Hacker News: nicholassmith

New comment by nicholassmith in "BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive"

nicholassmith — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:25:48 +0000

Quite a few actually, regular 911s often end up being daily drivers and given Porsche build them to last there's plenty of high milers out there.

New comment by nicholassmith in "The differences between an IndyCar and a F1 car"

nicholassmith — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 09:44:01 +0000

The World Endurance Championship has been using synthetic fuels since 2022 from TotalEnergies (https://competition.totalenergies.com/en/auto/endurance/wec/...), there's also Sustain (https://sustain-fuels.com/) in the UK as well who seem to be growing reasonably well but are a mix of sustainable & fossil fuels. There's some variability of how green they are, you still need to burn something so there's going to be emissions as well but they've been validated in the motorsport labs as being viable and they're starting to make their way to consumers.

New comment by nicholassmith in "I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)"

nicholassmith — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 08:23:19 +0000

Bigger equals better consumer perception, I imagine driven in part by the top-tier phones being larger to fit additional battery capacity in for the higher performance processors making all larger devices carry some premium cachet.

New comment by nicholassmith in "The $25k car is going extinct?"

nicholassmith — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 07:53:12 +0000

Renault at least are keeping the small car flame alive with the 5 and a new version of the Twingo. Audi's product strategy at the moment seems to be "try everything and pivot" so they might even end up relauching the A2 by accident.

New comment by nicholassmith in "The Rise and Fall of Toys 'R' Us (2018)"

nicholassmith — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:12:12 +0000

In the UK the toy chains The Entertainer and Smyths both expanded to fill the market, both usually seem to have a decent amount of footfall. Toys are an interesting product as the target market is, for the most part, not an online shopper.

New comment by nicholassmith in "Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf"

nicholassmith — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:39:35 +0000

Net profit was €1.14bn for 2024, which feels like a reasonable amount of money.

New comment by nicholassmith in "Show HN: Bayleaf – Building a low-profile wireless split keyboard"

nicholassmith — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 16:21:15 +0000

When I forget where I've stashed a specific symbol or similar I just check the Via QMK configuration tool, similar to when you're trying to learn the shortcut keys for a piece of software. Eventually it's muscle-memory, but it's nice to have a reference guide whilst you're building it.

New comment by nicholassmith in "WristPC Keyboard"

nicholassmith — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:15:28 +0000

That probably wasn't such a bad price when it was released: "In the fall of 1998 the WristPC wearable keyboard was introduced."

New comment by nicholassmith in "My Struggle with Doom Scrolling"

nicholassmith — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 17:43:07 +0000

I do the same thing (Motorola Razr rather than Samsung), and I've found that working on the smaller screen means I don't get sucked into things as it's useful for quickly checking on a limited set of apps but doesn't lend itself to a "open app => consume => next app" cycle.

New comment by nicholassmith in "Virtual Vette – Racing Simulator Built from Wrecked Corvette"

nicholassmith — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:47:58 +0000

I actually see quite a lot of elaborate rigs that go for the trusty Logitech/Thrustmaster belt drive wheels, I guess if you've got it and it's working fine for you then build around what you've got. I on the other hand am terrible for gear acquisition syndrome so I'll skip the impressive car-in-house rig to chase the next upgrade.

New comment by nicholassmith in "SpaceX Seeks Approval to Turn Texas Starbase Site into New City"

nicholassmith — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 14:38:26 +0000

I'm sure that this won't end up going the way of Fordlandia.

New comment by nicholassmith in "The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding"

nicholassmith — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 16:08:16 +0000

I suspect you're right, but I think it'll follow the COBOL engineer salary cycle, engineers that have a deeper understanding of the whole widget will be in demand when companies remember they need them.

New comment by nicholassmith in "How I configure my Git identities"

nicholassmith — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:29:28 +0000

I use different accounts for my work GitHub and my personal GitHub, so this approach would be great if I shared a machine for both of them to keep separation.

New comment by nicholassmith in "Why wordfreq will not be updated"

nicholassmith — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 15:39:08 +0000

I've seen plenty of comments here that read like they've been generated by an LLM, if this is a gated community we need a better gate.

New comment by nicholassmith in "1M Users"

nicholassmith — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 08:24:47 +0000

Almost 40 as well, also tired of social media but I do miss social networks. This seems to hew more closely to the social network concept than being a media outlet which is lovely to see coming back.

New comment by nicholassmith in "Study: Consumers Actively Turned Off by AI"

nicholassmith — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 09:34:09 +0000

Whilst watching the Olympics I've seen an eToro ad a few times that is very clearly AI generated, it wasn't exactly a confidence builder in a financial platform.

New comment by nicholassmith in "Another AI company wrote us and here’s our response"

nicholassmith — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 16:27:09 +0000

Another take on this point, the race to the bottoming of shirts has been a disaster ecologically and has fostered a throwaway culture where people don't take care or pride in an item of clothing. There's benefits on reducing the barrier to entry, but profound downsides to it as well.

New comment by nicholassmith in "Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams"

nicholassmith — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 08:29:28 +0000

I did some research on this recently and it's a bit tricky to pin down as some of the information is out of date or doesn't include certain services, but the three that appear to be the best on payouts are: Tidal, Quobuz and Napster.

New comment by nicholassmith in "Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age"

nicholassmith — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 13:54:29 +0000

I actually quite like it as a reminder of the gentle chaos of the early web before the vibe shift to homogenous design.

New comment by nicholassmith in "“When you use a Walkman all the memories come back”: In love with old tech"

nicholassmith — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 10:52:53 +0000

You don't have to, but it does often feel like when you use Spotify that isn't what the app would like you to do. The initial load in heavily steers you towards using a playlist instead and whilst it will occasionally list albums on the home screen it's often broken and will give you a single instead. I'm a huge Spotify user and listen to a lot of albums on it, but there's definitely merits for a more focussed experience like physical media or a digital player.