Hacker News: radpanda

New comment by radpanda in "Travel locally, where you are"

radpanda — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:36:24 +0000

If you’re an American, I highly, highly recommend the book American Ramble by Neil King, Jr. The one-sentence summary is “a guy walks from Washington to New York” but he connects with history (and the present) at a walking pace along the way, experiencing much more than the typical Washington->NYC traveler.

New comment by radpanda in "World Capitals Voronoi"

radpanda — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:19:54 +0000

I dunno, New Zealand getting a big chunk of Antarctica is a pretty big percentage gain too.

New comment by radpanda in "Farmer donates land for a park, city sells it for $10M as data center land"

radpanda — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:40:50 +0000

That reminds me of the story of the university librarian who lived frugally and left his savings to the university, which went ahead and spent a million of those dollars on a silly football scoreboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morin_(librarian)

New comment by radpanda in "Facing heavy losses, Honda cancels its three US-made electric vehicles"

radpanda — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:10:01 +0000

> "nova" is not a Spanish word

Nova is Spainish for nova.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova

New comment by radpanda in "The MacBook Neo"

radpanda — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:54:11 +0000

Hotel branding might be worse. Marriott has 30+ brands, each supposedly with its own identity but I can’t really see how having that many makes sense. Should I stay at the Fairfield or the AC or the Four Points or the Aloft or the Moxy or the CitizenM … how about just the Marriott?

New comment by radpanda in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

radpanda — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:48:03 +0000

I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider.

The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.

New comment by radpanda in "Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)"

radpanda — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:38:29 +0000

I feel like I’ve seen essentially this same comment every time a Lego thread comes up but there doesn’t seem to be unanimous agreement on which brick toys are better. Sure, some people have good experiences with brand X but others will say they’ve had bad luck with the construction. Someone else will talk up Brand Y and someone else will point out how terrible the instructions are. Are there any brands that actually do consistently deliver a Lego-quality experience without the Lego price?

New comment by radpanda in "Facebook is cooked"

radpanda — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:26:13 +0000

I haven't used Facebook in probably a decade or so. I've missed out on Facebook Marketplace apparently - at least 5 people in this thread mention using Facebook for that specifically, and I have heard numerous friends talk about snagging good stuff person-to-person like I used to do with Craigslist. OTOH, I haven't heard anything especially good about Facebook Marketplace's UI or features, just that "everyone is on Facebook", so it reaches a lot of people.

I wonder what will be next after Facebook Marketplace dwindles (assuming eventually "everyone" is no longer on Facebook). Going back to Craigslist? Something new?

New comment by radpanda in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

radpanda — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:16:42 +0000

I dunno, I’ve been doing some genealogy research and looking at a lot of newspapers from the 1800’s. It’s striking to me how much they are essentially Facebook. Sure, on the front page there’s the news of the day, but on the inside are jokes, riddles, local notes on who visited who and where. And the ads. Literal snake oil! As well as all sorts of other sketchy tonics for curing any sort of “ill constitution”.

I think those of us on this forum likely grew up in a golden age of ads being relatively harmless, but I’m not sure that’s the normal state.

New comment by radpanda in "The $100B megadeal between OpenAI and Nvidia is on ice"

radpanda — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:34:40 +0000

If the ice cream cone won't lick itself, who will?

New comment by radpanda in "TÜV Report 2026: Tesla Model Y has the worst reliability of all 2022–2023 cars (2025)"

radpanda — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:31:54 +0000

I’m an American living in a state with no roadworthyness inspections so I don’t have any first hand experience with this. But in previous threads, people have mentioned that the typical thing to do is, at the vehicle service (oil change or whatever) prior to the inspection, you mention “hey, my car needs to get the roadworthyness inspection soon, can you look it over for that while it’s in the shop?”. And if something is wrong, it’ll be brought to your attention and fixed before the official inspection. Then you show up for the official inspection and oftentimes, it goes smoothly. The pro-Tesla theory is that BEVs require less service so people don’t catch these things prior to official inspection.

Seems like if that’s true of BEVs generally one could find similar trends with Nissan Leafs, etc.

New comment by radpanda in "US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes"

radpanda — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:44:07 +0000

It seems to me that moving to lower cost-of-living cities did have a remote work boom, but it wasn’t evenly distributed. People from HCOL areas still wanted a high level of services (restaurant, airport, healthcare, recreation opportunities, etc) and probably a cool “vibe”. So the people fleeing SF and LA didn’t move to Dayton and Topeka and Duluth, but they did go to Boise and Bozeman and Asheville.

New comment by radpanda in "Singapore to cane scammers as billions lost in financial crimes"

radpanda — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:25:51 +0000

I’ve never been there but whenever I read something about it I get the vibe that they’re an HOA with a military.

New comment by radpanda in "Baseball durations after the pitch clock"

radpanda — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 21:23:39 +0000

To be pedantic I don’t think the 3-batter rule mentions relief pitchers. If a team wanted to use an opening pitcher to face only the first batter and then replace him, that would also be against the rules.

https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/three-batter-minimum

New comment by radpanda in "U.S. hits new low in World Happiness Report"

radpanda — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 23:04:05 +0000

I think it’s about momentum. The perception is that the US is in some ways getting worse and Mexico is getting better.

Who is better off, the software engineer who lost her $250k job and had to settle for a new job that pays $150k, or the teacher who found a new job and got a raise from $50k to $70k? The software engineer might be better off while simultaneously less happy about their situation.

New comment by radpanda in "Tesla market share in US drops to lowest since 2017"

radpanda — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 02:08:22 +0000

My understanding is that the Lucid Air Pure is more efficient than Tesla’s offerings, but yes, Teslas have tended to be more efficient than compliance BEVs and a lot of other efforts from legacy automakers.

New comment by radpanda in "Tesla market share in US drops to lowest since 2017"

radpanda — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 02:04:51 +0000

> Ford makes plenty of sedans

Does it? Since they stopped building the Mondeo in Europe they don’t sell any sedans there or in most places I’m aware of. The only Ford sedan I’m aware of in production anywhere is the Chinese-market Ford Mondeo built in a joint venture with Changan.

New comment by radpanda in "Chrome extension that replaces occurrences of 'the cloud' with 'my butt'"

radpanda — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 14:51:38 +0000

I worked at a three-letter agency when the prefix “cyber-” became widely used, and widely disliked. I remember someone there distributed a similar browser extension that changed every instance of “cyber” to “computery”.

New comment by radpanda in "Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales"

radpanda — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 21:10:46 +0000

The DoD is legally mandated to pass an audit but consistently doesn’t: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4992913-pentagon-fails-7t...

New comment by radpanda in "Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie"

radpanda — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 13:56:38 +0000

> There are, in fact, 88 approved Icelandic names with this exact pattern of declension, and they all end with “dur”, “tur” or “ður”.

…

> But that quickly breaks down. There are other names ending with “ður” or “dur” that follow a different pattern of declension

My “everything should be completely orderly” comp-sci brain is always triggered by these almost trivial problems that end up being much more interesting.

Is the suffix pattern based on the pronunciation of the syllable(s) before the suffix? If one wanted to improve upon your work for unknown names, rather than consider the letters used, would you have to do some NLP on the name to get a representation of the pronunciation and look that up (in a trie or otherwise)?