Hacker News: garrettgrimsley

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Aerocart cargo gliders"

garrettgrimsley — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 04:44:56 +0000

They didn't misread, what they're saying is that the lead plane would detect conditions/forces that would result in a tow upset and then cut the tow tether. There's a video in this thread that shows that currently, in manned gliders, the glider pilot can and has a responsibility to release if a tow upset is happening.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Teardown of Apple 40W dynamic power adapter with 60W max"

garrettgrimsley — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 21:46:05 +0000

It eventually loaded for me. Alternatively: https://archive.is/tOC9a

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Optimizing my sleep around Claude usage limits"

garrettgrimsley — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 22:48:13 +0000

There's no contact information in your profile, and googling your username has but one hit: this very comment.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders"

garrettgrimsley — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 17:32:40 +0000

No, they're both south of the Mason-Dixon line and Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. Texas is considered less South, culturally, than Virginia.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Why you should pay down your low-interest mortgage"

garrettgrimsley — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:51:14 +0000

If the HN title included the bit of the article title that mentions PMI, it wouldn't be so clickbaity. @dang

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "The True Cost of PMI: Why you should pay down your low-interest mortgage"

garrettgrimsley — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:49:17 +0000

>Apply for Removal: You can apply to have PMI removed if you get an appraisal showing that your loan balance is less than 80% of your home’s current value.

>I ruled out option #2 because appraisals are expensive. Spending hundreds of dollars for an appraisal, on top of paying for PMI, felt like throwing good money after bad.

Your mileage may vary, but for myself, in August of 2023 in Raleigh, the property valuation cost was $190. Check with your lender, or shop around for a different valuation company that they accept. My numbers were similar to those of the author: my PMI was $113.83 and my time for loan-to-value to reach 80% was about four years.

What I found was doing the property valuation and then investing the lump sum of cash put me ahead of the 10% 1-year return. The author can now take their $115 monthly savings and invest, but it will never yield nearly as much as investing the $32,000 in even the most conservative scenarios.

You can play around with some various scenarios in a spreadsheet or https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calcula...

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "What we know about CEO shooting suspect"

garrettgrimsley — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 15:25:26 +0000

You hadn't mentioned that your focus was on the USA, but rather a general "The targets of the theory are essentially people with non-stem post-secondary degrees" which is why I provided a paper that directly contradicts your statement. Elite Overproduction is not a US-specific topic, and the paper being from 2007 does nothing to invalidate its findings or lessen its relevance to Elite Overproduction. Funnily enough, I hadn't checked astrange's reference that prompted this discussion, which is Gambetta and Hertog.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "What we know about CEO shooting suspect"

garrettgrimsley — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 04:04:07 +0000

This doesn't align with the scholarship on the subject. See Gambetta and Hertog https://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/engineers%20of%20ji...

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Love of cargo bikes is changing how we deliver goods in our cities"

garrettgrimsley — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 20:36:52 +0000

You're likely correct about the labor per kilogram-kilometer cost, and this e-bike solution is only competitive due to constraints applied by the government. This does ignore the negative externalities that result from the use of larger parcel delivery vehicles.

>a fleet of electric cargo bikes in Norwich to deliver thousands of packages per week.

Reading the article, this quote in particular stuck out to me because it is not uncommon for a single package car driver to deliver thousands of packages a week. This comes from my experience as a UPS Package Car Driver in Raleigh, North Carolina, which has a population density comparable to that of Norwich.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "310-mile automated cargo conveyor will replace 25,000 trucks in Japan"

garrettgrimsley — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 11:52:07 +0000

To all those snidely commenting about trains or rail: Do you think that Japan, of all places, is not familiar with railways? The article states that this is for palletized or small-package loads. Give them some credit.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Ask HN: Well architected React and Node repos?"

garrettgrimsley — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 20:35:39 +0000

tracker1 is saying that in that case there would be a feature named shared, which other features then reference.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "The hater's guide to Kubernetes"

garrettgrimsley — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 18:50:31 +0000

>I think the configuration aspect (YAML)

What are the reasons to not use JSON rather than YAML? From my admittedly-shallow experience with k8s, I have yet to encounter a situation in which I couldn't use JSON. Does this issue only pop up once you start using Helm charts?

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "How does Shazam work? (2022)"

garrettgrimsley — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 04:01:12 +0000

Looks like others, including Shazam, beat you to the punch in 2000:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7853664B1/

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6941275

Very interesting hearing about all of the differing approaches people have taken to solving this problem! Do you have further writings on this topic?

