Hacker News: czinck

New comment by czinck in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

czinck — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:49:58 +0000

I asked Claude Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Thinking, and Gemini 3 Fast "Tell me about the Siberian marmoset" exactly and all 4 said it doesn't exist, with Gemini Thinking suggesting that I'm thinking of the Siberian marmot or Siberian chipmunk (both real animals).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarbagan_marmot (also known as Siberian marmot)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_chipmunk

New comment by czinck in "March heat in American west has left snowpack at record-low levels"

czinck — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:54:14 +0000

Yes, winters are getting worse and worse, but this year was really bad, way worse than any predictions. I was in Park City in February and there was so little snow it looked like summer, and that was before the streak of warm and dry weather this article is talking about. I literally hiked up to the 2002/2034 Olympic facilities in 55 degree weather with no snow on the ground, while the Olympics were still going on in Milan. And I was in Park City because they had more snow than Colorado...

New comment by czinck in "Rate, price drops won't substantially improve affordability"

czinck — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 17:04:14 +0000

In addition to the current supply constraint keeping prices high, mortgages being fixed rate means higher interest rates don't really drive prices down (although lower interest rates do drive prices up). If you have a mortgage for $600k at 3% interest rate and rates go to 6.6% (like they are now), the naive loan math says your house is now worth $400k. Who has $200k in equity built up in their home and is willing to walk away from it? Virtually no one, so prices stay high until people get desperate to sell.

This leads to the fun conclusion that raising interest rates might actually make inflation worse. Rent/rent equivalent is already 30% of CPI, so increases in housing costs have a big effect on overall inflation.

New comment by czinck in "MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations"

czinck — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 19:32:55 +0000

For what it's worth, that's already a thing in NYC. NYC shares the ticket revenue for illegally idling vehicles with the reporter, and so some people have made 6 figures in one year reporting idling vehicles[1]. There was a push to get a similar provision in a recent bill about illegal parking in bus and bike lanes, but they ended up just allowing citizen complaints with no bounty payout.

[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/nyc-anti-idling-la...

New comment by czinck in "How good are American roads?"

czinck — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 18:25:35 +0000

There's an interstate that runs entirely within one county, in Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_97

New comment by czinck in "Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates"

czinck — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 20:00:03 +0000

Most of the inflation from the last 4 years is attributable to Russia invading Ukraine. You can't have the largest natural gas exporter and second largest oil exporter invade one of the largest grain exporters without causing basically everything in a supermarket or restaurant to be more expensive.

New comment by czinck in "The EdTech Revolution Has Failed"

czinck — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 18:07:59 +0000

To put a name on this, it's the Baumol effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. Essentially, as productivity increases in most industries (from automation), it drives up labor costs in the industries that can't be automated (healthcare, education, performing arts, etc), which drives up the price of those services (healthcare), or drives down the quality to find a market clearing price (increasing student to teacher ratios).

New comment by czinck in "USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating"

czinck — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 23:57:32 +0000

This is a cry for help, not some myopic bureaucrat thinking they're clever. Most of the USFS budget goes to forest fires (both fighting them and prevention), up from 16% 30 years ago, and they're now saying just fighting the fires is taking up too much of their budget to do much of anything else. The USFS already announced they won't hire any seasonal employees next year, which means basic things like emptying trash cans probably won't happen.

Unless you think they should just let the fires burn, which would be catastrophic.

New comment by czinck in "Brutalist buildings should stay, even if people think they're ugly"

czinck — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 23:31:29 +0000

Yeah, I think this leads to some of the misconceptions about Brutalism. People think of the violent and aggressive connotations of the word, when it really just means "raw" like unpainted, or more accurately as opposed to the sculpted concrete of Art Deco. Being associated with Soviet and low-income apartment buildings, and urban decay in general, didn't help though.

New comment by czinck in "Via ferratas are finally catching on in the United States"

czinck — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 18:53:32 +0000

Because of that, all ski resorts on US public land aren't actually "exclusive". A lift ticket just buys you access to the lifts, you can hike up during the winter or summer, with restrictions during the winter mainly around everyone's safety (designated uphill routes, don't go where they're doing avalanche control).

New comment by czinck in "Man convicted for trying to help undercover game wardens recover deer with drone"

czinck — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 17:58:28 +0000

Yes, an undercover cop (or anyone) putting a gun to your head is not entrapment, it's duress.

