Hacker News: sct202

New comment by sct202 in "The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19"

sct202 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:41:44 +0000

At least with people fighting with infertility, they want to have children, so helping them have children is more straightforward list of actions than convincing people who don't want kids to have them.

New comment by sct202 in "Most-read tech publications have lost over half their Google traffic since 2024"

sct202 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:33:39 +0000

You can shape the AI responses for some niche topics relatively easily even on accident. I recently saw 2 people arguing on a forum on a very niche industry topic and one of them started to use Gemini as a source to argue and Gemini was already referencing their thread as a source. I'm imagining people could start doing that on purpose with their own astroturfed blogs and public social media accounts.

New comment by sct202 in "So many trees planted in Taklamakan Desert that it's turned into a carbon sink"

sct202 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:34:36 +0000

A lot of the roads that cross the desert look like they're flanked by trees or by some kind scrubby grass mounds. This road is flanked by trees or bushes https://maps.app.goo.gl/JW3gxd8wxSiuwhnZ7

New comment by sct202 in "A lot of population numbers are fake"

sct202 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:46:03 +0000

Just to put some numbers into perspective. China and Europe have roughly the same amount of land, and Europe has a population of 744m (vs your est of <800m for China). So like idk how that would make sense for them to be the same range of population when China seems way more overcrowded.

New comment by sct202 in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"

sct202 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:51:19 +0000

I accidently mildly shrunk a wool sweater from using warm water instead of cold, and the unshrinking method in the article does not work very much.

New comment by sct202 in "Spain fines Airbnb €65M: Why the government is cracking down on illegal rentals"

sct202 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:29:23 +0000

They've been expanding their airports over those 20 years; Barcelona's passenger air arrivals has doubled in that time and there is another expansion being planned. Barcelona is not a large city and they should really be coupling every airport capacity increase with an equal increase in tourist accommodations or they end up in an even worse situation.

New comment by sct202 in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

sct202 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:39:07 +0000

And he went in on integrating trendy things like Ads that pay crypto and AI integrated into the browser, so it's not like there wouldn't be AI if he were in charge.

New comment by sct202 in "Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far"

sct202 — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 01:44:58 +0000

Kroger placed one of the sites in Orlando to also service Tampa and Jacksonville when they have 0 regular stores in the entire state. They were trying to use it to expand into the area, but I never saw very much in terms of advertising or promotions to drive demand but it could have also been that the robots were so bad that they couldn't attempt to market and push volume.

New comment by sct202 in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

sct202 — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:29:10 +0000

With rates that high, it's a disadvantage if you don't have specialists assess your kid for all the things that could qualify them for extra testing time if you have the money to do it.

New comment by sct202 in "After delays, Egypt set for lavish opening of grand museum"

sct202 — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 13:42:08 +0000

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpegg27g74do

>British Museum gems for sale on eBay - how a theft was exposed

The British Museum is also vulnerable to staff theft.

New comment by sct202 in "10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea"

sct202 — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 01:52:12 +0000

And even still, whenever I or a friend has hired a locksmith, they try for 5-10 minutes with no success and drill thru the lock destroying it.

New comment by sct202 in "Why China is winning the trade war"

sct202 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:48:08 +0000

There is always a way out and Europe is starting from an advanced spot. Japan went from a isolated medieval country with very little resources except for people and became an industrial power in 40 years.

New comment by sct202 in "Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August"

sct202 — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 15:25:07 +0000

It's going to be a rough time for a lot of colleges that have been using foreign students paying full price to fund their operations. Especially now that the incoming college aged population is beginning to shrink and the percentage attending college has peaked, so the domestic population probably won't be able to fill the seats at less competitive colleges.

New comment by sct202 in "Nearly half of drivers killed in (Ohio County) crashes had THC in their blood"

sct202 — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 19:03:16 +0000

The article mentions 30.7 ng/mL which is a level that implies consumption within an hour.

New comment by sct202 in "Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly"

sct202 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 17:45:48 +0000

There was a wave of less formal topic based community groups when Meetup launched, but COVID + Meetup buyout & price hikes has led to most of them shutting down.

New comment by sct202 in "US High school students' scores fall in reading and math"

sct202 — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:06:21 +0000

IEPs and other accommodations are becoming more common with high achievers like with ADHD, anxiety, or depression. On the LSAT test takers with accommodations for extended testing time score 5 points higher on average than the overall pool of test takers, and ADHD is the most common request reason. https://www.lsac.org/sites/default/files/research/TR-24-01.p... (page 4)

New comment by sct202 in "This blog is running on a recycled Google Pixel 5 (2024)"

sct202 — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 13:34:30 +0000

A similar VPS from Digital Ocean (8GB RAM, 4vcores, 160gb storage) is $48/mo so this seems really cost effective. I'm not really sure how much more performance the vcores have vs a mobile chip but for a blog web server it's probably not a huge issue.

New comment by sct202 in "Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation"

sct202 — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:35:05 +0000

Needs to be a few minutes depending on where the lead is. I have lead service line and the city does testing and the sample collected after 3 minutes had the highest lead level by over 3x because that was the water that sat overnight in the lead service line.

New comment by sct202 in "AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, OpenAI are worst offenders"

sct202 — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 15:31:54 +0000

I wonder how much of the rapid expansion of datacenters is from trying to support bot traffic.

New comment by sct202 in "Installing a mini-split AC in a Brooklyn apartment"

sct202 — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:48:01 +0000

This is a good idea, and they can check for additional issues with the electrical. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if their meter was hooked up to multiple units or common spaces. The electric company had mixed up every single meter in my old condo build for 15 years.