Hacker News: netrus

New comment by netrus in "Allow babywearing carriers on planes"

netrus — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:48:35 +0000

To add my and data as someone who recently got a third child: number one question i get askes is whether we are going to move (we live in an apartment in the city) number two is a comment about cars size. So I am pretty sure people consider this when they think about having another child.

New comment by netrus in "Imagine 130M Washing Machines"

netrus — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:49:29 +0000

One city has a millionaire who builds a yacht for 100M dollars in a local shipyard and uses it for holidays. The neighbor city has a millionaire who spends 100M dollars to build 10 ferries he gifts to the city. The general population is clearly better off in the second case, even if it does not matter for the workers in the shipyard.

New comment by netrus in "Apple Will Transition from the CTF to the CTC for EU Businesses"

netrus — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:21:56 +0000

I think the core idea is to avoid someone actually losing money. The producer might end up with a loss, the actor's profit is strictly positive (not accounting for opportunity costs...).

New comment by netrus in "Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta"

netrus — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 13:40:37 +0000

It's important to be precise because everything is not the same. In the German case the ruling was not because someone posted a critical meme, but because it was not entirely obvious the picture was edited (as in: you and I can immediately see the photo was edited, but some people will not recognize the edit). I do not agree with the ruling, but as a citizen I am happy that in Germany we still care if claims are true or not (and try to prevent people from lying).

New comment by netrus in "The Internet Archive takes over foreign dissertations from Leiden University"

netrus — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 20:21:58 +0000

You are of by a factor of 10.

New comment by netrus in "The heiress at Harvard who helped revolutionize murder investigations"

netrus — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 15:09:10 +0000

Any educated reader can be assumed to interpret 'heiress' as 'heiress to a fortune' in this context.

New comment by netrus in "Grok-2 Beta Release"

netrus — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 07:37:56 +0000

The irreversibility is still important to highlight, as it is distinctively different from a similar consent issue with search: "Google indexed my website against my will, but I will just forbid them to include me in search results going forward".

New comment by netrus in "Google search won't autocomplete searches related to Trump assasination attempt"

netrus — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 16:22:20 +0000

The only winning move is not to play.

New comment by netrus in "So you want to rent an NVIDIA H100 cluster? 2024 Consumer Guide"

netrus — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 20:03:11 +0000

Hydro power is a great thing, it was the first renewable energy that was available in meaningful quantities. However, great sites for hydro power are definitely limited. We will not suddenly find a great spot for a new huge dam. Imagine the only source of vegan B12 to be some obscure plant that can only be grown on a tiny island. In this scenario, the possible extend of vegan consumption is fixed.

New comment by netrus in "Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid"

netrus — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 19:55:05 +0000

Just to add to that: Any fluctuation in prices works to incentivise storage, negative prices are not so special in that regard.

Negative prices allow for some weird actions to become profitable - like starting an empty washing machine, turning in the light in an empty room or needlessly heating some water tank. Basically everything we are used to think of as waste. It sounds absurd, but it's not really a big deal.

New comment by netrus in "Ask HN: In the event of an apocalypse, how long until we could produce CPUs?"

netrus — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 19:35:49 +0000

That's a very optimistic outlook after it was revealed what preparations had been taken to deal with a global pandemic, a risk scenario that at least every country had a playbook for.

I just think it is not possible to meaningfully prepare for a once-in-a-century event. You simply cannot sustain significant budgets for such scenarios.

New comment by netrus in "United Airlines CEO says the airline will consider alternatives to Boeing"

netrus — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 18:08:32 +0000

Stocks can fall quite a bit before a company fails. Aviation is full of companies with huge revenue and tiny profits/valuations.

New comment by netrus in "First look at Microsoft 365 Copilot"

netrus — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 15:47:48 +0000

Because correctly assigning blame does not solve any issue caused by the racism?

New comment by netrus in "'Weird Al' Roasts Spotify's Artist Payout System in Year-End Wrapped Video"

netrus — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 15:26:51 +0000

If the pot size stays the same, you are just shuffling around between artists. So artists who are listened to by people who only listen to a bit of music benefit, and those listened to by people who listen to a lot of music get less.

I guess there are two groups of people who listen to a lot of music:

1) young people

2) people who like music a lot.

So bad news for Taylor Swift AND obscure bands only interesting to enthusiasts. Not sure that's better overall. I would prefer a system that is regressive, that pays more for the first 1k listens than the last 1k - but that's definitely not fair :)

New comment by netrus in "Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty"

netrus — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:18:09 +0000

It's a tautology, as no implementation of a concept will ever be equivalent to the pure concept. The real existing examples of implementations of concepts will still tell you something about the viability of the concept.

New comment by netrus in "Google's advanced music generation model and two new AI experiments"

netrus — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 11:28:05 +0000

As drawing discoveries are hardly a thing, I see no ambiguity here.

New comment by netrus in "Visualizing American inflation across eight categories"

netrus — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 12:52:01 +0000

It's an artifact of how the measurement is made, as it accounts for insurance profits. While a good proxy in normal times, corona sent this measure into a wild rollercoaster-ride. However, it is generally a good idea not to change the method of measuring because you do not like the measures in the short term. The most important measure is the headline number (and MoM is more informative than YoY in these times), as it is the basis for actual politics. The headline number absorbs a lot of craziness in the underlying measures.

New comment by netrus in "Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started"

netrus — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 14:18:05 +0000

By flipping thousands of coins for this paper, I am sure their participation exceeds that of many 5-author-papers.

New comment by netrus in "Terry Tao's generals (2012)"

netrus — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 08:03:29 +0000

I can imagine that many great academics might have difficulties 'holding a job'. A PhD is certainly something to be proud of, just as running a marathon, raising a great child or having a great corporate career.

New comment by netrus in "Marvel Visual Effects Workers Vote to Unionize"

netrus — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 19:34:20 +0000

Wherever there is a Tarif, there are Außertarifliche Angestellte who can freely negotiate their salary, if it is at least 110% of highest Tarifgehalt. Unions cannot do anything about layoffs because that's the job of the workers council. Who are quite powerful in that regard . Unions are for coordination across the whole industry. Sure, you can still have a toxic boss - bit she cannot fire you at will!