Hacker News: medler

New comment by medler in "I gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job and it finished in 30 minutes"

medler — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:38:16 +0000

Qwen is very much censored. Just try asking it about Tiananmen or how to build a bomb. But it is nice that you can experiment with it locally without having to worry about your account getting nuked

New comment by medler in "Buy Your Friends Batteries"

medler — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:12:38 +0000

The battery linked in the article (https://eu.ecoflow.com/products/stream-series-solar-battery) advertises a 15 year lifespan and 10 year warranty. Personally I would expect batteries to last longer than that but 12 years feels fair

New comment by medler in "Europe EV Sales BEVs Jump 50% & Reach 26% Market Share"

medler — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:27:48 +0000

In the U.S. our standard outlets are 120V, so you only get about 1kW or so out of them. Plenty for most people, but annoying if you need >50 miles of range a day, or if you want to boil water in an electric kettle. The situation is much better in Europe, and most of the rest of the world, where you have 220+V

New comment by medler in "Europe EV Sales BEVs Jump 50% & Reach 26% Market Share"

medler — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:47:38 +0000

I agree charging at home/work is best, and ideally we would have ubiquitous slow charging at apartment lots, workplaces, and on the street. But that’s not really realistic right now in the U.S., and more importantly, it isn’t under Tesla’s control. Whereas they could have solved the problem for people with less charging access by making their fast charging faster like BYD has done.

With respect to your phone analogy, if I weren’t able to charge my phone at home or at work, I would definitely be interested in being able to fast-charge it at some conveniently located business

New comment by medler in "Europe EV Sales BEVs Jump 50% & Reach 26% Market Share"

medler — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:15:05 +0000

What is terrible about charging at home from a regular outlet? As long as you average <50-60 miles a day, like most people, you basically never have to go to fast chargers (or gas stations). It’s amazing.

New comment by medler in "Europe EV Sales BEVs Jump 50% & Reach 26% Market Share"

medler — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:11:50 +0000

I’m convinced super-fast charging will be a game changer, because it will eliminate the ~only remaining downside to EVs. If Tesla had charging tech like BYD the market in the U.S. would look very different

New comment by medler in "First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star"

medler — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:59:00 +0000

Uploaded for the lazy: https://imgur.com/a/0I8f8DG

New comment by medler in "AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence"

medler — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:01:43 +0000

That’s the one out of three that’s not bad

New comment by medler in "AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence"

medler — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:01:19 +0000

Take it up with geohot

New comment by medler in "AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence"

medler — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:47:11 +0000

Strange way to structure an argument. He seems to be arguing in favor of local models, but most of his examples are reasons local models are bad.

New comment by medler in "Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: study"

medler — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:49:51 +0000

This is one study with 20 subjects and has never been replicated. There have since been multiple studies and reviews that have found no effect on hair loss or follicle health

New comment by medler in "The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients"

medler — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:24:47 +0000

Is criticism is directly, and convincingly, addressed in the article.

> Some of what’s driving the seed oil panic isn’t wrong — it’s just misattributed. Ultra-processed food really is a problem. . . . But seed oils are not why ultra-processed food behaves that way. They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.

New comment by medler in "Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house"

medler — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:42:12 +0000

> investigators determined Bradley had violated State Police policies, and he was suspended for one day.

New comment by medler in "In the UK, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars, thanks to Chinese competition"

medler — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:30:36 +0000

This has already happened in Norway, where 96% of new cars sold are EVs. They didn’t ban combustion but they did support adoption with subsidies and other incentives

New comment by medler in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

medler — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:55:13 +0000

For me the killer feature of jj is how much easier it makes rebasing. With git, if I knew a coworker had recently merged changes to a file I’d been working on, I would really dread syncing because I knew there was a good chance I’d get stuck in rebase hell.

With jj, you still have to deal with conflicts, but you can do it on your own time, so I never fear syncing anymore. Also, on the rare occasion that I mess up a merge, I no longer have to pull out my git sorcerer hat to fix it. I just `jj undo` and it’s like it never happened.

New comment by medler in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

medler — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:52:13 +0000

jj has far fewer warts than git. You don’t have to learn every jj idiom, you just have to find a workflow you like, which you will, quickly, because it’s so easy to use. Personally I don’t know why anyone uses `edit` but if they like it then I’m happy for them.

New comment by medler in "Evaluating AGENTS.md: are they helpful for coding agents?"

medler — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:45:12 +0000

Quite a surprising result: “across multiple coding agents and LLMs, we find that context files tend to reduce task success rates compared to providing no repository context, while also increasing inference cost by over 20%.”

New comment by medler in "HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark"

medler — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:37 +0000

The FDA has approved it for men up to age 45. I myself got it in my late thirties at a pharmacy. For one of the shots, the pharmacist hassled me a little, asking if I was high risk, but acquiesced when I told them I was. For the other two, they just gave me the shot. It was also covered by my insurance.

New comment by medler in "HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark"

medler — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 23:44:03 +0000

Gardasil is usually a three-shot series. You may want to go back and get those followup shots

New comment by medler in "The entire New Yorker archive is now digitized"

medler — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 23:53:35 +0000

It runs great on windows 11. The install took a long time but I didn’t have to do anything special to make it work