Hacker News: akgoel

New comment by akgoel in "Ti-84 Evo"

akgoel — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:44:01 +0000

You don't. Most academic uses are now replaced by desmos, which is also used on the SAT. It's free, it's fast, and it does most of what you need.

New comment by akgoel in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

akgoel — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:14:08 +0000

In a Copilot world, Notepad is now meant to render Copilot output, which LLMs do a good job of spitting out Markdown.

New comment by akgoel in "Painless Software Schedules (2000)"

akgoel — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:33:47 +0000

The stackoverflow investors (Prosus) have licensed their data to the AI companies for training. They are most likely doing fine.

New comment by akgoel in "Autodesk's John Walker Explained HP and IBM in 1991 (2015)"

akgoel — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 19:13:21 +0000

We have something similar with tariffs. We pass them through to the client, and they show up as revenue and expenses like this Autodesk example.. But, we immediately deduct the tariff expense from the tariff revenue above the gross revenue line, so Gross Revenue is not affected.

New comment by akgoel in "California needs to learn from Houston and Dallas about homelessness"

akgoel — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 14:11:18 +0000

Yes, it takes me 60 minutes to go 45 miles when I cross the extremes of the city. Oh noes! How far does the red line go in Boston and how long does that take?

New comment by akgoel in "California needs to learn from Houston and Dallas about homelessness"

akgoel — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 14:09:49 +0000

It’s not quite true that we have no codes, but you wouldn’t come here and find some hell hole of mixed industrial and residential. Land prices really do dictate use.

New comment by akgoel in "Why do some gamers invert their controls?"

akgoel — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 22:36:16 +0000

For me, it was Wing Commander

New comment by akgoel in "MAGA declares war on the property tax"

akgoel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 21:38:27 +0000

Texas also has a business wealth tax, known as business personal property tax. All assets that a business owns are subject to the tax (with exemptions for farmers and ranchers...). This means that high capital factories on small plots of land also pay tax on their capital.

New comment by akgoel in "GPT-5: It just does stuff"

akgoel — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 18:11:00 +0000

I've come to realize that asking an LLM to do something that a purpose-built software program can already do is a mistake. Instead, the LLM must be an agent for that computer program.

Therefore, the correct prompt is "write a python program to count the number of letters in a word, and then use it to count the number of Rs in strawberry".

New comment by akgoel in "Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers"

akgoel — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:14:18 +0000

On a recent Odd Lots episode, they interviewed a Canadian lentil farmer. His claim was that a family of 3 (Father, Mother, Daughter) could farm 1200 acres of lentils with time left over due to modern automation.

So I guess it would depend on the automation level of the kind of crops you’re planting.

New comment by akgoel in "Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress"

akgoel — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 15:08:41 +0000

I’ve tried to switch to Linux and Mac several times over the past 30 years. And once I get it in front of me, I’m struck with a feeling of “now what?”. All that effort and no upside.

New comment by akgoel in "Microplastics shed by food packaging are contaminating our food, study finds"

akgoel — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 13:37:28 +0000

I grew up in a world where there was broken glass bottles everywhere - in parking lots, in playgrounds, on the street. I've never seen that externality of broken glass calculated.

New comment by akgoel in "AMC Theatres will screen a Swedish movie 'visually dubbed' with the help of AI"

akgoel — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 22:00:41 +0000

Man, this is so much better than many Bollywood movies that are re-dubbed. When the actors go back to the sound studio to re-record their lines, they don't match up with their lips exactly, and it can be off-putting.

New comment by akgoel in "May 5, Microsoft's Skype will shut down for good"

akgoel — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 15:32:35 +0000

It was a p2p phone and video call app that Microsoft purchased when mobile phones started to take off. Phones cannot participate in a p2p network the same way a desktop can, so it had to be re-architected to use central servers, and they never got it to work the same after that.

New comment by akgoel in "The deep roots of Americans' hatred of their health care system"

akgoel — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 16:54:43 +0000

I hear this all the time, and I somewhat disagree. The problem is that unhealthy people do not want to pay the full amount of their risk-adjusted rate into the risk-pool. Therefore, they need healthy people to subsidize them. It makes sense that pooling a group of employees together would be uncorrelated to health status, and would therefore make a good proxy for a risk-pool.

New comment by akgoel in "Reverse-engineering a three-axis attitude indicator from the F-4 fighter plane"

akgoel — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 19:58:57 +0000

The F35 is not meant to be a dogfighter. If it has gotten shot such that the control screen in unusable, something else has gone wrong.

New comment by akgoel in "Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner"

akgoel — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 15:23:01 +0000

We have a joint checking account. I automatically draw our investments to our joint Fidelity account.

I try to keep a balance of $50k in our checking account (it's a minimum that our bank sets to give us perks and a free safety deposit box). At the end of the month, if we over that, my partner knows that we can splurge on dining, vacations, or other stuff. If we are under that, we tighten our spending for a bit until we are back over it.

I tried all sorts of budgeting and tracking ideas, but most just weren't worth the effort.

New comment by akgoel in "Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands"

akgoel — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 20:36:19 +0000

Everyone already knows that diet and exercise are "the" solution to obesity, and yet it keeps getting worse.

New comment by akgoel in "Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands"

akgoel — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 20:34:54 +0000

When I was on Ozempic, I just didn't want the milkshake. It rewires all reward centers.

New comment by akgoel in "Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC"

akgoel — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:58:11 +0000

Passphrase in a bank safe deposit box.