Hacker News: arh5451

New comment by arh5451 in "Swiss AI Initiative (2023)"

arh5451 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:40:56 +0000

Because german is hard.

New comment by arh5451 in "5NF and Database Design"

arh5451 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:43:28 +0000

i like it but i find the writing style difficult to read.

New comment by arh5451 in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

arh5451 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:48:37 +0000

1. Unions - Police unions wield considerable financial and political power. They hold local governments hostage demanding higher worker protections for officers and larger pensions and benefits. - To offset these higher costs, departments have been mandated to become "revenue sources" by collecting more tickets, arresting more peoples, etc. --> The affected peoples are usually the ones of least advantage, illegal immigrants, low income, and others who are unlikely to be able to afford a defense. - Higher union protections proctect bad cops, who in many cases are simply repremanded or move to another town, different department. In many cases after committing capital crimes. 2. Recruiting - Previously police were recrutied from local communities and for their amicability, ability to defuse situations/work within the community as a member. Now increasingly military background, weapon training, or other prerequisites are sought; whereby the purpose of these trainings is to kill other people not diffuse situations. 3. Media Influences - U.S. media is extremely culpable of painting all police officers as killers and mobsters. This is a very small minority. 4. Law Enforcement Support Office - The D.O.D. began a program of distributing military hardware to police departments across the U.S. nearly for free. Causing absolutely ludicrous scenes of tiny police departments having armoured vehicles and drones.

New comment by arh5451 in "Big data on the cheapest MacBook"

arh5451 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:11:40 +0000

I agree and disagree, the benefit with cloud is you "don't need to manage it", it scales automatically, redundancy, and automatic backups etc. I do think you are right; in the future there will be more infrastructure as code as cost pressures become more obvious.

New comment by arh5451 in "Sizing chaos"

arh5451 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:45:21 +0000

Im interested to understand what is the reasoning for using the median and not average. I'm assuming the population is likely a perfect bell curve (more or less) in which case median would represent a higher waist size than using the average. This would seem to invalidate much of the presented thesis. I appreciate the detailed analysis of body shape, I think it is quite interesting.

New comment by arh5451 in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

arh5451 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:17:23 +0000

Thank you for the really excellent summation. I echo your thought 1 to 1. I have found it more difficult to learn new languages or coding skills, because I am no longer forced to go through the painful slow grind of learning.

New comment by arh5451 in "Overtourism in Japan, and how it hurts small businesses"

arh5451 — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 13:55:15 +0000

I'll agree certain locations are getting "instagram famous" and really ruining it for the locals, but I don't think they are worse off because of it. Just let people flock to the one picture spot, they did it before social media, and now there are just more of them, nothing new here.

New comment by arh5451 in "Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system"

arh5451 — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 13:30:10 +0000

Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.

New comment by arh5451 in "Changes since congestion pricing started in New York"

arh5451 — Thu, 15 May 2025 08:51:05 +0000

Agreed, this article is a love letter to congestion charges. My guess is that nearly nothing has changed and will change. The fact is that the public transit systems are simply unable to modernise and Union Labor makes it next to impossible to make changes.

When I bought a NJTransit when I started working a monthly ride card for a 1hr commute cost $500/month approximately. The same commute with a car was 45 minutes and fuel/maintenance was $250/month + I needed the car anyway.

A 1hr commute in Switzerland costs me like $1.5k per year.

The congestion charge changes the math, but I’m not sure it changes the service.

New comment by arh5451 in "Static Chess"

arh5451 — Tue, 14 May 2024 13:16:11 +0000

Only issue I see is that it does not identify check mate.

New comment by arh5451 in "Spreadsheets are all you need"

arh5451 — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 09:21:27 +0000

Super cool stuff!

New comment by arh5451 in "What the Goddamn Hell Is Going on in the Tech Industry?"

arh5451 — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 09:44:47 +0000

The tech industry and business in general has an enormous challenge in how management is hired and selected. Currently it is either. 1. Selected by MBA or some management certification 2. Engineers who perform well/are more visible. Both are really poor choices for technology related management roles and inevitably lead to unethical/poor management practices regardless of the firm in many cases.

The best manager traits are usually soft skills which are nearly impossible to measure and more impossible for HR to find (HR departments are largely lost in tech hiring). I think if you want to see examples of excellent run large companies you need to look in the places where there is an internal culture of up-skilling employees whether its rotational leadership programs or learning credits. Often my experience is they are much better run and invested in the people and it is reflected in the managers/management.

New comment by arh5451 in "Recursive Drawing"

arh5451 — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 09:48:44 +0000

cool

New comment by arh5451 in "The Price-Fixing Economy"

arh5451 — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 12:43:25 +0000

The only medium for creating monopolistic power is government. Unless laws or regulation exist to create barriers of entry to market by businesses then the prices are always competitive.

Cartels have been proven 100x over to not be feasible. Even classic examples like standard oil prove the monopolies aren't possible, because Standard Oil was out competing all market competitors on price, quality, and innovation.

Only thing close to a modern day monopolistic behavior is growth before profit capitalism we've seen over the last 20 years. Now that interest rates are going back up it's finally coming to an end.

New comment by arh5451 in "Economic inequality cannot be explained by individual bad choices, study finds"

arh5451 — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 07:45:08 +0000

Hot take: 1. Income Inequality is directly related to financial education. If you taught people how to save in schools and make good choices things would be very different. 2. The Fed Reserve has made it impossible for a generation of people to save for the past 2.5 decades. Creating the largest wealth disparity in human history.