Hacker News: pge

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.

New comment by pge in "ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation"

pge — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 14:38:02 +0000

The current administration has set targets for numbers of people deported(which ICE is currently behind on). That creates an incentive to skip due process in order to get more people deported more quickly (and the awareness that there will no consequences for doing so probably contributes as well)

New comment by pge in "43-year-old Family Canoe Trip"

pge — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 16:02:00 +0000

That part of the Pacific is very sheltered by islands so it is often fairly calm. The First Nations people have hunted and traveled in canoes there for many generations (unlike the Inuit on the eastern arctic and in Greenland that used sealed kayaks where the water was rougher).

New comment by pge in "43-year-old Family Canoe Trip"

pge — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 12:40:11 +0000

If you watch the video at the end of the article, you may get a better sense of it

New comment by pge in "Framework's first desktop is a strange–but unique–mini ITX gaming PC"

pge — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:18:20 +0000

what about the Snapdragon? Microsoft is using in their ARM laptops

New comment by pge in "Inside Musk's Aggressive Incursion into the Federal Government"

pge — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 22:53:55 +0000

three selfish reasons everyone should be in favor of expanded medicaid (ie in favor of everyone having access to healthcare):

* healthy people are able to work and pay taxes

* when people don’t have access to regular care, they end up in the ER when things get really bad. All the rest of us pay the cost of those visits

* access to care (particularly vaccines like flu or covid) means less spread of disease and leas exposure to disease for the rest of us

New comment by pge in "Brave Care Has Closed"

pge — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 01:51:51 +0000

There are still a lot of low-income patients that are not covered by medicaid