Hacker News: dr__mario

New comment by dr__mario in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

dr__mario — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:56:49 +0000

"Violence" does not only include "physical violence". It also includes "structural violence". And precisely, temperature is going up because people is sick of structural violence.

New comment by dr__mario in "How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me"

dr__mario — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 04:41:49 +0000

Straight from "A Clockwork Orange".

New comment by dr__mario in "Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview"

dr__mario — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 16:19:01 +0000

I'd love to love them but I don't: I can't seem to justify moving away from Python to use this. What advantages does JS offer for this use case? I' ve never felt that I couldn't do any visualization with Python (but I don't do nice newspaper figures).

New comment by dr__mario in "Foreign visits into the U.S. fell off a cliff in March"

dr__mario — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:24:03 +0000

> I am not taking the risk of getting locked up in ICE jail any time soon, no matter how unlikely it is.

I've turned down a 7-day-all paid-trip my company was offering me to San Francisco for this (and I had in the past a bad experience at Puerto Rico's border).

New comment by dr__mario in "Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood"

dr__mario — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 20:45:34 +0000

Super amused that something so "deep Spain" (specifically from my region) arises in other places too:

https://es-euronews-com.translate.goog/2022/07/12/salir-al-f...

New comment by dr__mario in "Unless my phone can be a PC, I don't want to keep paying for extra performance"

dr__mario — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 08:46:13 +0000

> When was the last time you felt your smartphone really couldn’t cope?

A couple of weeks ago using Obsidian in an iPhone SE (3rd gen). And I've switched to an iPhone 16 and it's definitely way more fluid (even for browsing).

There is clearly some kind of rat race: more raw power available, less time spent by devs in optimizations (and I guess the PRO to that CON would be less time to market). I'm not sure how to feel about all this, but there are definitely situations of phones that can't keep up.

New comment by dr__mario in "Why pay for a search engine"

dr__mario — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 04:46:19 +0000

I didn't have much success with Kagi for Spanish/local searches. Has this improved?

New comment by dr__mario in "Reading texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension [pdf]"

dr__mario — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 19:48:57 +0000

I would love to know what happens with e-ink devices then. I feel this test is doing many things at once and the conclusion may not carry to e-ink (it's easier in the eyes, you can scribble...)

New comment by dr__mario in "Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem"

dr__mario — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 11:19:30 +0000

Can you define that "middle-class", please? If you live purely from housing, you are not middle-class.

New comment by dr__mario in "Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem"

dr__mario — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 09:46:57 +0000

I agree that it may not be 100% accurate, but probably correlated with the truth and directionally accurate. If you discard it, what do you have? Anecdotes? The media narratives?

New comment by dr__mario in "Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem"

dr__mario — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 08:17:45 +0000

BTW, I'd love to recommend a book that explains all this much better than I would do. Unfortunately, I think it's only in Spanish: "La España de las piscinas" (The Spain of Swimming Pools).

New comment by dr__mario in "Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem"

dr__mario — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 08:15:40 +0000

Ok, but first: is it financially risky right now to own properties? No, based on the data we have.

Second: can renters be hurt even more? Are landlords the most vulnerable people right now? The situation is pretty awful right now, while at the same time there are people whose sole contribution to society is "owning flats".

And I agree on increasing property taxes (any progressive taxes over capital would do).

New comment by dr__mario in "Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem"

dr__mario — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 07:05:34 +0000

But again, you talk about usurpation or trespassing? And even in that case, the data is the data: the rest is speculation.

New comment by dr__mario in "Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem"

dr__mario — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 06:34:36 +0000

"The rise of okupation"... but they make no references to data. Here is the data (in Spanish) [1].

The difference between trespassing (that somebody enters in the house you live) and usurpation (the house is yours but is not where you live) is very important. Both problems are way less prevalent than what appears on the media (see [1]), but trespassing is waaay lower (and as the owner you have better mechanisms to recover your house).

However, there is a huge propaganda campaign here in Spain, where TV shows talk constantly about trespassing, and one can only imagine what they get from that (swaying votes to conservative political groups, selling alarms, less rights to people that live on rented apartments...)

[1] https://maldita.es/malditateexplica/20221026/datos-okupacion...

New comment by dr__mario in "Sora: Creating video from text"

dr__mario — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 14:14:41 +0000

I'd love to feel excited by all these advancements and somehow I feel numb. I get part of the feeling (worry about inequalities it may generate), but I sense something more. It's like I see it as a toy... I'm unable to dream on how this will impact my life in any meaningful way.

New comment by dr__mario in "Twitter accounts with the most community notes"

dr__mario — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 05:48:24 +0000

I'd love to see the correlation with popularity (followers, tweet views...), and with the number of tweets, and then some measure to try to to remove those effects to really get the most toxic accounts (i.e., community notes per total tweet views).

New comment by dr__mario in "Ask HN: How are the current layoffs affecting non-US developers?"

dr__mario — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 06:31:55 +0000

Spain. Data Eng. manager. I switched jobs a week ago. Although there are some startups with a freeze (because of failed investment rounds), the hiring market looks healthy: same salary ranges, recruiter spam with same frequency.

New comment by dr__mario in "AI chatbots are not a replacement for search engines"

dr__mario — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 06:02:26 +0000

Not sure if I'm missing something but if the authors claim:

1. That chatbots don't understand what they are producing -> a search engine doesn't either.

2. The benefit of search is that you engage in sense-making -> you actually need to do that with a chatbot too.

3. You would want access to the sources -> that's already fixed for today's chatbots (see perplexity.ai, for example, which offers links next to its claims).

4. We may trust chatbots more easily because of their language: we already have that problem with search results.

I understand the idea that there will not be an ever-knowing AI and we will probably don't even want one. But what we have today seems an improvement over a search engine (not necessarily a replacement).

New comment by dr__mario in "Refusing to Stand on the Shoulders of Giants"

dr__mario — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 12:10:33 +0000

If it's personal stuff, I can see the point in trying to do something without Googling at first and how that can be fun for many and interesting for learning, but still, I don't think that learning is "complete" without then seeing previous progress on the topic.

New comment by dr__mario in "Refusing to Stand on the Shoulders of Giants"

dr__mario — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 05:09:14 +0000

Hi HN! I'm one of the HN lurkers: I read you a lot but haven't had the courage to join the conversations (which is something I want to start doing).

I'm submitting my article here with the hope of starting a healthy debate around something that, to be honest, I'm not sure if it's more prevalent in Spain (where I am from), or specifically the companies I've worked for: why do people start trying to solve something without checking previous work on the topic?

Have I been hanging "with the wrong crowd"? Am I missing positive aspects for doing that?