Hacker News: milch

New comment by milch in "Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death"

milch — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 07:38:42 +0000

I live in Seattle and anecdotally I have seen the number of people running red lights absolutely explode in the last two years. Literally from seeing once or twice pre-COVID to at least one a day. This is not an exaggeration, there's a particular light on my commute that I see at least one driver run per day. My theory is that in an effort to make the intersection safer they adjusted the lights so now there's a period where cars all have a red light while pedestrians are crossing. Meanwhile a certain segment of the population sees all cars in the intersection stopped and decides to slam it. It's a recipe for disaster given there's a middle school down the road from that light...

New comment by milch in "Zig Libc"

milch — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:59:24 +0000

The poster I replied to made an over exaggerated statement about the prominence of these two words, which I found hilarious, in the same way a teenager saying "I am LITERALLY DYING right now" after the barista spelled their name wrong on their coffee order would be hilarious. This was a very slight inconvenience to the poster's day (at best) that they could have dropped after deciding they don't care about events happening in a country they don't live in.

New comment by milch in "Zig Libc"

milch — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:34:59 +0000

It's kind of hilarious to call 2 single words at the end of a blogpost that you could have read over "pushing politics down your throat". As you said, you didn't even have an idea what it meant. For all you knew before you looked it up, he was complaining about the frigid winter weather.

New comment by milch in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"

milch — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 03:24:26 +0000

I'm not sure where you're getting that from in my comment. I never said US citizens should want H1Bs for everyone with zero vetting, only that they are a net tax positive.

It's not a dichotomy of maintaining the status quo or getting rid of H1b completely. At least in big tech companies, they do follow labor market tests and prevailing wage tests and so on that are designed to vet that there is an unmet need and that visa holders aren't underpaid. I won't deny there are visa mills and consultancies that game the system and pretty much explicitly just hire cheap foreign labor, but this is a thread about H1B in the context of Amazon layoffs, not InfoSys layoffs.

New comment by milch in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"

milch — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 03:22:24 +0000

If you have access to data that shows big tech is preferentially hiring visa holders over US citizens you should get on that class action lawsuit right away. That's probably hundreds of thousands or even millions per person in lost wages, and even after lawyers take their 30% cut, that's still a sizable chunk.

New comment by milch in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"

milch — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:19:52 +0000

Immigrants pay social security taxes, unemployment taxes, ... that they also will never be able to benefit from. Those are purely for the benefit of US citizens

New comment by milch in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"

milch — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:17:04 +0000

No, because H1B has pay requirements. As someone who went through the process with Amazon I can confirm that they definitely do offer you a salary that is in line with the local market. There might be lower incentive for raises down the line, but that's a conspiracy theory at best

New comment by milch in "Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster"

milch — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:52:27 +0000

> So all you want is your CEO to make repeated big bets and be consistently right?

Isn't that what they get the big pay package for?

New comment by milch in "Unifi Travel Router"

milch — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 07:40:29 +0000

I don't think they necessarily compete for the same market as some of these other routers. This seems way more compact than many of the other options on the market. I just briefly looked around on Amazon and even many other wifi 5 routers look to be about 2x or thicker than this one. Compared to the GL.inet Opal for example, it's about 20mm smaller in each dimension: 118 x 85 x 30mm (Opal) vs. 95.95 x 65 x 12.5 mm (Unifi). The Unifi is pretty close to a tiny 5000 mAh portable battery.

Now what I'd be really more interested in a Pro version, more so than wifi 6, would be a built-in modem with SIM/eSIM.

New comment by milch in "Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them"

milch — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:48:26 +0000

I find for me that doesn't work. I have to actively count calories to lose or maintain a healthy BMI range. If I don't, no matter what I eat, I end up stabilizing in the overweight category. I'm lucky enough that my wife has a very flexible work schedule where she is able to cook most meals for us, but she hates weighing everything out so I can track... we've tried to stop the tracking multiple times but it never works. I'll think I'm eating to the same satiety level as before, but I end up slowly creeping back up in weight. My wife is fine either with or without tracking for maintaining her weight, though she does also seem to have an easier time losing when she's counting her calories. I think this is why it's so hard to have discussions about it, people's experiences literally don't match even when they try the same things. I suspect I'd be one of those people that if they tried Ozempic would be able to lose tons of weight, and who would shoot back up as soon as they stopped, unless I track the whole time... at which point I wouldn't need the Ozempic in the first place

