Hacker News: richwater

New comment by richwater in "Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models"

richwater — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:19:58 +0000

One thing that plagues [insert current FAANG] is the large amount of corpus knowledge that is outdated/misleading or just plain wrong. I'm curious how this addresses that if it's deriving the reward function from the corpus itself.

New comment by richwater in "International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF)"

richwater — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:36:08 +0000

This is quite the claim (and I'm not saying you are wrong from making it).

I just would have expected some of these institutions to be better.

New comment by richwater in "Zigbee vs. Matter over Thread:Understanding IoT Protocol Performance in Practice"

richwater — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:59:54 +0000

Is there a situation in which your smarthome taking 30s to recover from a node failure is impacting your life? Seems like a distinction without a difference

New comment by richwater in "Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off"

richwater — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:59:41 +0000

I think an interesting point here is there is no substantial difference between allocated vacation days if you work for the government or a private employer. One would think the government would set a good example.

New comment by richwater in "Where .env Went Wrong"

richwater — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:50:08 +0000

Doesn't stop charlatans from creating startups promising to make it work :)

New comment by richwater in "New York Will Require Digital ID Checks for Social Feeds"

richwater — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:39:56 +0000

> Notifications between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. also stop without parental consent, and it’s not clear how that works with travel or time zones.

It just doesn't. These fucking morons writing these laws are just pro-surveillance state. That's all they care about.

New comment by richwater in "Making Postgres queues scale"

richwater — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:03:37 +0000

Reading Postgres queuing posts always seem like deja vu. People love to write about them

New comment by richwater in "Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History"

richwater — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:46:16 +0000

It will surely be a tough sell. It will be very expensive (comparatively), and most travelers won't even want to do it. There's a reason Ethiad is so successful on these kinds of flights because their hub creates a natural stopping point halfway.

New comment by richwater in "Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History"

richwater — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:43:38 +0000

As the country exited COVID, mainline carriers began to really push their basic and barebones fares which directly took away business from ULCCs like Spirit. Spirit never really leveraged their credit cards effectively to help subsidize the cost of seats.

ULCCs thrive when they can maximize their time in the sky across as many different flights as possible. Filling up the day with many different flights allows them to rake in checked-baggage fees, reserved seat fees etc more often than longer mainline carrier flights. All of this went out the window when a large portion of their A320 fleet was grounded because of the P&W engine issues. This absolutely killed their utilization percentage.

Spirit died way more because of business management than it did because customers didn't choose on price.

New comment by richwater in "Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History"

richwater — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:10:35 +0000

The real cost of air travel continues to go down as customers really only discriminate on price. Airlines have tried before to compete on other facets but everything failed.

The best you can do is look at specific carriers, and more importantly specifically what aircraft you'll be flying on.

A cross country flight in economy is going to be more comfortable in a Delta A220 than a United 737 Max. However, because of hubs and lack of competition many non-mega metros don't really have a large amount of choice.

New comment by richwater in "Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History"

richwater — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:05:01 +0000

The new Airbus Project Sunrise aircraft also set the record for longest passenger aircraft flight

New comment by richwater in "Our position on open-weights models"

richwater — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:24:39 +0000

Yep.

> We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations.

"We consume all intellectual property for our model but you cannot do the same"

New comment by richwater in "Our position on open-weights models"

richwater — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:23:52 +0000

This is a whole lot of words to say "we don't support open weight models".

It's so obvious they are hoping to regulate out their competition rather than compete

New comment by richwater in "New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape"

richwater — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:33:49 +0000

Rent Control is a settled topic in economics, bar some fringe theorists. It would be impossible for me to explain all the negative externalities that rent control has on both existing and new housing stock in a single comment. I implore you to do some academic reading.

New comment by richwater in "New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape"

richwater — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:28:26 +0000

The policies she chooses _results_ in the failure to implement them because the ideological obsession clouds rational judgement and it loses in court

New comment by richwater in "New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape"

richwater — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 16:52:46 +0000

> Mamdani explicitly campaigned on building more, especially housing

You can't claim to support building or improving housing while implementing rent freezes on 40ish% of all units in the city.

New comment by richwater in "New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape"

richwater — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 16:48:19 +0000

She also failed to secure wins when suing most big businesses because their strategy and evidentiary standards were subpar. Her ideological positions haven't really held up to court scrutiny.

New comment by richwater in "New York's small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape"

richwater — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:44:14 +0000

Removing tiny pieces of red tape (a permit to sell ice cream) is a token gesture when he decided to install Lina Khan as Chair Of New York City Economic Development. Her entire reputation is built on being incredibly hostile to business.

General NIMBY-ism within the city combined with a ED chair who hates big business does not seem to bode well for the success of large projects.

New comment by richwater in "New rental trend? A $200 'work-from-home fee' tacked on to Bay Area lease"

richwater — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:07:29 +0000

Why are we writing articles about some random, single-event rental ad. What are we doing here?

New comment by richwater in "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"

richwater — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:19:43 +0000

The NYCHA is the largest slumlord in the city. The country has proven over decades that it cannot operate public housing with any measure of success.