Hacker News: lr1970

New comment by lr1970 in "Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly""

lr1970 — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:12:16 +0000

> As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in.

What's about EU? EU is bigger than the USA in total population and it has comparable if not larger total GDP. Why did not they step in where USA failed?

New comment by lr1970 in "California's Battery Array Is as Powerful as 12 Nuclear Power Plants"

lr1970 — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:59:12 +0000

> > For the first time, California discharged just over 12,000 megawatts, equivalent to 12 large nuclear plants, of energy from its battery arrays.

Clueless journalist conflates power (megawatts) with energy. They need physics 101. For electrical energy common unit is megawattHour (megawatt drawn for entire hour). A smaller unit would be megaJoule (megawatt drawn for 1 second).

New comment by lr1970 in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

lr1970 — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:03:35 +0000

> My favorite hilarious metric is measuring the amount of work done by counting lines of code written per day

Or by hours spent in the office

New comment by lr1970 in "GM just laid off IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills"

lr1970 — Tue, 12 May 2026 10:03:48 +0000

UX in my Audi Q5 (2024) is terrible. With two phones in the car you never know which one is connected and whose google maps is being currently displayed. And then come the buttons designed with a contempt for a driver. I recently had to change a flat tire which is a story in itself. German engineering is soooo different these days.

New comment by lr1970 in "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left"

lr1970 — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:02:01 +0000

> pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices.

Or you can have your own negotiated private pricing which is a whole different story in itself.

New comment by lr1970 in "GPT-5.5"

lr1970 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:19:51 +0000

When I ask GPT-5.5 about its knowledge cutoff date it says "August 2025". Really?

New comment by lr1970 in "Claude Opus 4.7"

lr1970 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:45:46 +0000

Just asked Claude Code with Opus-4.6. The answer was short "Drive. You need a car at the car wash".

No surprises, works as expected.

New comment by lr1970 in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

lr1970 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 23:16:16 +0000

There was a Tacker Carlson interview with Sam Altman where Tacker probed him on Balaji's murder and Sam quickly got confused and disoriented. Make your own conclusions.

New comment by lr1970 in "FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers"

lr1970 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:09:15 +0000

An opportunity for Apple to resurrect Airport line of WiFi routers (I love Airport Extreme) and on-shore their production.

New comment by lr1970 in "Fyn: An uv fork with new features, bug fixes, stripped telemetry"

lr1970 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:43:28 +0000

> and uv forcing it into a single project directory made it quite inconvenient and unnecessary duplication of the same sets of libraries.

Actually, uv intelligently uses hardlinks or reflinks to avoid file duplication. On the surface, venvs in different projects are duplicate, but in reality they reference the same files in the uv's cache.

BTW, pixi does the same. And `pixi global` allows you to create global environments in central location if you prefer this workflow.

EDIT: I forgot to mention an elephant in the room. With agentic AI coding you do want all your dependencies to be under your project root. AI agents run in sandboxes and I do not want to give them extra permissions pocking around in my entire storage. I start an agent in the project root and all my code and .venv are there. This provides sense of locality to the agent. They only need to pock around under the project root and nowhere else.

New comment by lr1970 in "Fyn: An uv fork with new features, bug fixes, stripped telemetry"

lr1970 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:37:50 +0000

> How is pixi better than uv?

pixi is a general multi-languge, multi-platform package manager. I am using it now on my new macbook neo as a homebrew _replacement_. Yes, it goes beyond python and allows you to install git, jj, fzf, cmake, compilers, pandoc, and many more.

For python, pixi uses conda-forge and PyPI as package repos and relies on uv's rattler dependency resolver. pixi is as fast as uv (it uses fast code path from uv) but goes further beyond python wheels. For detail see [0] or google it :-)

[0] https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/

New comment by lr1970 in "Fyn: An uv fork with new features, bug fixes, stripped telemetry"

lr1970 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:26:27 +0000

Would be more logical to use FYN_ prefix

New comment by lr1970 in "Fyn: An uv fork with new features, bug fixes, stripped telemetry"

lr1970 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:23:12 +0000

From fyn's roadmap:

> 2. Centralized venv storage — keep .venvs out of your project dirs

I do not like this. virtual environments have been always associated with projects and colocated with them. Moving .venv to centralized storage recreates conda philosophy which is very different from pip/uv approach.

In any case, I am using pixi now and like it a lot.

New comment by lr1970 in "GPT-5.4"

lr1970 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:22:21 +0000

> I wonder how much can I read into it about gpt-5.4's personality.

Modeled on Sam Altman's personality :-)

New comment by lr1970 in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

lr1970 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:28:41 +0000

How to tell a software engineer from a real one? A real engineer thinks that 1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes while software engineer believes that there are 1024 meters in a kilometer :-)

New comment by lr1970 in "Television is 100 years old today"

lr1970 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 22:43:02 +0000

Another important person in creation of the TV technology was Vladimir Zworykin [0]. He developed cathode-ray tube based TV transmission devices that he patented in 1923 and 1925.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_K._Zworykin

New comment by lr1970 in "Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension"

lr1970 — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:06:57 +0000

I thought that Anthropic and OpenAI created precedents that legitimize libgen and Anna archive. They pillaged all the books and scientific papers from those archives and got away with it. Why not the rest of us?

New comment by lr1970 in "Private equity is killing private ownership: first it was housing, now it's PCs"

lr1970 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:04:18 +0000

About four years ago, during COVID, there was a shortage of chips for cars, fueled in part by PE scalpers hoarding chips. Sounds familiar?

EDIT: more accurate language

New comment by lr1970 in "Open-source Zig book"

lr1970 — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 13:19:02 +0000

The biggest red flag for me is the author hiding their name. If you wrote quality book about a programming language you are not hiding your identity from the world.

New comment by lr1970 in "Remembering Steve Jobs"

lr1970 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 22:05:00 +0000

One of the best movies about history of Apple and people involved is "Pirates Of Silicon Valley". Pretty accurate portrayal of Steve Jobs, Woz and the rest.