New comment by milch in "Koralm Railway"

milch — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 16:39:46 +0000

Trains are also just more comfortable. More space, more comfortable seats, more space for luggage, you can walk around, better bathrooms, easier to work from especially in the 4 seat configuration, … Personally I would always prefer the train even if it is a bit slower. Once you account for traffic a bus that is scheduled to be faster ends up slower anyway, especially when you really needed it to be on time

New comment by milch in "Everyone in Seattle hates AI"

milch — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 17:17:32 +0000

My impression is purely from a metrics perspective, people who were underperforming can really look like they are 3x as productive. AI is a real increase for them because it can do things they couldn't. It just gives them the ability to publish a thousand lines worth of PRs a day, which the regular and over performers have to review, but that shows up in THEIR metrics, not in the underperformer's metrics. If all you look at is metrics and KPIs and have no technical understanding, this looks amazing to you.

Most people I've worked with that were already some of the most productive before AI took off are still at the top, and AI didn't move the needle much for them. There's simply no way for them to do 3x the work.

New comment by milch in "What you can get for the price of a Netflix subscription"

milch — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:43:57 +0000

I use Kagi at home and Google at work, and IME Kagi results are much better compared to Google. It's easy enough to jump to Google by adding !g, but I never find myself actually using that... I do however end up doing the reverse, where I'll not find the result I'm looking for on my work computer and then quickly repeat the search on Kagi on my phone. I used to use DuckDuckGo on my personal devices before, and while it was mostly fine, I did have to jump to Google more frequently. In the end sometimes the results were better on DDG and sometimes on Google. I haven't really found any situation where Google results were better than Kagi (I do tend to prefer Google Images results, but I only very rarely use image search, maybe once a month).

There was also an instance recently where I was helping out a coworker get set up with something. I had done it earlier in the day, so I told him something like "type in $SEARCH_TERM, then go to the first page and copy the commands from there". He put it into Google, couldn't find the right result, tried a few variations, still couldn't find it. I pulled Kagi up on my phone, searched the same term, and slacked him the page while he was still looking around on Google.

New comment by milch in "Kagi Assistants"

milch — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 07:05:54 +0000

Some people are contrarian simply to be contrarian. I'm loving the features that are coming out. I use Translate, Assistant, Universal Summarizer, and (of course) Search multiple times a day. Not everything is going to be for everyone, I'm personally not really interested in News, but it certainly feels like I'm getting value out of my subscription. The only thing I'm actively missing with Assistant is a proper app - the PWA is fine but the keyboard glitches out sometimes, navigation is not as fluid/smooth as it could be on a native app, same with file/photo uploads, and notifications when you leave the app and the reply is done would really tie it together.

New comment by milch in "Kagi Assistants"

milch — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 06:37:22 +0000

A query I ran earlier ran for about 70s, and did 12 web searches and 2 site fetches.

New comment by milch in "Kagi Assistants"

milch — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 06:32:14 +0000

I've already used the Research assistant half a dozen times today and am super happy with the outcomes. It does seem to be more trigger happy with doing multiple searches based on information it found in earlier results, and I've found the resulting output to be reasonably accurate. Some models in particular seem to never want to do more than one search, and you can tell the output in those cases is often not very useful if the sources partially contradict each other or don't provide enough detail. The best I've found to avoid this is o3 pro, but o3 pro is very slow and expensive. If the Research assistant gets 85% of the results in half the time as o3 pro...

New comment by milch in "Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)"

milch — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:42:52 +0000

Depending on the CLI tool you could even forego memory management completely and just rely on the OS to clean up. If your program completely reads arbitrary files into memory it's probably not the best idea, but otherwise it can be a valid option. This is likely at least partly what happens when you run a benchmark like this - the C++ one cleans everything up nicely if you use smart pointers or manual memory management, while the Java tool doesn't even get to run GC at all, or if it does it only cleans up a percentage of the objects instead of all of them.

New comment by milch in "Microsoft: We see all the backlash and we know we have a lot to fix in Windows"

milch — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 04:01:22 +0000

I shudder to think what extra features they cram into Outlook for Windows considering Outlook for macOS is already bloated to hell. I've had to use it for the past few months due to our company upgrading the internal AD version (or something) while they built out the support for native macOS Calendar/Mail, and I hated every second of it

New comment by milch in "72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study"

milch — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 16:37:53 +0000

There are competitors like itch.io, which are specifically targeted towards indies

New comment by milch in "From VS Code to Helix"

milch — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:22:51 +0000

Maybe my hands are small, but to type []|\+= and not use my pinky I would either have to move my entire hand over or contort it even more to use my ring finger