Hacker News: kamarg

New comment by kamarg in "Romania soccer introduces black card to 'combat abusive behaviour' from parents"

kamarg — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 23:00:17 +0000

As teens my brother and I both refed youth soccer. The parents were the absolute worst part of the experience. One of them actually followed my brother back to his car after a game to yell at him more. It was so bad that the ref association took the guy to what I've always called "soccer court" (not sure what it actually was) to have him banned from coming back for the rest of the season. That was a U-12 girls rec game by the way.

New comment by kamarg in "Designing for Dual Screen and Foldable Devices with CSS (2023)"

kamarg — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 23:16:12 +0000

The seam doesn't really make a difference for clicking. It's really at the point of just being a large phone screen. It's certainly easier than interacting with elements on the edge of the screen.

New comment by kamarg in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

kamarg — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:40:11 +0000

Because most people feel uncomfortable being in the tiny vehicle that sits below the bumber of all the trucks and suvs that surround them. It's one of those things that doesn't work until a large percentage of other people are doing it. Very few want to put themselves in more danger for principled reasons.

New comment by kamarg in "Replaceable but Employed: Automation and the Meaning of Work"

kamarg — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 01:49:53 +0000

The two options dichotomy is false. There's at least a third option of the player with the deepest pockets outlasts and/or acquires the rest and then jacks up the price once they're firmly in control of a "large enough" share of the market. At that point they can go the route of all monopolies and acquire or destroy any upcoming competition to maintain their market share and begin rent-seeking behavior.

This keeps human labor devalued while not allowing artificial labor's value to fall to low enough that human labor is back to being cost effective.

New comment by kamarg in "The Amazon tax"

kamarg — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:13:59 +0000

I've long felt that there needs to be a bill passed to charge companies $x additional tax each year where $x is the amount of government assistance their employees required in order to meet food/housing minimum standards. One way or the other, the companies that are making the rest of us pay for their employees to survive need to be funding these programs.

New comment by kamarg in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

kamarg — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:23:10 +0000

The city supposedly did an enforcement weekend on it last year. It was so ineffective that the state actually changed registration laws so that you pay the sales tax when you purchase a car at the dealership and then you get your plate in the mail. That doesn't go into effect until late this year and I won't be surprised if it gets pushed back before then.

New comment by kamarg in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

kamarg — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:55:36 +0000

Where I live, it's common to see at least one person run a red at every major intersection and not just for left turns that couldn't be made due to cross-traffic. Quite often these drivers have expired temp tags which means they don't have insurance because you have to show you registered your vehicle to get insurance. Enforcement is awful so people have been trained to realize there's virtually no consequences to their bad habits. And if they do cause an accident, well it's not like the police will show up in time to stop them from driving off.

In fact, it's so bad that parts of the metro are reinstating red light cameras this year despite having decommissioned them years ago for similar legal reasons as what Florida has run into.

New comment by kamarg in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

kamarg — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:51:12 +0000

If you can't tell who was driving, you shouldn't be sending anyone a ticket.

New comment by kamarg in "Silver plunges 30% in worst day since 1980, gold tumbles"

kamarg — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:05:48 +0000

The Hunt brothers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

New comment by kamarg in "Dude, where's my supersonic jet?"

kamarg — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:26:44 +0000

> This seems incredibly inefficient. Is there a future for hybrid aircraft, which would feature both traditional turbofans and large batteries for energy storage?

I would assume the extra weight would make it not really worth the added cost and complexity.

New comment by kamarg in "The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'"

kamarg — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 14:47:00 +0000

> Recovery is beyond the scope of most small practices.

Seems like a business opportunity. Could probably work very similar to other collections agencies where they either buy the debt for pennies on the dollar or take a percentage of the collected amount.

New comment by kamarg in "Orcas are bringing humans gifts"

kamarg — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 13:48:47 +0000

Humpback whales have been known to defend other animals from Orcas. The food of my enemy is my friend type of thing I guess.

New comment by kamarg in "Making Florida More Flood Resistant Is Forcing Hard Choices for Homeowners"

kamarg — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 15:40:39 +0000

> With such a… fixed opinion, the hidebound government agencies can't allow themselves to think that the overall risk profile has increased

This is only true if policy makers are logically consistent. If they're not then whatever they feel like at the time goes. I don't think it takes much effort to see that logical consistency is not something that is highly valued by the people currently in charge.

New comment by kamarg in "Metamaterials, AI, and the Road to Invisibility Cloaks"

kamarg — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 13:50:16 +0000

I knew a guy that was extremely upset to find out that there isn't a lenticular garage door product so he could have it display an "animated" image as it opened/closed.

New comment by kamarg in "U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier"

kamarg — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 18:42:26 +0000

> This means people are okay with whatever is happening

Or it means the game has been rigged which is exactly the point of all the gerrymandering going on right now. Tons of people are not okay with what is happening but their power to replace their government representative has been or is currently being effectively stolen from them.

New comment by kamarg in "Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales"

kamarg — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 04:06:22 +0000

A lot of those things require you to give them your email to get the coupon. They could do that with a button as well but couldn't then follow up to let you know you didn't buy anything from them in 24hrs.

New comment by kamarg in "GPT-5"

kamarg — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 20:24:36 +0000

If the FDA was able to work faster/more parallel and could approve the process significantly quicker, would that have changed how many experiments you could have run to the point that you could have kept an intern busy at all times?

New comment by kamarg in "GPT-5"

kamarg — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:07:09 +0000

> Sure, you can scale it, but if an LLM takes, say, $1 million a year to run an AGI instance, but it costs only $500k for one human researcher, then it still doesn’t get you anywhere faster than humans do.

Just from the fact that the LLM can/will work on the issue 24/7 vs a human who typically will want to do things like sleep, eat, and spend time not working, there would already be a noticeable increase in research speed.

New comment by kamarg in "Human speech may have a universal transmission rate (2019)"

kamarg — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 17:17:20 +0000

Did you read his followup Echopraxia? How would you say it compared to Blindsight?

New comment by kamarg in "The future is not self-hosted"

kamarg — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:52:39 +0000

Mostly battery life I would think