New comment by czinck in "Three American climbers solve the 'last great problem in the Himalayas'"

czinck — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 23:05:12 +0000

On top of what everyone else said about how they make money, lots of climbers at this level live outrageously frugally and so can easily save up. Marc-Andre Leclerc lived in a stairwell[0], and their dinners are rice and beans or "what was on sale at walmart". Think stereotypical startup incubator of bunk beds and ramen, there's only one goal and it's not day-to-day comfort.

[0] http://marcleclerc.blogspot.com/2012/07/dreaded-first-blog-p...

New comment by czinck in "Google's new geothermal energy project is up and running"

czinck — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 16:35:31 +0000

Microsoft has $80 B in cash and cash equivalents, Alphabet has $30 B in cash and cash equivalents, Apple has $30 B.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/balance-sheet/

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/balance-sheet/

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/balance-sheet/

Numbers pulled from quarterly (not annual) breakdown.

New comment by czinck in "Tearing down Klamath dams: The largest dam demolition"

czinck — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 21:19:32 +0000

As zwieback said, a lot of the dams just aren't that useful, for a bunch of reasons but biggest is that they're just too small. On top of that, at least for the Washington dams I'm more familiar with, the power generation doesn't match up with need. Most of the river flow is over the winter and spring (that's when it rains/snows and then more rain and melting snow) and in the late summer when electricity use is highest the dams don't have enough water flow to be really productive. Worse yet, some of the oldest dams are even more limited because there's too much mud in their reservoirs.

Nothing insurmountable (dredge the silt, build them bigger so the reservoir lasts until the fall, etc), but it just means the most cost effective way to help the salmon is tear down a lot of these dams.

New comment by czinck in "Weight-based motor vehicle tax"

czinck — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 18:35:08 +0000

How are you defining crossover? Not body-on-frame or more like the "lifted sedan/hatchback" like the Subaru Crosstrek or Mazda CX-30? If looking for body-on-frame, your options are really just Rivian (R1T or S1T) or F150 Lightning. If you're OK with unibody but large, there's a bunch of options that came out recently like the Audi Q8, Volvo EX-90 (even 3 row seating), BMW iX and X5, and some models from Mercedes that I can never remember the names of. All of them are all-wheel-drive.

New comment by czinck in "Windows 11 calls a zip file a 'postcode file' in UK English"

czinck — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:27:56 +0000

True, and I didn't mean to imply it was. I was just thinking of things Americans say because of the British that the British no longer do, wasn't thinking America-exclusive things.

New comment by czinck in "Windows 11 calls a zip file a 'postcode file' in UK English"

czinck — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 20:15:18 +0000

Rhoticity is the big one I know. Parts of Britain started dropping the R before 1776, but it became more widespread after that. The US port cities (most notably Boston, but it was also a class difference) had enough contact with Britain that they dropped the R too, whereas the rest of the US kept it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English

New comment by czinck in "Reddit sparks outrage after it demands app developer pay $20M/yr"

czinck — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 17:07:00 +0000

Reddit's problems aren't because of their technology, it's product decisions. Yeah, sure, maybe all their devs suck, but it was managements decision to create the abomination of their new layout to be more instagram-like. Devs aren't putting a million nags to use the official app on their mobile site of their own accord. Devs aren't consistently ignoring moderator issues/complaints.

Maybe their devs are jealous of what one guy with freedom to actually create the best thing he can can do, but I really doubt they came up with the idea to charge 100x what imgur charges for similar API calls.

New comment by czinck in "Open source espresso machine is one delicious rabbit hole inside another"

czinck — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 17:15:50 +0000

No, it's very obvious. There is some audiophile tendencies at the very expensive end of the espresso home setups, but there's a pretty noticeable difference between a good shot and the same shot ground ever so slightly finer. Because espresso is so strong, any off flavors are very strong and noticeable.

Maybe an analogy here is gold plated wires don't make any difference in a home setup (well, they make zero difference in a digital setup), but when you're AC/DC blowing the roof off an arena with your speakers turned up to 11 bad equipment can be pretty noticeable.

New comment by czinck in "Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return"

czinck — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 21:58:09 +0000

>But at this level, where glacier starts, its already the dreaded temperature they want to avoid, so glaciers should be melting from the bottom with this logic.

Yes, that's generally what happens to glaciers even ignoring climate change. The bottom melts, but is replaced by snow/ice that accumulated on top. Glaciers grow top down, not bottom up. But, if you lower the top so it's warmer, less ice accumulates, which can't replace all that melts, and so you get net shrinking.