Hacker News: organsnyder

New comment by organsnyder in "The Amazon tax"

organsnyder — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:00:09 +0000

Interesting. I always click through to the regular search instead of waiting for the AI results to load, under the assumption that they'll be even worse (somehow) than normal search. Maybe I should give it a try.

New comment by organsnyder in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

organsnyder — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:56:24 +0000

You're always free to purchase a new laptop, though.

New comment by organsnyder in "In Australia, a Home Battery Boom Has Helped Cut Wholesale Power Prices in Half"

organsnyder — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:28:58 +0000

It's much more difficult when the ownership of the vehicles isn't centralized.

New comment by organsnyder in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

organsnyder — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:28:14 +0000

Workplaces (and other locations) could offer free/reduced-cost charging, with the caveat that V2L is required. They could guarantee that the vehicle will be at a certain charge level at a designated time, and that the vehicle will never go below a threshold (in case an unanticipated trip is required).

New comment by organsnyder in "Midlife Vascular Risk Burden and Dementia-Free Survival Years"

organsnyder — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:10:25 +0000

This is a question for your doctor.

New comment by organsnyder in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

organsnyder — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:13:13 +0000

I'd argue that seriously upending global energy markets (and perhaps the entire economy) is quite a high cost.

New comment by organsnyder in "Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench"

organsnyder — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:07:32 +0000

Musk definitely gives Dukat vibes.

New comment by organsnyder in "Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality"

organsnyder — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:00:45 +0000

Exactly. I've lost count of the number of times I've found a brand I liked, only to see quality go downhill after the company tries to scale too quickly, gets bought out, goes public, etc.

New comment by organsnyder in "The death and rebirth of my home server"

organsnyder — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:48:18 +0000

I run a k8s cluster in my homelab, with Longhorn providing storage. Except for some extra-large volumes for bulk storage (just movies in Jellyfin right now), everything is replicated three ways. I've had nodes fail to boot up after a power outage (turned out to be a dead CMOS battery) and procrastinated bringing them back up because everything just kept working.

New comment by organsnyder in "The death and rebirth of my home server"

organsnyder — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:45:26 +0000

I run a fairly large homelab (probably ~10 nodes when including OPNSense routers, backup NAS at our cottage, etc.), and hardware failures have been incredibly rare, especially compared to what it used to be a couple of decades ago (I had quite a few motherboards fail due to blown capacitors due to the stolen electrolyte formula scandal).

Hardware failures tend to follow a bathtub curve: there are more frequent failures early on due to manufacturing defects, then they become rare until you reach the end of the natural lifespan of the equipment. That is shorter for some components (spinning rust HDDs, fans, CMOS batteries, power supplies in noisy environments), but extremely long for others.

New comment by organsnyder in "Qwen 3.8"

organsnyder — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:27:53 +0000

I had a fun conversation with Qwen 3.5 a while back. I ended up getting it to admit that it was complicit in the coverup of the Tiananmen Square massacre. This was running locally—it wouldn't surprise me if they had additional safeguards for their hosted service.

New comment by organsnyder in "Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone"

organsnyder — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:19:31 +0000

Back in elementary school, I used Applescript in Hypercard to get around the restrictions on our school computers. Kids always find ways.

New comment by organsnyder in "Ways to think about token pricing"

organsnyder — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:16:48 +0000

Prices will come down when the stupid money isn't all going to datacenter buildouts.

New comment by organsnyder in "Just Pay the Subscription"

organsnyder — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:00:27 +0000

Software used to work like this. You'd pay for a shrink-wrapped product, and the only updates you'd ever get (if you're lucky) would be for major bugfixes.

Subscriptions have gotten ridiculous, but with the way we've come to expect frequent updates the pay-once model isn't sustainable for many products.

New comment by organsnyder in "Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks"

organsnyder — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:36:06 +0000

Same! It's in Dropbox now. I found the source from the very first code I got paid to write, back in 1998. I was 14, and mostly self-taught. One of these days I'm going to run it through static analysis and see how many security holes there were.

New comment by organsnyder in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

organsnyder — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:50:21 +0000

I typically stay in the middle of the lane, but will drift to one side when I'm passing a vehicle that is wider or potentially erratic. I've never noticed lane-keeping fighting me when there's a car next to me; I wonder if they use the blind spot sensors to detect when to give some leeway in these situations.

New comment by organsnyder in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

organsnyder — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:02:09 +0000

I have two vehicles with lane keeping (a 2017 Chrysler and a 2025 Ford). Both of them work quite well. The system in the Chrysler will nudge you back if you drift outside of your lane, while the system in the Ford will do that plus automatically stay centered in the lane when cruise control is active.

I have driven vehicles that have lane departure warnings without lane keeping, and they're much less useful.

New comment by organsnyder in "Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new"

organsnyder — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:57:30 +0000

I hear this sentiment repeated a lot, but I've never seen it to be true in practice. My kids' teachers absolutely do nurture creativity, and I don't think our school district is particularly unique.

New comment by organsnyder in "PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform"

organsnyder — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:22:23 +0000

I've found the same with Mastadon. It has a pre-eternal-September feel to it.

New comment by organsnyder in "Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers"

organsnyder — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:21:56 +0000

Principal version: similar, but also says the only acceptable approach is to do it like they did it at their last company.