Hacker News: d_sem

New comment by d_sem in "Why Japan has such good railways"

d_sem — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:17:13 +0000

I suspect the commenter above is reflecting on 2026 USA and not 1850 USA. The past tense nature of your comment if part of the concern highlights a common recognition that there is limited evidence the country is currently capable of building.

New comment by d_sem in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

d_sem — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:58:14 +0000

The geographic and demographic orders of magnitude when comparing these two places makes it difficult to extrapolate applicability of best practices. Who's to say the Swiss model scales? Article doesn't convincingly address this.

For context:

41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is .064% of the national area.

Some fun distance contexts. Driving end to end in Switzerland is comparable in distance to: Driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, Detroit to Chicago, or New York City to Washington DC.

New comment by d_sem in "Fermented foods shaped human biology"

d_sem — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:23:35 +0000

More likely the cultural practice was not passed down after the massive change in food preservation about 125 years ago. In the United States, fermentation was a universally practiced method for the pickling of vegetables. This practice has been so reduced that the word "pickle" now only refers to cucumber preservation.

New comment by d_sem in "Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode"

d_sem — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 05:06:30 +0000

Bold take. This hasn't been my experience.

New comment by d_sem in "Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)"

d_sem — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:24:22 +0000

very nice. Keep up the good work.

New comment by d_sem in "Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)"

d_sem — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:54:21 +0000

And yet an accessible ecosystem of 3rd party non-emacs tooling has not been developed.

I would pay big bucks for an obsidian-styled org-mode clone that had a no-frills GUI interface. I find org-modes task tracking, calendar, and agenda views top tier.

New comment by d_sem in "NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months"

d_sem — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:55:44 +0000

electric bicycles have significantly less tire waste.

New comment by d_sem in "Perl's decline was cultural"

d_sem — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 19:14:10 +0000

I worked for a few years in an large org which utilized perl for build scripts, testing automation, and a few other things. I would summarize the half decade Perl learning curve as initial bewilderment, intermediate cult like praise, to advance level disillusionment.

There was something about scaling usage in large teams that felt awkward and high friction.

New comment by d_sem in "Roblox is a problem but it's a symptom of something worse"

d_sem — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:18:56 +0000

I think the primary issue is that there is massive demand for adolescent social interaction in a world that is increasingly physically isolating for kids.

Demographic shifts make suburban families too sparse to support children friend groups. Denser cities are increasingly financially impossible for families to move in.

New comment by d_sem in "Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?"

d_sem — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:12:57 +0000

any particular platforms that one could host the blog?

New comment by d_sem in "Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?"

d_sem — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 21:27:19 +0000

Any 101 tips for starting a blog that will stand the test of time?

New comment by d_sem in "VisiCalc on the Apple II"

d_sem — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 22:06:34 +0000

This was before my time but I appreciate the write up and the nostalgia from folks in this thread.

My take away was that VisiCalc was a fairly straight forward technological problem, but a 10,000x+ impact idea. I feel like there are still idea's like this waiting in the shadows to be discovered by a lowly undergrad somewhere who tries something unique for the first time.

New comment by d_sem in "Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a new one"

d_sem — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 22:07:26 +0000

So can we project from the authors data that, under normal operation, both bridges roughly consume the same amount of power?

New comment by d_sem in "Abandoned land drives dangerous heat in Houston, study finds"

d_sem — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 22:00:54 +0000

You sure? Thats the case for areas the size of entire states. You can look at any weather temperature map to prove this.

New comment by d_sem in "Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend"

d_sem — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 17:26:50 +0000

Thanks for the clarity. Wow this is a big deal.

New comment by d_sem in "Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend"

d_sem — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:58:32 +0000

How did you verify that a software update can 1. Occur during driving operation of the vehicle and 2. results in vehicle power loss?

I worked in an auto supplier years ago and there where several protections in place to prevent the risk of update corruption on safety related components. One of the simplest one the UDS programming session having entry protections related to vehicle speed, vehicle driving mode, etc.

New comment by d_sem in "Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025"

d_sem — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 16:56:54 +0000

This article left me wishing it was "How I'm using coding agents to do task better"

I've been exploring AI for two years now. It's certainly upgraded itself from the toy classification to a basic utility. However, I increasingly run into its limitations and find reverting to pre-LLM ways of working more robust, faster, and more mentally sustainable.

Does someone have concrete examples of integrating LLM in a workflow that pushes state-of-the-art development practices & value creation further?

New comment by d_sem in "Why warm countries are poorer"

d_sem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:48:45 +0000

You're over indexing on the genetics impacts of these things over the cultural impacts.

New comment by d_sem in "The "Wage Level" Mirage: H-1B proposal could help outsourcers and hurt US talent"

d_sem — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 10:08:08 +0000

My equally anecdotal professional experience has been the exact opposite and certainly influences my view on this topic.

New comment by d_sem in "The "Wage Level" Mirage: H-1B proposal could help outsourcers and hurt US talent"

d_sem — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 02:44:30 +0000

One of America's greatest assets is its brand as a place worth immigrating too. Much of the social capital is gained by high performing international hires who leverage the H-1B visa. We want methods for highly educated people to make the US their home. limiting this is short sighted and negatively impact the health of the country.