Hacker News: Vrondi

New comment by Vrondi in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

Vrondi — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:48:43 +0000

By mis-identifying them, leading to 5 months of jail time for a person who has done nothing other than be in public. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/us/north-dakota-facial-re...

New comment by Vrondi in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

Vrondi — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:40:02 +0000

The people writing the AI agents are being paid by the insurance companies.

New comment by Vrondi in "Ryugu asteroid samples contain all DNA and RNA building blocks"

Vrondi — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:27:48 +0000

Comets is where many astronomers have long thought the ocean came from. Comets are literal drops in our ocean. LOTS of comets. The atmosphere and the Earth at large would have been very different, and being bombarded by many giant space snowballs (along with asteroids) would have contributed materials. The missing part is, um, missing. We still do not know. However, these samples contained building blocks, not actual self-replicating RNA. That might seem like nothing, but before this discovery, we thought they only contained one ingredient.

New comment by Vrondi in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

Vrondi — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:36:15 +0000

I think the fact that most Americans call it "Charlie Brown" when the name of it is actually "Peanuts" proves you wrong.

New comment by Vrondi in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"

Vrondi — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:17:29 +0000

But I have 90s t-shirts that are just now dying after all these years of being dried only in an electric dryer, and other t-shirts just a few years old that are disintegrating. There's definitely been a quality change in the average shirt.

New comment by Vrondi in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"

Vrondi — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:14:04 +0000

Along these lines, watch these two videos from Bernadette Banner to learn how to identify fabric types and learn how to identify quality features in clothing:

https://youtu.be/qtJ5ukWundY?si=xzOyiwrrt8oTgpii

https://youtu.be/fuVU64m1sbw?si=5reXwGwVu2j5pTL1

New comment by Vrondi in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"

Vrondi — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:11:09 +0000

Supima Cotton t-shirts from Lands End are great. Or, "100% Pima Cotton" from anyone else.

New comment by Vrondi in "What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?"

Vrondi — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 17:49:34 +0000

Well, the author in the article is in the US, posting about behavior they experience in the US, so it really isn't that surprising.

New comment by Vrondi in "What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?"

Vrondi — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 17:44:29 +0000

But, OP was not in a public space.

New comment by Vrondi in "What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?"

Vrondi — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 17:42:56 +0000

The the author of the article wasn't in a public area, but in a private area at a private event, perhaps model release forms are a really good idea for participants.

New comment by Vrondi in "Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI"

Vrondi — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 20:36:33 +0000

It isn't you. None of those answers are correct. Sociology studies societies and cultures; collective behaviors at different scales within different niches, etc. It's an LLM hallucinating again.

New comment by Vrondi in "A failure of security systems at PayPal is causing concern for German banks"

Vrondi — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 21:13:18 +0000

At the time PayPal rolled out, the single feature that made it popular in the USA is that it provided eBay sellers an easy/cheap way to receive credit card payments from buyers. That is all. Any person could set up a PayPal and instantly start receiving credit card payments without setting up a vendor account with a credit card company (which was not trivial at that time).

New comment by Vrondi in "Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole"

Vrondi — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 20:22:23 +0000

You're missing the part where the robot was created by us.

New comment by Vrondi in "Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?"

Vrondi — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 19:03:51 +0000

Kobo is generally excellent. Usually if there's a hardware problem, it's visible out of the box, and you can exchange it immediately. Then, you're good for years, usually. The recently available color e-ink screens come with a couple of caveats (no matter what brand reader they are in). The background color is more gray when compared to previous black and white/grayscale e-ink screens (some compare the experience to reading a color newspaper). The second caveat is that at this time, color content renders at a lower dpi than black and white content does on a color/Kaleido e-ink screen.

New comment by Vrondi in "Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?"

Vrondi — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 18:48:53 +0000

It did increase for a while, and then when Chromebooks came out, schools started using those instead of real computers, because it saved a ton of money. So, the students have only been taught to use Google Docs/Sheets/etc. for years now, and no actual computer literacy. Some can write code, but can't find their own homework file. It's crazy, but we stopped teaching them this stuff, so most don't know it.

New comment by Vrondi in "Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?"

Vrondi — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 18:41:17 +0000

During that 10 years, inflation happened. Covid supply chain issues happened. Now, tariff uncertainty is happening. At the same time, the screen resolution of these devices has increased, the refresh rates have gotten faster, etc. Yes, even a "plain black and white" e-ink screen has slowly had tech improvements. So really, the price staying the same or going up a little is pretty expected. Most also have more other features now than 10 years ago.

New comment by Vrondi in "Younger generations less likely to have dementia, study suggests"

Vrondi — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 18:34:47 +0000

Not just antibiotics to consider along this line of thought. We historically had a higher load of parasites. Far more of the population had some amount of parasites more of the time. Things like sewer systems/sanitation/clean drinking water/bathing and personal hygiene/wearing shoes/not having piles of animal feces all over the streets. That all changed the amount of exposure to parasites for the common person. We know it affected our immune systems (overall rates of allergies increased). We do not know how it affected our brains. Makes intuitive sense that it must apply to bacteria as well. Before foods were pasteurized (and before refrigeration), for example, we were exposed to more dietary sources for bacteria, both beneficial and non-beneficial.

New comment by Vrondi in "The Who Cares Era"

Vrondi — Wed, 28 May 2025 17:45:18 +0000

Nobody talks about "life in the 22nd century" in the way they talked about "life in the 21st century" in recent decades, because for the past 24 years we've been at the _beginning_ of a century. Once we get halfway through the 21st century, the talk about "life in the 22nd century" will really ramp up.

New comment by Vrondi in "Self hosted FLOSS fitness/workout tracker"

Vrondi — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:59:36 +0000

To make it super easy to use the same "program" on your smartphone/tablet/laptop/desktop, wherever you are. And/or to simultaneously share access to it with friends/family. Yes, you can all just point a local app at a data share instead (the old way), but many apps aren't available across all these platforms to even make this possible across iOS, OSX, Linux, Android, and Windows, so this often doesn't work for a group of more than two people.

New comment by Vrondi in "How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed"

Vrondi — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:55:06 +0000

The fascinating thing is that the political right largely prefers ICE vehicles in the USA. This is a combination of factors, like more rural voters who need more range/work more blue collar jobs/haul firewood/etc. Combined with a personality type that is more cautious about change. And also, the insane prices for things like Teslas here. Perhaps Musk's close association with President Trump will gain him a small number of new rich fans on the political right, but most common Americans in most of the country aren't even considering a Tesla to begin with, and it's the majority of folks with lower incomes that put Trump back in office this time.