Hacker News: samch

New comment by samch in "Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place"

samch — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:31:30 +0000

The war on drugs, due to its targeting of specific socioeconomic and racial groups, is probably not the best analogy here.

While I do get your point about the FUD it generated, a better parallel might be the rise (and eventual fall) of the tobacco industry. There was a lot of fraud and deception in the 20th century about the health effects of smoking. There were ads touting that more doctors preferred brand X. The idea was to correlate something genuinely dangerous and lethal with good health.

Crypto and betting markets, to the author’s point, are repeating this pattern again today in terms of personal finances.

New comment by samch in "Gaussian Point Splatting"

samch — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:09:55 +0000

It seems like there are fairly regular posts on HN about splatting, and most appear to be fairly technical or proof-of-concept level. While the outputs look nice, I’m not sure that I could distinguish them from a nice ray-traced scene. What I think I’m missing is the “why?” of splatting. What are the material benefits of this area of research?

New comment by samch in "Under Notre Dame, a 'dig of the century' unearths 1,700 years of history"

samch — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:53:33 +0000

The author should’ve known that we already have an accepted unit for measuring things in terms of a person’s stature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

New comment by samch in "Time to talk about my writerdeck"

samch — Sat, 23 May 2026 21:59:14 +0000

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/974/

Governor Newsom signs order to prepare workers for potential AI disruption

samch — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:09:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/05/21/governor-newsom-signs-first-of-its-kind-executive-order-to-prepare-workers-and-businesses-for-potential-ai-disruption/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234757

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by samch in "Pomiferous: The most extensive apples (pommes) database"

samch — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:00:01 +0000

Nice database (got a brief glimpse before it was hugged to death). Personally, I’ve always really liked this apple rating site (no affiliation):

https://applerankings.com/

New comment by samch in "The smelly baby problem"

samch — Sat, 02 May 2026 02:27:07 +0000

Agreed - like the sibling comment, we also used cloth diapers with our two kids. They were actually great. The ones we had were basically two-part construction: there was an outer shell with adjustable snaps for appropriate sizing, and an inner liner that absorbed the moisture. Both were easily washable. Like other parents we knew who did this, we added a small hand-held sprayer / bidet wand to one of our toilets and used it to hose off the diaper and liners. We would then toss them in the washing machine. I think these also provided more cushion for the kids’ bottoms and they both ended up sitting and scooting on them pretty fast. Also like the others here, we used disposables on the go / on vacation. Just my two cents, but we loved our cloth diapers.

New comment by samch in "Phyphox – Physical Experiments Using a Smartphone"

samch — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:37:22 +0000

One of my kids has science project due each quarter in school, and this is our go-to app. We’ve measured acceleration in an elevator, sound attenuation of an audio source in a small vacuum chamber, and the Doppler effect. The app makes it easy to capture and export the data points to make graphs. I highly recommend this even just to play around with.

New comment by samch in "Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails"

samch — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:41:43 +0000

Copilot is not a model, to my knowledge. When you’re asking about the data that it was trained on, you are most likely referring to an OpenAI or, in some circumstances, an Anthropic model. Customer data is not used for training the models that run Copilot.

New comment by samch in "Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out"

samch — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:14:59 +0000

I hadn’t thought about using their first-party API offering, but I will look into it.

Personally, I’ve used AWS Bedrock as the fallback when my plan runs out, and that seems to work well in my experience. I believe you can now connect to Azure as well.

New comment by samch in "Microsoft 365 now tracks you in real time?"

samch — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:56:30 +0000

Some of this could be related to laws that necessitate updated location data for emergency calling. Since a common component of Teams is Teams Phone, there can be a compliance gap. I’m sure this isn’t the whole story, but it is likely one facet: https://www.911.gov/issues/legislation-and-policy/kari-s-law...

New comment by samch in "NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power"

samch — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:25:33 +0000

Can anybody speak to the current best practices around running underground power lines? I see these types of articles about above-ground distribution systems from time-to-time, particularly in California. I feel lucky that my area has underground power, but that was installed back in the 1980s. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Boulder’s utility provider to move to underground distribution? I can’t help but think it could be worth the cost to reduce wildfire risk and offer more reliable service.

New comment by samch in "Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure"

samch — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 02:25:20 +0000

Copilot in Excel is getting some significant updates. It can write Python now that Excel has support for that. There’s also a new “COPILOT()” function in Excel that works pretty well.

New comment by samch in "Microsoft 365 Copilot's commercial failure"

samch — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 02:21:24 +0000

The same M365 Copilot app is installed for both “free users” and the premium licenses that have access to all of their Graph tenant data. From the sounds of it, you only have the basic Copilot Chat (web grounded) that comes with the E3/E5 license. If you have the full license for M365 Copilot, you’ll see a work/web toggle at the top of your chat screen.

New comment by samch in "Electromechanical reshaping offers safer eye surgery"

samch — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 13:07:48 +0000

My wife had PRK done on both eyes over a decade ago, and it was great. At the time, she had the choice between LASIK and PRK (I’m not sure that everybody has both options given their particular conditions). After reviewing the long-term prognosis and possible side effects of both, she went with PRK. It’s been a fantastic decision for her, but that just one person’s experience.

New comment by samch in "Killing the Mauna Loa observatory over irrefutable evidence of increasing CO2"

samch — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:40:44 +0000

Maybe they’ve thought about this and measure that too? Maybe they can adjust measurements based on data from multiple sensors?

https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/volc...

New comment by samch in "Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say"

samch — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 12:50:20 +0000

Yes, as is OneDrive and Teams file sharing. Those, however, are part of SharePoint Online. SPO is distinct from this CVE, which only applies to the standalone SharePoint Server.

New comment by samch in "Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion"

samch — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:53:36 +0000

This is what precisely why I willingly pay more to Google for their fiber optic service than AT&T for an equivalent, albeit less expensive, plan: Google readily allows me to use my own equipment. I am voting with my dollars on this one.

New comment by samch in "Denmark: Minister for Digitalization wants to phase out Microsoft"

samch — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 21:29:22 +0000

So many of the comments are focusing on Office products. Okay, that’s fair. People can talk Calc vs Excel for example, and that’s fair. What I don’t get is how you replicate knowledge worker collaboration without using a major commercial provider like Google Workspace or M365. How do you handle the use cases solved by collaborative document editing, SharePoint / OneDrive, Teams with DLP, document classification, etc. I’m not affiliated with Google or MSFT, just genuinely curious how you replace the broader ecosystem around the core Office products using open-source solutions. Has anybody solved for this?

New comment by samch in "Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site"

samch — Fri, 23 May 2025 12:40:51 +0000

Since you asked, I use Cloudflare for my registrar. I can’t really say if it’s objectively better or worse than anybody else, but they seemed like a good choice when Google was in the process of shutting off their registry service.