Hacker News: hn_acc1

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

hn_acc1 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:19:47 +0000

I mean, just because OpenAI started it doesn't mean the vendors didn't form a cartel afterwards (or conspire together) to ensure maximum profits in a "crazy high demand" situation..

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

hn_acc1 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:16:33 +0000

>Seriously, if a single politician stepped forward and said "i'll bring down ram prices" they could then shoot a puppy and call me a slur and I'd still go out and doorknock for them.

How many people, outside of tech geeks and megacorps care about RAM prices? And how gullible would you be to BELIEVE the politician they could actually make it happen, and even if they did, that it would extend to the average person, and not JUST megacorps/megadonors?

New comment by hn_acc1 in "The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]"

hn_acc1 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:49:07 +0000

Not sure that it would be worse than letting the other end of the spectrum be in charge of it, as we've seen..

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

hn_acc1 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:43:03 +0000

I've found that some sites (even like restaurants, for example) have no problem setting up an order when I connect via my VPN (from Linux) - my default browsing setup. But when I go to pay, their payment processor refuses to work properly / fails, so I can't actually transact any $$. Others work just fine WITH VPN on. Sadly, the former is increasing and the latter decreasing, to the point it's getting harder and harder.

Heck, Lowes and BestBuy are pretty unusable in general via VPN already.. (or maybe due to ublock, or privacy badger or eff, etc.. :-)

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

hn_acc1 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:38:34 +0000

We have a data center in Utah.. And I'm sure some of our customers are storing "adult" material.. Are we now banned?

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

hn_acc1 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:35:44 +0000

Next it will be illegal for anyone to visit an adult website from some states, even with proof of age, kinda like Prohibition..

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant"

hn_acc1 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:31:31 +0000

GAVE, not gives - past tense. What good is an amendment if the govt can ignore it at will (2025+) and you can't sue successfully because SCOTUS will find some made up reason to make you lose?

New comment by hn_acc1 in "GPT-Synopsys: Frontier Intelligence to Revolutionize Chip Design"

hn_acc1 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:48:07 +0000

Can 3D printers print with 1 micrometer (not millimeter) accuracy? 1 micron gets you things like the original 8086. Oh wait, current best desktop printers get like 100 micron (0.1 mm) accuracy. So scale up what we have now 100x in terms of accuracy (imagine how much bigger / more precise the motors, magnets, everything has to be). EASILY 10-50x the cost of a good home 3D printer today - say $50K. And 8086? Your phone is faster than probably 50-100 of them in parallel today) - so $100K (materials aren't cheap) to print a series of chips that were insanely obsolete 20 years ago and 1 $500 fpga could run circles around. Then scale that up at least another 50x to get semi-competitive (20 nm). There's a reason they put fabs in places like Arizona where there are relatively few earthquakes... Even the garbage truck driving past your house could damage your chip.

As far as home printing stuff: the clean room requirements are INSANE: just the HF (hydrofluoric acid) is crazy bad stuff that you could NOT get certified for general consumer use, no way, no how. And even if you did, you'd be crazy to buy something that comes with HF as part of the process.. And that's just ONE bad, bad chemical used by TSMC all the time.

FPGAs are the "faster-than-software / can make a custom chip" compromise - companies like Intel used to (not sure if they still do) use a ton of FGPAs to simulate new chip designs. Precisely because manufacturing state-of-the-art chips is so hard.

New comment by hn_acc1 in "GPT-Synopsys: Frontier Intelligence to Revolutionize Chip Design"

hn_acc1 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:27:33 +0000

When TSMC capacity is already sold out for a couple of years, and demand just for plain RAM is through the roof, where will these "more chips" be actually fabbed?

New comment by hn_acc1 in "The last time my family was replaced by technology"

hn_acc1 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:24:05 +0000

Is that in cash, so if the stock market drops 80%, it's still true?

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?"

hn_acc1 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:15:33 +0000

I did a deep dive into NiMH batteries a few years ago and concluded that most people felt similarly: you can often get "good" (similar to Eneloop) specs for a short run from almost any manufacturer at the outset (see Ikea Ladda batteries - suspected of relabeled Eneloop for a while, but now not as good), but consistent quality is pretty much only Eneloop or other name brand, with Eneloop generally being the best.

In the interests of saving my sanity and time (it's not free!) having to chase down which batch of which brand is "good" at the moment, I just decided on Eneloop all the time. Sure, we now have like 100-120 or something (wife likes flameless candles - just bought another 16-pack AAs) and I COULD maybe have saved $200 by buying dirt cheap. But all the time spent debugging flaky batteries, having the spouse complain, etc wasn't worth it to me (I get paid reasonably well).

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

hn_acc1 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:49:30 +0000

How much for a decent home battery setup? Already have 15-year-old 4.2 kW system and lately, PG&E isn't really giving us anything for our power..

New comment by hn_acc1 in "The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging"

hn_acc1 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:26:28 +0000

I've only ever rented a room back in my college/intern days, so I have no context exactly, but from coworkers here in the valley, even the rent on those types of apartments keeps going up ridiculous amounts so that they keep moving..

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Gemini 4 Argon"

hn_acc1 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:24:17 +0000

I know someone who works for Google Canada with AI. Her parents and mine were friends and some thought something might happen there at one point in time..

New comment by hn_acc1 in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

hn_acc1 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:35:49 +0000

Dang, you sound like you were in school in Ontario at the same time as me? I also graduated from grade 13 in 1989...

New comment by hn_acc1 in "The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging"

hn_acc1 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:03:51 +0000

What kind of tools would help renters? This "just one penny less than they will bear" is part of the problem of modern society. There used to be SOME areas you could "win" a little. Pay a reasonable price for rent, not exactly 33.3333% of your income. Pay a reasonable price for a car, not 25.0% of your income, etc. Save a few percent here, a few percent there, and you could eventually get a downpayment on a house, or indulge in a hobby.

The endgame for these ghouls is to have you work 996+ and spend 99.9999999...% of your income on just the bare essentials so that there's not one penny left unmonetized for you to just exist, and nothing left for any type of enjoyment.

New comment by hn_acc1 in "The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging"

hn_acc1 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:57:27 +0000

Sure, but insurance companies also routinely pay only part of the cost - I.e. if the hospital has evaluated that a CAT scan costs them $1250 to do, and they need a small profit margin (make up your own numbers), they need to bill the insurance $3300 just to get $1400 paid out. Insurances routinely only cover a certain percentage of the cost (to save $$), so hospitals have to bill more to get the $$ they need.

And I'm not saying the hospital is innocent here, but this "costs more when billed to insurance" is a long-known issue.

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse"

hn_acc1 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:03:54 +0000

I've had an internet email address since the late 80s, BBSing since the early 80s, pretty active online compared to many people I know who are also software people, especially for my age..

Had to google to figure out the abbreviation and look at the summary. I HAD heard the name before, but that's about it.

New comment by hn_acc1 in "Show HN: Snapdrop: Instantly share files between devices. No setup, no signup"

hn_acc1 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:46:26 +0000

So does this host the files? For free? How long before ads start / you have to register / subscription model, etc?

New comment by hn_acc1 in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

hn_acc1 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:26:45 +0000

>If you can charge at home then trading in for an EV makes sense. Electric at home is vastly cheaper than fuel. If you can't charge at home, electric prices are all over, generally cheaper, but often not by enough to be worth the bother.

Sadly, in CA, charging at home (minimum $0.26/kWh) isn't that much cheaper. Sure, maybe half the price of fueling up an efficient gas car, but not like 5x cheaper or anything..