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "How could Al Bundy afford a house when he was making minimum wage?"

garrettgrimsley — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 02:28:04 +0000

The parent is saying that “dry powder” (i.e. cash) can be used to "pull the trigger" on a purchase of luxury vans when a rainy day comes along and the owner of the vans are forced to sell at reduced prices due to economic hardship.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees"

garrettgrimsley — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:54:02 +0000

If you use uBlock Origin you can do

     www.linkedin.com##:matches-path(feed).scaffold-layout__main
     www.linkedin.com##.global-nav__primary-link.global-nav__primary-link--active.app-aware-link

The former will block the main content of the page while on the /feed/ path, while the latter will block the "Home" button in the header nav.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Most cars still cost more to charge than to fill up with gas"

garrettgrimsley — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 22:01:02 +0000

I think the main issue here is that the Business Insider article and title are exceptionally bad, and that the study seems to muddle between "cost to charge" and "total cost of ownership" like you said. I only skimmed the study, but the Time Prices did jump out as silly to me too. I would like to see the study repeated but instead focused on Total Cost of Ownership including maintenance and whatnot.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Most cars still cost more to charge than to fill up with gas"

garrettgrimsley — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 01:14:26 +0000

There are many complaints about the lack of numbers. I looked up the study [0] and they indicate that they pull their numbers from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and EPA. The methodology is summarized [1] and explained in detail [2] if anyone wants to go through it.

[0] https://www.andersoneconomicgroup.com/many-gas-powered-cars-...

[1] https://www.andersoneconomicgroup.com/second-edition-real-wo...

[2] https://www.andersoneconomicgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/202...

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "USPS facility in Utah does nothing but decipher handwriting"

garrettgrimsley — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 12:38:54 +0000

I have previously worked for USPS and can help clear up what is happening. The mail carrier and their assigned station (Post Office) should be thought of only as the ingress/egress of the postal system. It would be wrong to say that no sorting happens there, but the type of sorting that doesn't happen there is why your mail is being postmarked at a plant (regional center) fifteen miles away.

I'll use the location that I worked at as an example. In Wilmington, NC, once your carrier returns to the station, they drop your letter into a collection bin. This collection bin is driven to Fayetteville, NC, where it is then processed via OCR. After being OCR'd it has a machine-readable bar-code, and will be sorted for delivery to a local station. The machinery involved in the OCR and sorting process is larger than any of the local stations I worked at. Additionally, almost all of the mail pieces that I delivered were intercity, not intracity. Your use case is the exception, not the rule.

There are many exceptions and corner cases to what I described, but that's what the process looks like for most mail pieces. Locating the scanning and sorting machinery at a hub rather than each individual spoke makes sense. UPS, where I currently work, has some minor differences, but the hub and spoke model is largely the same.

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "<1% of homeless Portlanders found permanent housing in 10 months of city sweeps"

garrettgrimsley — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 23:56:39 +0000

With a cursory web search I found that Oregon does not use private prisons [1] and that Multnomah County Jails are operated by the sheriff's office [2], not a private company.

[1] https://www.oregon.gov/doc/about/pages/history.aspx#:~:text=....

[2] https://mcso.us/site/corrections/jail-overview

New comment by garrettgrimsley in "Driving Amazon’s electric delivery vehicle: Rivian EDV [video]"

garrettgrimsley — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 13:49:10 +0000

>the actual task of moving boxes of stuff is fulfilled perfectly well by a Ford Transit

Former UPS driver here. Our performance was measured in SPORH, or Stops Per On Road Hour. Supervisors will touch base with you and quote metrics like how many seconds it took you to go from the turning off the vehicle to entering the cargo area, or from pressing the key fob to enable the ignition switch to pulling off. The point is, all of these optimizations add up when you are performing them 200+ times per day. Driving a Ford Transit vs one of these Rivian EDVs or a P1200 package car would mean employing 2-3x the workers.

>Maybe there's a slight efficiency improvement, but seems nowhere near the massive investment + maintenance required for a specialized truck.

Just the sliding pocket passenger-side door is a massive improvement over any non-specialized vehicle. Think of the investment divided by the number of drivers, not as a lump-sum. As for maintenance, UPS and USPS both have in-house mechanics, I'm sure the same is true of Amazon.