventually being given orphan drug designation by the FDA. I doubt this would have happened without machine learning or AI or whatever you want to call it.

I'm also against "agents as scientists" as a concept for numerous reasons, but deep learning etc has or is leading to breakthroughs.

New comment by Konnstann in "Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp"

Konnstann — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 22:35:41 +0000

YouTube is mostly there as an advertisement tool nowadays, once you get any amount of an audience youtube revenue becomes a small piece of your income compared to things like Patreon, live streaming elsewhere, and even alternative hosting sources like floatplane or Nebula where creators will host exclusive content.

New comment by Konnstann in "'Shoe doping' changed marathon times in ways we still don't understand"

Konnstann — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 15:12:54 +0000

I thought cycling competitions have a minimum weight/aero limit specifically to prevent people from buying their way to better times past a certain point? Is that not the case?

New comment by Konnstann in "After Learning Her TA Would Be Paid More Than She Was, This Lecturer Quit"

Konnstann — Fri, 24 May 2024 20:30:17 +0000

Anecdotal data from the grad programs in my area is that at least for PhD students your supervisor pays their tuition from whatever funding source they use to pay the stipend.

New comment by Konnstann in "YouTube Cuts 100 Employees as Tech Layoffs Continue"

Konnstann — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 23:00:40 +0000

Sponsorblock is good enough on pretty much every channel I watch, including skipping intro/outros, might want to check that out.

New comment by Konnstann in "Generalized K-Means Clustering"

Konnstann — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 03:30:23 +0000

I've used something similar for tissue segmentation from hyperspectral images of animals where I know there should be K different tissue types I care about.

New comment by Konnstann in "The dark side of social media on youth mental health"

Konnstann — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 01:30:30 +0000

Psychologists aren't doctors, just people with phds in psychology. Clinical psychologists might have some version of the oath though.

New comment by Konnstann in "Los Angeles police flights cost $3k an hour, audit finds"

Konnstann — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 15:53:11 +0000

The biggest issue in the article I found wasn't the actual expense of the flights but rather the wanton use of helicopters for non-essential matters like ferrying officials to meetings to avoid traffic. They quote some figure like 2 helicopters flying 20 hours a day every day, which sounds insane.