Hacker News: sgarrity

New comment by sgarrity in "Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)"

sgarrity — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:08:42 +0000

My first guitar teacher told me that someday I'd start to notice that you can't get all strings perfectly in tune. At that point, he said, you'll know you're getting somewhere on the guitar.

New comment by sgarrity in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

sgarrity — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:31:22 +0000

I didn't even read the article, but the headline made me smile.

New comment by sgarrity in "Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition"

sgarrity — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 12:20:00 +0000

The biggest "TBD" I've ever seen (in the slide deck for the winning entry):

"(TBD ethics of voluntary euthanasia)"

New comment by sgarrity in "How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy"

sgarrity — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 19:22:13 +0000

Are there benevolent AI swarms?

New comment by sgarrity in "US tech tariff exemption may only be temporary, says Lutnick"

sgarrity — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 15:30:37 +0000

That was close. We almost had clarity on something for a minute.

New comment by sgarrity in "JSON parsers that can accept comments"

sgarrity — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 21:51:26 +0000

Imagine if he was though...

New comment by sgarrity in "In Praise of Buttons"

sgarrity — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 19:15:48 +0000

I have a dehumidifier that I'd like this author to redesign please.

New comment by sgarrity in "The EV transition trips over its own cord"

sgarrity — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 13:53:10 +0000

I imagine this varies regionally (I'm in Eastern Canada), but we keep running into limited availability issues.

I'd consider myself in the early(ish) part of the mass-market adoption curve. I'm not an early adopter (I don't have an EV yet), but I'm interested and keeping an eye on them.

We're ready to purchase an EV, but I'm not ready to pay to get on a waiting list for a vehicle I can't see or test-drive.

Until I can go to a few dealerships and see/drive the low/mid-priced EV models, it's going to be difficult to make the decision to spend $40,000 to $60,000.

New comment by sgarrity in "How Soap Works: The Science Behind Handwashing"

sgarrity — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 17:57:45 +0000

I remember a science radio program from years ago (might have been https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks) summing up an explanation of how soap works with the summary: "Soap makes water wetter."

It's obviously an over-simplification for the purposes of education, but it works, as it has stuck with me.

New comment by sgarrity in "How to run 50% faster without external energy (2020)"

sgarrity — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 19:10:55 +0000

If even one of those many mathematical formulas had been a YouTube video of a person running in super-space-boots...

New comment by sgarrity in "Counting Friday 13s"

sgarrity — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 13:53:31 +0000

This is like a super FizzBuzz test.

New comment by sgarrity in "The brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside (2020)"

sgarrity — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:54:20 +0000

I'm pretty sure mine is.

New comment by sgarrity in "Painful Lesson: Always 'Show and Tell' Your Product Before You Develop It"

sgarrity — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 19:51:13 +0000

The Blackberry movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_(film) includes a few examples of selling something without having anything real behind it.

New comment by sgarrity in "Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF"

sgarrity — Fri, 05 May 2023 19:39:53 +0000

10,000 trips / week is impressive. How many vehicles is this?

New comment by sgarrity in "Show HN: GPT-4-powered web searches for developers"

sgarrity — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 19:08:30 +0000

I had a similar experience. I asked if you can use CSS logical properties in IE11. It confidently told me YES with a whole bunch of follow-up.

The answer was no.

New comment by sgarrity in "Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars"

sgarrity — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 19:54:25 +0000

Is this sharing a criminal act?

New comment by sgarrity in "Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?"

sgarrity — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 13:16:15 +0000

Sriracha is great, but we don't need Sriracha Cheerios.

New comment by sgarrity in "Twitterrific has been discontinued"

sgarrity — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 21:46:08 +0000

This feels a bit more like the power & water was cut off to the beach house, but I like taking metaphors one step to far.

New comment by sgarrity in "Is anyone else getting cold/sick much more often these days?"

sgarrity — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 13:09:54 +0000

Yup. The flu and other colds/viruses have been much more prevalent this year in our corner of the world (Eastern Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-covi...).

We had strong masking protocols here, and some periods with schools closed. I'm assuming it's just a matter of us "catching up" on three years of colds/flu.

Anecdotally, if feels like everyone is getting sick. It's not great.

New comment by sgarrity in "Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades"

sgarrity — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:29:04 +0000

The worst technology I've encountered in recent years is: Other People's AirPod.

When paired with a windows PC or older Mac, Airpods use an older or lower quality audio codec that sounds pretty poor for those hearing you speak.

Caveat: I don't know what I'm talking about, technically.