Hacker News: insaneirish

New comment by insaneirish in "Tracking Costco gas prices"

insaneirish — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:55:45 +0000

I understand your argument on gas. But I find the comment about tires to be curious. I literally will not buy tires anywhere else.

Costco:

- Often has a lower price on tires than other stores (particularly when they run a brand specific sale)

- Includes free installation

- Properly torques lug nuts/bolts

- Includes road hazard warranty

- Properly patches tires when you do have a service issue

Those are the highlights...

New comment by insaneirish in "Nvidia dramatically reduces amount of OpenAI infra financing it may guarantee"

insaneirish — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 02:50:55 +0000

As it's said... "Every company eventually becomes a bank."

New comment by insaneirish in "Thomann takes legal action against Fender"

insaneirish — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:57:15 +0000

In one fell swoop, Fender destroyed every bit of musician goodwill they had. For right or for wrong (and I think for wrong), their claims are baseless.

I wish them (and their PE overlords) a powerful defeat, ideally in a court of law, but if not, in the court of public opinion.

New comment by insaneirish in "Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware for breach of contract (2025)"

insaneirish — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 01:46:15 +0000

Feel like it's burying the lede a bit to not mention that Broadcom acquired Computer Associates and said "hold my beer".

New comment by insaneirish in "HP re-releases classic computer science calculator: The HP-16C"

insaneirish — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 05:54:07 +0000

I never thought the HP of today would do this. 20+ years ago, I was first enamored by a 16C a much older coworker owned. Sometime after that, I bought one on eBay for around $100 (IIRC). Inflation adjusted, this reissue is a deal!

New comment by insaneirish in "HP re-releases classic computer science calculator: The HP-16C"

insaneirish — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 05:50:32 +0000

It's simply not for you then. That's okay.

I'm the opposite. I can't use a non-RPN calculator. Getting the numbers out of my head and onto the stack is how I achieve clarity in what I'm doing.

I used the 49 in high school until I wore out the substandard keyboard. Then I did what I should have in the first place and bought a 48GX which I still have 20+ years later.

New comment by insaneirish in "Can you stop beans from making you gassy?"

insaneirish — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:51:19 +0000

Steve Sando, the founder/owner of Rancho Gordo, has been on the podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cooking-issues-with-da...) hosted by the author of this article (Dave Arnold) a few times.

Those episodes are really fun and always result in me eating more beans!

New comment by insaneirish in "Can you stop beans from making you gassy?"

insaneirish — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:51:55 +0000

If you are unfamiliar with the author, Dave Arnold is a former instructor at the French Culinary Institute, a bar owner/operator in NYC (Booker & Dax (closed), Existing Conditions (closed), and Bar Contra (https://www.barcontra.com)), a cooking equipment designer and manufacturer (https://www.bookeranddax.com), sharer of lots of knowledge (e.g. https://cookingissues.com/primers/sous-vide/part-i-introduct...), James Beard Award winning book author (https://www.kitchenartsandletters.com/products/liquid-intell...), and a weekly podcast host (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cooking-issues-with-da...).

I highly recommend anything he works on.

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

insaneirish — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 01:13:28 +0000

My delivered cost of electricity went up about 50% per kWh in the last few months and is therefore 3x what you mention and likely only going higher.

[AI driven] data center power consumption is real and as of right now, it seems like other consumers are subsidizing it.

New comment by insaneirish in "Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025"

insaneirish — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 01:04:17 +0000

Sun Rays were so good. Being able to walk over to someone else's desk and say "hey, take a look at this" and swap your card for theirs and instantly have your desktop was such a great user experience.

Also enjoyed the keyboards (with control where caps lock "normally" is)...

New comment by insaneirish in "Brian Wilson has died"

insaneirish — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 18:46:37 +0000

Here is a great analysis of God Only Knows from the podcast “Strong Songs”: https://strongsongspodcast.com/blogs/episodes/god-only-knows...

New comment by insaneirish in "WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator"

insaneirish — Fri, 30 May 2025 03:54:39 +0000

> Importantly, it also plays Weather Channel-esque background music.

Which has its own sort of funny subculture. One is Phish fans unexpectedly hearing what was decidedly not publicly common music being aired on the Weather Channel: https://jambands.com/features/2002/07/24/guyute-and-your-loc...

Fast forward 20ish years and a similar thing happened with Fox Sports interludes: https://www.si.com/nfl/2020/12/17/fox-producer-who-got-the-n...

New comment by insaneirish in "Comma 3X: Initial Impressions"

insaneirish — Fri, 16 May 2025 14:52:45 +0000

Maybe it's me, but I think in the worse case scenario (criminal liability), a jury will be more sympathetic to a person (acting in good faith) that had an issue because of the car manufacturer's provided system than they would to a person who installed a DIY/open source self-driving system.

And I say this as someone who considered trying out the project.

New comment by insaneirish in "What if humanity forgot how to make CPUs?"

insaneirish — Tue, 13 May 2025 00:22:44 +0000

> For example, it would be pretty difficult to produce vacuum tubes now.

Vacuum tubes are still made. They’re used extensively in instrument amplification.

But I think this bolsters your point!

New comment by insaneirish in "An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system"

insaneirish — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 03:49:39 +0000

What particular drivers are you referring to? NFS is natively supported in MacOS...

New comment by insaneirish in "Trump exempts phones, computers, chips from ‘reciprocal’ tariffs"

insaneirish — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 04:00:54 +0000

> Exceptions are reasonable.

If there were an actual strategy, exceptions would have been clear from the start.

New comment by insaneirish in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

insaneirish — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 02:51:55 +0000

Can someone please explain the flag?

Given the amount of stupid things that end up on this site, this is asinine.

New comment by insaneirish in "NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker"

insaneirish — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 04:37:18 +0000

> I personally took a cab from Newark to Laguardia

I don't understand why anyone would ever attempt to do this. Was it truly the only option?

New comment by insaneirish in "Windows Kills SMB Speeds When Using Tailscale"

insaneirish — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 04:33:25 +0000

I feel like this whole thing buries the lede a bit.

Yes, turns out running overlay/VPN type things disrupts traffic patterns. This is a non-story.

But we're talking about using wireguard on a local network, so the actual interesting question is: why does it cause the performance to plummet? Is it an implementation issue or something more fundamental?

I expect some performance impact. I don't expect a three orders of magnitude impact (which is what 355 KB/s imputes).

New comment by insaneirish in "Spirit Airlines is filing for bankruptcy"

insaneirish — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 02:55:45 +0000

It's interesting how major airlines competing with them has made things worse for everyone. I have many times seen passengers ignorant about what "basic economy" means (or at least feigning ignorance) and it leads to passengers trying to negotiate seat swapping on their own, or gate agents getting involved when it's a young child getting separated. All of it leads to boarding delays, which leads to delays pushing back, which leads to sequencing delays for takeoff.