Hacker News: sgerenser

New comment by sgerenser in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

sgerenser — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:54:10 +0000

I head them say 35% at some point later in the videos, but they definitely said 10% first, so I’m not sure which is correct.

New comment by sgerenser in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

sgerenser — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:30:59 +0000

It sounds like the original franchisee doesn’t want to admit that they were losing a lot of money already. Only someone really desperate would take on a $200K lego collection and only collect a 10% consignment fee. It would also explain the corporate “takeover” if they were already behind on paying their franchise fees or whatever they might have owed to corporate.

That being said, it’s not illegal to be a bad business person, and none of that excuses the subsequent behavior by BAM corporate or the new franchise owner.

New comment by sgerenser in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

sgerenser — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:27:15 +0000

Somewhere in one of the long videos, they mentioned that there were unique stickers on each of his items that he was selling on consignment. They had to have known which items were his.

New comment by sgerenser in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

sgerenser — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:19:29 +0000

Bricks and Minifigs stores are like 2000 square feet, much different than a Target. Their overhead per square foot is almost certainly far higher than Target.

New comment by sgerenser in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

sgerenser — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:18:41 +0000

My wife owns a retail business where some part of their sales is consignment. Taking anything in with only a 10% consignment fee would be laughable, there’s no way that’s a money making deal when you account for all the overhead of a small retail store. My suspicion is the original store owner made a bad consignment deal to sell the Star Wars stuff with only a 10% commission and the new owner didn’t want to live up to it. Of course, at that point they should have just given it all back, but it turns out they’d rather be evil.

New comment by sgerenser in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

sgerenser — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:12:16 +0000

There actually are legal ways to do that… instead of buying the company, you start a new company, and just buy assets of the old company (e.g. phone numbers, web sites, trademarks, customer lists). Seems shady but apparently it’s pretty common.

New comment by sgerenser in "GitHub Actions was down"

sgerenser — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:21:14 +0000

Who says Azure devops is on the same infra as GitHub? I mean, sure they're both hosted in Azure data centers, but there's very little else shared between them AFAIK. I used to work for Microsoft and I heard about the grand plans to merge the two but I don't think it ever really happened.

New comment by sgerenser in "Converting an Integer to a Decimal String in Under Two Nanoseconds"

sgerenser — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:15:40 +0000

I don’t think that’s correct, Intel is transitioning to AVX10, which is essentially the instruction set of AVX-512 but without mandating 512 but vector width. Future E cores, afaik, will still only be capable of 256 bit vector ops. EDIT: ok maybe not, it sounds like that was the plan a year or so ago but newer articles are saying future E cores will actually support 512b.

New comment by sgerenser in "Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200"

sgerenser — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:33:01 +0000

Would YouTube really block Gemini? I thought summarizing (or asking questions about) YouTube videos was one of their advertised features.

New comment by sgerenser in "C++26 Shipped a SIMD Library Nobody Asked For"

sgerenser — Sun, 17 May 2026 12:05:23 +0000

Yeah AVX-512 is basically dead as a universal target for x86, the future is now AVX-10. But I believe there is a reasonable subset that will work on both.

New comment by sgerenser in "Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'"

sgerenser — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:52:27 +0000

I’m still amazed at the people who claim that Apple Maps is as good as Google Maps nowadays. If you live anywhere where there’s lots of development, it’s definitely not. It’s also terrible when businesses or places of interest move. My wife’s business moved a half mile down the road and a single message to google maps got it moved in a couple days. Apple Maps took about a year with multiple requests and even multiple messages to their special “escalation” email address.

New comment by sgerenser in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

sgerenser — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:23:22 +0000

Missed this so coming in very late, but wow this is unbelievably off the mark. The airlines do not operate a credit card company, full stop. They sell airline miles, at a fixed rate per mile, to the credit card companies. That’s it. Citi, Chase, CapitalOne, etc. are the ones that operate the credit cards.

New comment by sgerenser in "We are retiring our bug bounty program"

sgerenser — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:11:11 +0000

I believe the company is based in SF, but the developers are all over the world, so $100/hr is probably in the ballpark. Interestingly one of the senior developers is working from prison so his costs are probably a bit lower: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44288937

New comment by sgerenser in "Googlebook"

sgerenser — Wed, 13 May 2026 01:04:59 +0000

Not yet, sale hasn’t closed yet. They changed their name in advance of the sale though.

New comment by sgerenser in "I want to live like Costco people"

sgerenser — Fri, 08 May 2026 03:05:07 +0000

Publix in the southeast and Wegmans in the northeast both have fountain drinks.

New comment by sgerenser in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

sgerenser — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:23:15 +0000

Waiting for the MOASS… it’s coming any day now!

New comment by sgerenser in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

sgerenser — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:24:57 +0000

No airline operates a credit card company. They just put their name on a card and sell miles at a discount in bulk to credit card companies like Chase or Citi.

New comment by sgerenser in "Ti-84 Evo"

sgerenser — Sat, 02 May 2026 11:25:02 +0000

There’s no back room arrangement, beyond perhaps some amount of marketing from TI to math teachers. But nobody is getting a kickback to recommend the TI-84. Also, since so many people had to buy these things then stuck it in a drawer after a couple years, there’s a healthy supply of used ones on eBay and marketplace.

New comment by sgerenser in "Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables"

sgerenser — Sat, 02 May 2026 06:41:19 +0000

It comes with experience, you know it when you see it.

New comment by sgerenser in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

sgerenser — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:00:04 +0000

Had to be even earlier than that, I graduated college in 2006 and I’m pretty sure someone turned me on to Friendster at least a couple years before.