Hacker News: niwtsol

New comment by niwtsol in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

niwtsol — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 01:40:02 +0000

To share something different, it is less about what I have built, and more about what I have seen my friends (non-technical and technical) build. In a one month span I have seen a lawyer make a personal red line tool, a sales guy make a custom website for a golf trip, another friend make a 3d printing grid-finity project, a friend make a stl file to print a jig for his table saw, and another friend make a full mobile game. It is just really cool to see these micro-projects be created and shared, not only for the utility, but just to see my friends' childlike excitement showing off their project.

New comment by niwtsol in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

niwtsol — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:18:38 +0000

Got it, thanks for the response - I think my honest reaction is shocked by reading this. I was always good at math and it was such a source of pride and sense of accomplishment. In english I struggled, vowel sounds, grammar, it just didn't come naturally to me. I'm a little disheartened by this slide (for lack of a better word) of public school education, especially STEM.

New comment by niwtsol in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

niwtsol — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:13:25 +0000

I believe there are some public schools that have stopped giving homework for k-5 completely which is just shocking to me.

New comment by niwtsol in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

niwtsol — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:10:15 +0000

Could you elaborate on the reasoning they "strongly discourage math outside of school"? I'm genuinely curious how that would be a stance they take.

New comment by niwtsol in "The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)"

niwtsol — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:55:48 +0000

Don't you tell me the competition was in New Jersey...

New comment by niwtsol in "The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)"

niwtsol — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:02:34 +0000

Our high school computer science team did a StarCraft LAN party on a flight coming back from a coding competition. We felt like the coolest kids in the world when we did that.

New comment by niwtsol in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

niwtsol — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:28:50 +0000

You don't use AI at all? What is your main justification for not?

New comment by niwtsol in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

niwtsol — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:28:13 +0000

100% - I think that is also part of the divide you see online. Devs who work on massive codebases w/ 100s of engineers and see the bugs the LLMs create vs devs who work on smaller codebase w/ small <5 person team.

New comment by niwtsol in "CISA tries to contain data leak"

niwtsol — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:07:15 +0000

What an egregious mistake. "exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository" - isn't is git 101 to not put creds in git? What pattern do they think this is consistent with?

New comment by niwtsol in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

niwtsol — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:42:23 +0000

I think that is the glaring hole here - via an insane number of instruments from the various investments, they can reduce their tax liability (fed and state) to be very close to 0%. I believe a main idea of the wealth tax is to get around the insanely complicated tax code w/ all its loopholes.

New comment by niwtsol in "50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers"

niwtsol — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:52:29 +0000

Has there been any attempt for some sort of legislation that would allow utility solar or electric lines to be included in that?

New comment by niwtsol in "Claude Platform on AWS"

niwtsol — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:52:34 +0000

So claude.bedrock is where you run if you want complete data privacy, this - claude.aws - is just claude on/in AWS - is that the right core difference?

New comment by niwtsol in "The Burning Man MOOP Map"

niwtsol — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:37:14 +0000

FYI - Coffee at center camp was canceled as of 2022

New comment by niwtsol in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

niwtsol — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:27:40 +0000

Patagonia is up there for me in current day. Let my people go surfing by the founder is a great read IMO

New comment by niwtsol in "Haunting Photos Show the Aftermath of the Kursk Submarine Disaster in 2000"

niwtsol — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:19:41 +0000

I didn't realize how big the submarine actually was

- Ohio class - US' largest: 18,750 tonnes displaced submerged, 170m long, 13m beam

- Typohoon-class - USSR's biggest: 48,000 tonnes displaced, 175m long, 23m beam

- Oscar II-class (Kursk) - 19,400 tonnes submerged, 154m long, 18.2m beam

New comment by niwtsol in "OpenClaw privilege escalation vulnerability"

niwtsol — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:23:01 +0000

Title is a bit misleading, no? You have to have openclaw running on an open box. And the post even says "135k open instances" out of 500k running instances? so a bit clickbait-y

New comment by niwtsol in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

niwtsol — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:16:38 +0000

I believe it is by group - AWS started the weekly operations meeting, effectively every service's oncall from the last week had to attend. Then it grew massive, so they made it optional. Alexa had a similar meeting that tried to replicate what AWS did. A lot of time spent reviewing load tests getting ready for holiday season, prime day, and the superbowl (super bowl ads used to cause crazy TPS spikes for Alexa). And a lot of finger pointing if there was an outage from one team. While it probably did help raise the operational bar, so much time wasted by engineers on busywork/paperwork documenting an error or fix vs improving the actual service.

New comment by niwtsol in "Google Safe Browsing missed 84% of confirmed phishing sites"

niwtsol — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:18:05 +0000

Multiple comments that start w/ "what's interesting about" by this user and very similar formatting kind of answers that question on human vs bot. Weird internet we live in these days.

New comment by niwtsol in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

niwtsol — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:13:18 +0000

This is not exactly correct. If you have an M5 Pro chip instead of m5 Chip - I just built a 16inch, M5 Pro chip, it is $400 to go from 24 -> 48gb. An additional $200 ($600 over base) to go to 64gb. So the memory prices change based on chip. M5 Max Chip starts with 48gb of memory.

New comment by niwtsol in "A NASA Engineer Discovered a World of Semi Truck Aerodynamics by Accident"

niwtsol — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:59:32 +0000

Roger that - thanks for the OC graphs. In the first chart, the sloping cluster of data points, is that just the max torque output of the engine then? And the vertical clusters at ~950, ~1050, and ~1110 - can we assume those are some sort of cruise control or gearing outcome?

Also, your 28.5M+ miles driven is such a great stat - thanks for sharing this knowledge!