Hacker News: kingnothing

New comment by kingnothing in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

kingnothing — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:08:44 +0000

That's unfortunate. I've found it to be a valuable resource in the past. Hopefully they are able to recover their site.

New comment by kingnothing in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

kingnothing — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:01:53 +0000

https://flickeralliance.org/ will help you find good quality bulbs

New comment by kingnothing in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

kingnothing — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:03:13 +0000

AI solves Captcha's just fine. Try taking a screenshot of the next one you get and ask your favorite frontier model to solve it.

New comment by kingnothing in "Gemini 3.6 Flash"

kingnothing — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:21:44 +0000

Of the models I've tried lately, I get more value out of Gemini for personal stuff like researching products or learning how to do things than the others. It seems more factually correct in domains I know about and hallucinates minor stuff less than the others.

New comment by kingnothing in "After wearing the Pebble Time 2 for two weeks, I'll never buy another smartwatch"

kingnothing — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:37:09 +0000

For most of my waking hours, my phone is sitting next to me on my desk, couch, or table. Carplay has my back when I'm driving. I honestly don't miss any of the notifications from my smart watches.

New comment by kingnothing in "After wearing the Pebble Time 2 for two weeks, I'll never buy another smartwatch"

kingnothing — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:31:39 +0000

I set expectations with my team that it's only an emergency if I call or page them. I don't have Slack notifications on in my personal time, I don't expect my team to either.

New comment by kingnothing in "After wearing the Pebble Time 2 for two weeks, I'll never buy another smartwatch"

kingnothing — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:41:32 +0000

After wearing an analog watch for two years, I'll never buy another smart watch.

I do not need to be so connected to my phone that my wrist vibrates when someone texts me. The little reminders to stand up are ignored. The guilt at the end of a day when I didn't get enough steps in is gone. And I have a newfound appreciation for the pure craftsmanship that goes into making this tiny analog device on my wrist that is powered by tiny springs and gears and somehow crafted well enough to be accurate within seconds per day. It's also the one piece of jewelry that is socially acceptable for every single man to wear and can be a fun expression of self given the sheer variety of watches in the world.

New comment by kingnothing in "I also filed the corners off my MacBook"

kingnothing — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:29:21 +0000

On the flip side, I've been using them for years with no issues. I jam pack them full of filthy dishes and they come out perfectly clean every time. I use high quality detergent, rinse aid, keep the filter clean, and regularly run dishwasher cleaner through it. I wouldn't have any other brand.

New comment by kingnothing in "US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers"

kingnothing — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:22:20 +0000

> My favorite interview question: If I gave you a swarm of autonomous drones, what would you do with them?

What signal are you looking for with that question? It feels much more like a thought experiment with friends while having a few pints than something reasonable for a job interview.

New comment by kingnothing in "Claude Sonnet 5"

kingnothing — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:53:23 +0000

You can let a local LLM run loops all night or all weekend and it costs nothing. It works offline. There's no rate limits. Privacy. You aren't tied to the whims of the US Government banning models. You can tie it in to HomeAssistant for home automation tasks very easily.

New comment by kingnothing in "Dark Sky Lighting"

kingnothing — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000

That site works fine in Firefox.

New comment by kingnothing in "U.S. science is in chaos"

kingnothing — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:02:50 +0000

What are the foolish maneuvers that China is making?

New comment by kingnothing in "Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?"

kingnothing — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:26:48 +0000

For fun, I ran some numbers here.

If we wanted to launch the Stratos Hyperscale AI Data Center, which will take 40,000 acres of land, to space, we're looking at roughly 3 million tons of equipment, or 3 billion kilograms. SpaceX charges $1520 per kilogram, so it would be about $4.5T to launch all of that into orbit. We'll just assume the space station already exists and labor is free to hook it up, given that we've already hit the annual budget for the US federal government in launch fees. And it'll take about 47,000 launches to get the equipment there, or roughly 300 years.

New comment by kingnothing in "Ask HN: Are orbital data centers possible / a good idea?"

kingnothing — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:42:19 +0000

What problem is solved by putting a data center in orbit?

You can solve all of them far cheaper and easier on land.

New comment by kingnothing in "Safer, cheaper vision correction without lasers or surgery"

kingnothing — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:06:37 +0000

On the opposite side of the experience, after wavefront LASIK on my very very high prescription eyes, I've had dry eyes for the past 15 years and needed glasses again about 5 years post-surgery. It's now a very mild prescription and I'd definitely say my vision is better now than it was before LASIK, but it didn't last long. I opted not to get a touch up out of fear of my eyes getting even more dry. I use eye drops 5+ times per day. My dark night vision is worse than it was before, mostly a lack of contrast. It doesn't impact driving, but being in a very dim room feels like the gamma was slightly raised.

New comment by kingnothing in "A 10 year old Xeon is all you need"

kingnothing — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:56:29 +0000

I've never had a cpu die in the decades I've been using them. I've bought 10-20 year old computers that still work just fine. I kept my last MacBook for 9 years before I upgraded out of want for more RAM.

Most computer equipment fails quickly, otherwise you'll get a long life out of whatever it is.

New comment by kingnothing in "A 10 year old Xeon is all you need"

kingnothing — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:54:57 +0000

It's not terrible for interactive... https://mikeveerman.github.io/tokenspeed/?rate=12&mode=text

And it should be just fine for plenty of background use cases.

New comment by kingnothing in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

kingnothing — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:45:16 +0000

You pay per impression or per click, just like in all the rest of their ads. Except these have a higher CPC since you're the only featured brand to go along with paragraphs of text about why your shoes are the best.

New comment by kingnothing in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

kingnothing — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:43:50 +0000

Shitty startup idea of the day: pay developers $0.05 per commit message to inject an ad at the end of it in a git commit hook.

[PRJ-123] Fix the prod bug. This commit brought to you by Acme!

New comment by kingnothing in "The Siri for Families Apple Will Never Build"

kingnothing — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:19:09 +0000

It's so bad. This happens to me on a weekly basis:

"Get directions to "

"Getting directions to "