Hacker News: avn2109

New comment by avn2109 in "Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)"

avn2109 — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:19:34 +0000

OSX's command-space spotlight search has been degrading functionally (at least on my machines) for literally years now. It peaked around ~2012, when it would reliably search the full text of all documents on my local hard drive quickly, and not do anything dumb like "search the internet by sending whatever I typed up into the search field to the cloud."

Nowadays it fails to reliably search the full text of documents on my local hard drive, tries to search the internet despite my best efforts to prevent this, and often even fails to find a file ~/Documents/foo.txt when I explicitly search for the string foo.txt. This is uniformly true on several work Macbooks and a couple personal macbooks too.

A truly astounding regression in functionality!

New comment by avn2109 in "Israeli-founded app preloaded on Samsung phones is attracting controversy"

avn2109 — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:35:04 +0000

I took this seriously and thought back to the most recent actually-useful-bugfixes-and-security-improvements release that I can remember. OSX Snow Leopard perhaps?

New comment by avn2109 in "Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower"

avn2109 — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:50:03 +0000

Super pro comment, should be much higher.

New comment by avn2109 in "10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea"

avn2109 — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 21:42:22 +0000

There is a new generation of bike locks which have the shackle wrapped in a composite coating that mostly destroys angle grinder cutting discs and similar cutting tools. This is likely the best current outdoor bike locking approach as it requires thieves to have either 1) lots of spare discs or 2) a torch or 3) picking skills, and very few thieves have any of those.

New comment by avn2109 in "Cigarette-smuggling balloons force closure of Lithuanian airport"

avn2109 — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 17:52:22 +0000

A nickel!?? Good heavens probably the whole pack full doesn't even cost a nickel to manufacture. Manufacturing cost per cigarette must surely be waaay under a penny. Disregarding marketing and distribution expenses of course.

New comment by avn2109 in "EVs are depreciating faster than gas-powered cars"

avn2109 — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:18:04 +0000

Underrated point! Heavier EV's typically burn through tires and wear components in the suspension faster.

New comment by avn2109 in "DoorDash and Waymo launch autonomous delivery service in Phoenix"

avn2109 — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 20:02:51 +0000

That's really a derivative work of the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel [0].

[0] https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

New comment by avn2109 in "America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom"

avn2109 — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 18:45:42 +0000

Surely they do damage proportional to the fourth power of the contact pressure on the tire contact patch, not the fourth power of the overall vehicle weight, right? So adding axles or wider tires etc mitigates this.

New comment by avn2109 in "Indefinite Backpack Travel"

avn2109 — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 18:45:06 +0000

Still not wide enough. If anybody has wider reccos in big sizes other than "oddball" brand, I'm all ears.

New comment by avn2109 in "Study mode"

avn2109 — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 17:42:51 +0000

LLM's are useful because they can recommend several famous/well-known books (or even chapters of books) that are relevant to a particular topic. Then you can also use the LLM to illuminate the inevitable points of confusion and shortcomings in those books while you're reading and synthesizing them.

Pre-LLM, even finding the ~5 textbooks with ~3 chapters each that decently covered the material I want was itself a nontrivial problem. Now that problem is greatly eased.

New comment by avn2109 in "AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more"

avn2109 — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:25:11 +0000

If you have any evidence for the claim that "many parts of DoD" are being exploded/defunded, it would be really interesting to see that. As far as I can see, just the opposite is true; the military industrial complex looks like it's increasing in size and scope.

New comment by avn2109 in "AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more"

avn2109 — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:22:35 +0000

Intel's C-suite is gonna pick up this line of reasoning soon! "It's not our fault the stock crashed and the fabs don't run and TSMC is eating our lunch, blame Trump instead!"

New comment by avn2109 in "Huawei releases an open weight model trained on Huawei Ascend GPUs"

avn2109 — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 19:57:38 +0000

>> ... spends the normalized equivalent of America’s defense spending...

I'd be interested in seeing the numbers for that claim broken down if you can cite them. From napkin math it seems hard to make the budgets line up, unless we're doing a very large purchasing power parity adjustment?

New comment by avn2109 in "A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen"

avn2109 — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 18:01:29 +0000

Yes! By far the biggest feature here is "no infotainment" which leads directly to "hard controls for HVAC," that alone is a killer feature! They should double down on that concept and make the truck work perfectly with no apps at all and no OtA updates too.

New comment by avn2109 in "Potatoes in the Mail"

avn2109 — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 02:44:12 +0000

This is the HN comment I didn't know I needed.

New comment by avn2109 in "Open guide to equity compensation"

avn2109 — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 10:20:52 +0000

It's kinda both sometimes haha

New comment by avn2109 in "BMW Group Product Catalog–Historic Models"

avn2109 — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 10:49:28 +0000

Apparently the "big grill era" design chief departed semirecently, but the design inertia will continue through another model year or two, just due to lead times.

New comment by avn2109 in "Broken legs and ankles heal better if you walk on them within weeks"

avn2109 — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 16:48:49 +0000

Controversial take: On a population level, the negatives of smoking are at least partially mitigated by the "smoking suppresses obesity" side effect. Obesity is such a huge (pun not intended) public health issue in modern American society that any intervention reducing it is actually quite valuable.

It's at least arguable and perhaps even true that we as a society would be better off if everybody used tobacco at 1950's rates and therefore got skinnier, especially if we all just dipped Zyns or similar smokeless "low harm" nicotine formats instead of smoking.

That said, I personally use 0 tobacco/nicotine etc.

New comment by avn2109 in "The FAA’s Hiring Scandal"

avn2109 — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 17:46:05 +0000

> "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal..."

Astounding level of misdirection/cope here, bordering on non-factual. Did we just read the same article? This is the textbook example of a DEI scandal and was so from the very beginning. I mean the "textbook" part literally, employment discrimination law textbooks will dedicate whole chapters to this scandal for decades at a minimum.

New comment by avn2109 in "America desperately needs more air traffic controllers"

avn2109 — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 21:57:28 +0000

The million dollar salary thing is compelling. I would certainly switch careers from ML engineering for a million bucks of cash comp, especially in a low CoL location :) Also, the "30 years old" thing mentioned in the GP seems excessive, surely if they were really desperate to staff up, they could loosen that age limit.