Hacker News: pge

New comment by pge in "elect.horse"

pge — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:17:18 +0000

I am color blind (red-green) and have the same issue. Not a color-blind friendly color scheme...

New comment by pge in "Patrick Stewart has died"

pge — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:17:26 +0000

I had the pleasure of seeing mckellen play Richard III live, the show that became the film. Absolutely incredible!

Not in the same category of greatness, but apropos of this thread, I also saw Patrick Stewart playing Othello (in a reverse-race production), and that’s when I realized how good an actor he actually was.

New comment by pge in "A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W"

pge — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:09:11 +0000

The early printing presses in Britain were imported from the continent where the letter thorn was not used, so they didn’t have a thorn letter. The printers used either y or “th” (which was also already being used by scribes in place of thorn in parts of the country anyway) to replace thorn depending on how much space they had. Y followed by a superscript e was common way to print “the” when space was very limited.

New comment by pge in "The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind"

pge — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:55:16 +0000

My understanding was that it was not just the height but also the deck space and depth (the vertical sails have to extend down through the decks). Giving up that much cargo volume (in addition to issues at the dock you note) is not worth it.

New comment by pge in "How physicists track and trap the elusive neutrino"

pge — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:50:37 +0000

With the caveat that it’s been almost 30 years since I worked on neutrino oscillation, and I was just a student at the time, the way to detect neutrino oscillation is to look at the ratio of different kinds of neutrinos. If those ratios are different from the ratios calculated to be produced by the reaction at hand (eg a collision in a particle accelerator), then you know some of the neutrinos changed flavor.

New comment by pge in "Ferrari Luce"

pge — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:18:44 +0000

To what extent is the design a response to the constraints imposed by the electric drivetrain? The car is built around the engine. An EV has a large battery and small motor(s), while a gasoline sports car has a big engine in the front. I'm curious how much of the Luce design is a direct result of having to work around the drivetrain (noting that the Mustang Mach E also deviated significantly from the classic designs of past Mustangs in some of the same ways as the Luce deviates from past Ferraris).

New comment by pge in "Honda is killing its EVs"

pge — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:56:28 +0000

Not the OP but have a 20-year-old car. The relevant calculation is not cost of annual repair v value of car, but rather annual cost vs annual cost of a new car. Even if you amortize the upfront cost of a new car over 20 years, the increased insurance cost and (depending on where you live) property taxes plus some annual maintenance, at least for me, is substantially more expensive than annual maintenance on my current car.

New comment by pge in "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants"

pge — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:52:58 +0000

I get that - the question is why CMS would have addresses for undocumented immigrants at all (assuming for the moment it is only undocumented that they are looking for). Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, so how and why would CMS have their names and addresses?

New comment by pge in "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants"

pge — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:15:56 +0000

What is not clear to me from the article is what data they are getting from CMS. The article references Medicaid data, but everyone that has access to Medicaid is legally present in the country. They have to be to qualify. Some possiblities:

* They are going after people legally here on temporary visas such as SIV that give them access to medicaid

* They are going after people that are not on medicaid and have no insurance but received care (either emergency care or charity care) at a hospital or clinic that takes medicaid (I don’t know if hospitals capture this information for CMS).

* ?

New comment by pge in "Rob Reiner has died"

pge — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:32:45 +0000

The Enquirer also broke the John Edwards (vice-presidential candidate) affair story well before mainstream media picked it up. That doesn't make up for the reckless and sometimes completely nutso stories they print, but it is a reminder that they aren't always wrong.

New comment by pge in "The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia"

pge — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:10:58 +0000

There’s a reason for this. Prices that force cashiers to make change force them to run the transaction through the cash register so it is recorded, and the amount in the register can be checked at the end of a day or shift to detect theft. If prices are round numbers, such as $1, the cashier can pocket the payment.

New comment by pge in "This map is not upside down"

pge — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 18:16:37 +0000

For navigation, having the poles at top and bottom is really the only way to do it. Lining up positions of constant noon sun angle along a horizontal line (i.e. latitude line) makes the paper map correspond nicely to the navigational information available.

New comment by pge in "GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation"

pge — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:05:36 +0000

I would add to your list that MSFT also makes decent hardware now - surface laptops and xbox have both done well

New comment by pge in "The Ski Rental Problem"

pge — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 22:28:29 +0000

I would add that (having simulated this problem in code myself), the reason you have bad outcomes is that you run out of candidates and take a bad one because you have no choice. In real life, at some point you would grab a decent candidate even if s/he were not as good as a prior passed candidate. It is also true that even under the original assumptions, there is a wide range of thresholds around 1/e that yield a similar outcome.

New comment by pge in "Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?"

pge — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:47:43 +0000

We can agree to disagree. People said cycling would be clean after the '98 Festina affair because all eyes were on them. All that happened was that teams (that could afford it) switched from EPO to blood doping. The next Tour after everyone said the Festina bust had cleaned up cycling was Lance Armstrong's first win (1999).

New comment by pge in "Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?"

pge — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 12:11:28 +0000

I would argue that history suggests this is likely. The dopers have substantially more financial resources than the testers. EPO is a great example. It was widely used in cycling for almost 10 years before tests were developed. It was pretty much a miracle drug from a performance standpoint and undetectable. The very few cyclists that tried to blow the whistle were run out of the sport. Similarly, blood doping was widely used for a decade after the EPO test was developed and no one ratted out the teams doing it until USADA brought the hammer down on Armstrong.

It’s also worth thinking about the incentives to test and catch cheaters. Do the organizers of the Tour de France really want to bust the biggest names in the sport? That would destroy their livelihood. Do the national anti-doping authorities want the athletes from their country busted (look how many national antidopingborgs have successfully appealed adverse rulings through CAS)? It’s in everyone’s best interest to bust a low level doper here and there to make it look like they are watching but to ignore the big names that fans are coming to see. All of this is also why motor doping is unlikely. Motor doping leaves incontrovertible evidence of cheating. Positive drug tests can always be challenged as either inaccurate testing or unintentional contamination.

New comment by pge in "I Solved the Century-Old Mystery of a Miraculous Shipwreck Survivor"

pge — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 17:01:04 +0000

It's pretty impressive (and not always widely known) how much cold water impairs swimming ability. There are some good videos on this site - coldwatersafety.org - of Coast Guard volunteers trying to swim in 45deg water. They lose motor function before making it 20m or so. Only one is able to make the short distance to shore, and he is one of the largest guys and a professional rescue swimmer. A 6km swim in 45F water for someone that is not wearing protective clothing or well acclimated to cold water is not realistic.

New comment by pge in "Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students"

pge — Thu, 22 May 2025 22:09:25 +0000

The administration’s letter to Harvard (which they later claimed to have sent in error) made it clear that their intent is to root out what they perceive as liberal ideological bias at Harvard - nothing really to do with Israel, that was just an excuse. Whether there is a liberal bias is something I will leave others to debate (and if there is, whether that provides grounds for federal action, given the freedoms afforded by the first amendmemt), but I think the Administration’s actions had more to do with throwing red meat to the base than it did with an factual inquiry

New comment by pge in "The Awful German Language (1880)"

pge — Fri, 16 May 2025 11:32:08 +0000

The Norman invasion of England in 1066 led to extensive introduction of French vocabulary into English. That's a large part of the reason English has so many Latin cognates that you don't see in German (and German also has been purged of some Latin cognates at times as well).

New comment by pge in "Why I stopped angel investing after 15 years, and what I'm doing instead"

pge — Sat, 03 May 2025 16:43:46 +0000

I feel like this is not talked about enough. SAFEs are not the trouble-free investment vehicle that many people seem to think they are.