Hacker News: blonder

New comment by blonder in "The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle"

blonder — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:02:03 +0000

Agreed. Common use cases like creating a simple LMS system Opus is shockingly good, saving hours upon hours from having to reinvent the wheel. Other things like simple queries to, and interactions with our ERP system it is still quite poor at, and increases development time rather than shortens it.

New comment by blonder in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

blonder — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:22:47 +0000

They are not the same. I don't think Tesla or its consumers are interested in geofenced self driving, they want to be able to use it on road trips and driving around suburbs.

New comment by blonder in "Luce: First Electric Ferrari"

blonder — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:44:41 +0000

There are millions of people living in cities that do not own their own home, that cannot charge every day (speaking as an EV enthusiast that rents somewhere that thankfully has public charging across the street). For those that are able to charge at home, there is definitely a mindset shift that needs to happen. I have seen the lightbulb over my friends heads turn on when I ask them how they would like it if their gas cars could fill up 1 gallon per hour at their house, and if so why would they care how long a gas station fill up takes.

New comment by blonder in "Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B"

blonder — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 02:17:17 +0000

Handling cash costs money too though. I know some small business are credit/debit card only since they do not want to deal with the hassle of cash. Out of everywhere I have been, only one place (some grocery chain in SLC) has accepted debit cards but not credit cards.

New comment by blonder in "Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B"

blonder — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 02:15:16 +0000

May I ask why you eschew the basically free money that comes from credit card rewards as a responsible credit card user?

New comment by blonder in "DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf]"

blonder — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 03:20:45 +0000

I appreciate your rabid optimism, but considering that Moores Law has ceased to be true for multiple years now I am not sure a handwave about being able to scale to infinity is a reasonable way to look at things. Plenty of things have slowed down in progress in our current age, for example airplanes.

New comment by blonder in "Waymo to expand robotaxi service to Las Vegas, San Diego and Detroit next year"

blonder — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 03:18:06 +0000

Is Detroit the first Waymo city that sees more than a negligible amount of snow? It will be interesting to see Waymos snowy road debut.

New comment by blonder in "Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society"

blonder — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 02:59:08 +0000

I think banning or severely limiting advertising similar to cigarettes would be a good start. Stop having sports broadcasts be so intertwined with gambling, seeing odds on the screen when watching sports is gross.

New comment by blonder in "How the AI Bubble Will Pop"

blonder — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 14:04:49 +0000

Sam has claimed that they are profitable on inference. Maybe he is lying but I don't think speaking so absolutely about them losing money on that is something you can throw around so matter of fact. They lose money because they dump an enormous amount of money on R&D.

New comment by blonder in "Nvidia buys $5B in Intel"

blonder — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 18:42:31 +0000

I don't think you can confidently say how it will pan out. Maybe OpenAI is only unprofitable at the 200/month tier because those users are using 20x more compute than the 20/month users. OpenAI claims that they would be profitable if they weren't spending on R&D [1], so they clearly can't be hemorrhaging money that badly on the service side if you take that statement as truthful.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/sam-altman-gpt5-launch-chat...

New comment by blonder in "Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves"

blonder — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 07:11:21 +0000

Stealing a catalytic converter to sell for money cannot be equivocated to shoplifting. Plenty of shoplifters are doing it for the thrill or to obtain things that they wouldn't pay for, no one is doing that with cats, they are doing it to try and survive.

New comment by blonder in "Saquon Barkley is playing for equity"

blonder — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 19:14:41 +0000

Bitcoin was in the thousands for most of 2017, that as a booster to a tech heavy portfolio would have done extremely well.

New comment by blonder in "Tesla reports 14% decline in deliveries, marking second year-over-year drop"

blonder — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 15:14:23 +0000

As a (former) huge tesla fan/shareholder, and current model 3 enjoyer, the cybertruck really makes me upset. The millions of dollars and engineering hours devoted to that thing that could have been devoted to a new product that people actually want and use (or even a halo product like the forgotten new roadster) was and is incredibly wasteful.

New comment by blonder in "Tesla reports 14% decline in deliveries, marking second year-over-year drop"

blonder — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 15:09:14 +0000

I would counter your charging anecdote almost entirely with my anecdote. I have never had to worry about arriving at a destination without enough to make it to another supercharger, that worked great in 2022 when I got my model 3 and works great today. I have never had so much as a single issue with a supercharger not working or being out of service and not saying it on the car screen. I don't have any rebuttals for your other points: winter range stinks, and tires wear faster than gas equivalents. EVs really need a battery innovation to add another 100 estimated miles to really push them into the mainstream imo. If we can get to the 450ish range that would help a lot.

New comment by blonder in "Airline Demand Between Canada and United States Collapses, Down 70%+"

blonder — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 20:12:06 +0000

As someone from Buffalo it is (anecdotally) pretty common for Canadians to come here to fly to other parts of the US for cheaper, and for us to go to Toronto for cheaper international flights.

New comment by blonder in "NASA freezes Starliner missions"

blonder — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 04:37:30 +0000

Tesla in 2024 is certainly succeeding in spite of Elon. From firing the supercharging team because he had some kind of mental break to the tens of millions of dollars and engineering hours wasted on the cybertruck instead of another practical vehicle he clearly isn't contributing much to what is at this point a matured company that doesn't need a maniac (for better or worse) at the helm.

New comment by blonder in "'Three New York Cities' Worth of Power: AI Is Stressing the Grid"

blonder — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:07:42 +0000

They claim they can do that in 24 months.

New comment by blonder in "Hertz to sell 20k EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars"

blonder — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 17:43:39 +0000

As an EV believer that happily owns a Tesla Model 3, I grimace thinking about peoples first EV experience being a rental car. When I went on a 4 day vacation that would include a decent amount of driving (going from Fort Lauderdale out to Key West & back) I specifically chose the Nissan Altima in the corner of the lot, rather than the fancy EV Mercedes that wouldn't have cost me any more money due to my status with Hertz. If there was a Tesla I probably would have been fine picking it due to the robustness of the supercharger network, but someone's first EV experience being a Chevy Bolt while on vacation is setting the EV movement back years.

New comment by blonder in "Launch HN: Stralis (YC W23) – Hydrogen electric aircraft for medium-haul travel"

blonder — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 23:27:33 +0000

Best of luck! I can think of no cooler space to work in than next generation clean aircraft. Now, if only I wasn't completely hopeless at physics and chemistry...

New comment by blonder in "Winter & Cold Weather EV Range Loss in 7,000 Cars"

blonder — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 04:46:00 +0000

While not giving any energy back, Teslas can now detect when regen breaking is limited, and blend in the regular brakes for you, so that you don't have to change your driving style. It has only come out in the past couple of weeks, but I cannot tell the difference when regen is supposedly limited after enabling the feature. Before it was a little dangerous to have to modify your driving style and watch out for how much regen your car uses compared to its normal amount, since after a week of driving an EV in the summer you don't ever really touch the break pedal.