Hacker News: badpun

New comment by badpun in "Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets"

badpun — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:45:08 +0000

How much would it cost to build out batteries which cover entire continent's electricy needs for say three weeks (as there can be 2-3 week lulls of no wind and no sun in Europe in the winter)? Cause that sounds like a lot of batteries. Not to mention, if a freak 4 week lull occurs, we'll go back to Middle Ages for a week.

New comment by badpun in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

badpun — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:29:01 +0000

Typical salary for a senior dev is around 20-30k PLN per month, which translates to $65k-$100k per year (gross). Also, a lot of devs do a little bit of tax avoidance that is currently not persecuted, which allows them to pay total taxes below 20% on that amount. So, your take-home pay is $50k-$80k.

New comment by badpun in "BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets"

badpun — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:01:00 +0000

I'd say it's a country that builds a ton of infrastructure, at the expense of living standards of common people. The money from infra has to come from anywhere, and an all-powerful central government can just redirect the stream from consumer spending into building out infrastructure. Whether Chinese are happy about it, you'd have to ask them.

New comment by badpun in "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons"

badpun — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:01:37 +0000

You can't hire people cross-border though. That sp. z o.o. would need a German subsidiary if it wanted to employ people in Germany.

New comment by badpun in "UK Fuel Price Intelligence – Market analytics from reporting stations"

badpun — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:41:55 +0000

I think majority of the profits come from extracting the oil from the ground, much less from refining (more competetive - everyone can just build more refineries if margins become high enough), and the least from retail (gas stations).

New comment by badpun in "Maladaptive Frugality"

badpun — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:15:54 +0000

Aren't there health insurance plans with a high deducible (say $10k) that are quite affordable? In your early retirement, you can cover catastrophic health failures with them, and pay for everything else out of pocket.

New comment by badpun in "Ask HN: Is Zuckerberg just a „one-hit-wonder"?"

badpun — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:26:29 +0000

Same argument goes for Hitler though. If he didn't do it, there'd be another fascist leader exploiting the masses' love of fascism in early 1930s Germany.

New comment by badpun in "Anthropic bans orgs without warning"

badpun — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:19:16 +0000

> No, it isn't. No LLM platform ever will be. No platform or vendor of any kind ever will be, if we are being honest. One cannot set up a business where another company becomes critical to your operations.

Most of companies in the world have done that with Windows, though.

New comment by badpun in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

badpun — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:31:51 +0000

All recruiters get paid accounts.

New comment by badpun in "How a subsea cable is repaired (2021)"

badpun — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:14:42 +0000

Most notable examples of both are China and India, where China outperforms India even despite decades of violent Communist rule.

New comment by badpun in "Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw"

badpun — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:56:56 +0000

In Poland, factories' light installations ran on non-standard voltage, so that, if you stole the lightbulb, it'd be useless in your household. Unfortunately, they couldn't figure out similar solution for toilet paper and many other household items.

As for motivation, beyond the obvious one, people also stole because many items were not available in stores (having a guy who has a connect on toilet paper was a thing back then), and also, since Communism in Poland was actually a Russian dictatorship, the idea was that if you steal from communist factories you're fighting the system and making it fall faster.

New comment by badpun in "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation"

badpun — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:14:16 +0000

A lot of investments gets amortized over many years so even if you're investing all your free cash you'll still show a lot of profit.

New comment by badpun in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

badpun — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:32:09 +0000

One of the first things to do on a fresh install is to disable the Web search results in Start menu search. There's a setting in the registry to do it.

New comment by badpun in "Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains"

badpun — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:21:55 +0000

For games, part of that mere „output” is 3d graphics, so replicating the internals of Direct 3D exactly right and getting the Linux GPU drivers to cooperate. That’s a hardcore task.

New comment by badpun in "Overcoming the friendship recession"

badpun — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:24:50 +0000

I have plenty of such scenes in my city still, but these people are usually either pensioners, or local unemployed drunks who have an entire day to fill. People with jobs don't hang outside, unless they're with their kids.

New comment by badpun in "Oil nears $110 a barrel after gas field strike"

badpun — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:37:21 +0000

Putin is not a mad dictator ruling against everyone’s wishes. He’s a leader of a large establishment elite which shares his views and gets very rich. If you replace Putin, most likely outcome is his replacement will not be very different (and probably worse, since the country will be even more anti-Western after the assassination)

New comment by badpun in "Honda is killing its EVs"

badpun — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:06:59 +0000

Car tires are made with synthetic rubber, which is made from oil.

New comment by badpun in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

badpun — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:00:04 +0000

If it wasn't in his power to toughen regulation, why did he promise it in his campaign?

New comment by badpun in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

badpun — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:17:14 +0000

Frank-Dodd wasn't nearly as strict as the post-1929 regulation (Glass-Steagall act) that actually prevented such crisies for half a century.

New comment by badpun in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

badpun — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:54:57 +0000

Consequences would be nice, but actually forbidding it for the future would be enough. Obama promised to do it, but didn't, and everybody kind of forgot and moved on.