Hacker News: snaily

New comment by snaily in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

snaily — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:11:07 +0000

Here's an alleged secondary effect of 2 in a quote by Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan[1]:

“When I get hit up by people in the Middle East who are saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking at Polymarket to decide whether we sleep near the bomb shelter; we look at it every day’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s really that popular over there?’” he added. “That’s very powerful. That’s an undeniable value proposition that did not exist before.”

I'm with Matt Levine here[2]:

"There is something particularly dystopian about the idea that:

a) Some countries will bomb other countries.

b) The people doing the bombing will profit from the bombing by insider trading the bombing contracts on prediction markets.

c) This will cause the prediction markets to correctly reflect the probability of bombing, allowing the people getting bombed to avoid being bombed."

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/polymarke... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-12/lev...

Cooklang: A Recipe Markup Language

snaily — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:33:00 +0000

Article URL: https://cooklang.org

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410819

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by snaily in "Why top firms fire good workers"

snaily — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 06:46:35 +0000

If it is indeed easy to move operations wholesale, I think we would see far more and quicker cases (not just arbitraging differences in labor organization, but also e.g. tax and regulatory regimes). It certainly happens, mind you, but my read is that different forms of institutional inertia puts a damper on the willingness to "re-home".

New comment by snaily in "Volvo delivers 5,000th electric semi"

snaily — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 06:10:04 +0000

You're right about driver time being the key metric. mattlondon's reply[1] to the GP gives the extra context: the endurance is aligned pretty well with (EU) legally mandated breaks, allowing for mid-day charging.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44478186

Edit: I see you've replied there.

New comment by snaily in "Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam"

snaily — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 11:19:42 +0000

Methanol has been used, as has rubbing alcohol and methyl ethyl ketone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol for further reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatonium is used to make it unpalatable. Fun fact: the same chemical is also coated onto Nintendo Switch cartridges to discourage children from putting them in their mouths.

New comment by snaily in "WebGL Fluid Simulation"

snaily — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 22:22:11 +0000

Have you checked out mixbox[0]? The outputs do feel intuitively "right" as someone who has dabbled in watercolor, and the paper/videos cover the thinking and Kubelka-Munk theory well.

[0] https://github.com/scrtwpns/mixbox

New comment by snaily in "Steam's Last Stand"

snaily — Fri, 31 May 2024 07:00:51 +0000

Jay Leno has a Doble car (mentioned in the article as a 1920s attempt at a "user-friendly" steam car revival). The video has great production and really shows the starting and driving processes: https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo

New comment by snaily in "Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way"

snaily — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 07:01:24 +0000

There's at least one commercial acoustic underwater modem provider - Subnero out of Singapore. They claim up to 5km range:

https://subnero.com/products/modem.html

New comment by snaily in "Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M°C for 30 seconds"

snaily — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 11:40:46 +0000

> The typical efficiency of TEGs is around 5–8%

A steam turbine is many times more efficient.

New comment by snaily in "Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco"

snaily — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 15:45:09 +0000

Scania did a neat affordance for this in their (otherwise rather incremental) autonomous AXL concept. A band of LEDs around the vehicle that light up "towards" a pedestrian once the vehicle takes them into account: https://youtu.be/0WN9xvAvEls?t=499

New comment by snaily in "Vermeer Restoration Reveals a Painting Within a Painting"

snaily — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 08:33:20 +0000

The explanation is right there in the article, and it does not involve your supposed modern day hubris:

Restorers found that the central panel of the artwork, known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, had been painted over in the 16th Century.

Another artist had altered the Lamb of God, a symbol for Jesus depicted at the centre of the panel.

Now conservationists have stripped away the overpaint, revealing the lamb's "intense gaze" and "large frontal eyes".

New comment by snaily in "An Alarming Decline in Sperm Quality Could Threaten the Future of the Human Race"

snaily — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 06:44:27 +0000

The article is not about general infertility in couples.

It is specifically about male infertility, based on an objective measure of fertility (sperm count), which has indeed dropped over the past few decades - no one is trying to "blame everything on men".

New comment by snaily in "Why a land-value tax is inevitable"

snaily — Sat, 05 Dec 2020 22:36:12 +0000

To elaborate on that last point, one concrete model that was on the HN front page lately was the "climate club": https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001

New comment by snaily in "Artist releases album called “Ok Google Play Music” on Spotify"

snaily — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 20:08:53 +0000

A UI with next to zero discoverability and an incredibly broad input set ("all speech") must really work for most conceivable inputs, or only die-hard enthusiasts will keep trying.

New comment by snaily in "The Un-American Rule on VC's Legal Fees"

snaily — Sat, 07 Nov 2020 21:01:11 +0000

For an institutional fund, they can be different, non-fungible pools of capital. The $15M comes from fund limited partner (LP) commitments as part of the investable capital of the fund (i.e. was earmarked for investments and is not the fund manager's money, in a very real sense), but the $100k might (depending on the LP agreement for the fund) come out of the management fees, and if so, is very much part of the P&L for the fund manager.

For a corporate VC, its typically all the same pool, though.

New comment by snaily in "Approval for Hotel Covered in Plants"

snaily — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 16:53:27 +0000

I'm also reminded of the Oasia Downtown hotel in Singapore, which, like Park Royal, is designed by WOHA. It's a fairly recently completed skyscraper, and the plant scaffolding hasn't fully been overgrown yet: https://archello.com/project/oasia-hotel-downtown

New comment by snaily in "Stripe Corporate Card"

snaily — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 14:37:07 +0000

Interchange fees are capped to 0.2-0.3% in the EU by regulation. Merchants pay less (to the issuer, ultimately) for the benefit of accepting credit cards, so there is less fees to hand out as cash back (from the issuer to the card owner).

New comment by snaily in "VisiCalc's Spreadsheets Changed the World"

snaily — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 21:23:02 +0000

I believe mbostock's https://observablehq.com/ is trying to do that

A guide was linked the other day: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/observables-not-javas...

New comment by snaily in "Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair"

snaily — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 13:32:40 +0000

On 5 October 2011, Spotify was a freshly minted single-billion unicorn. Factually, no-one had plural billions of dollars on the line at that time, not even the senior exec I quoted.

Spotify was also comparatively small at the time, with limited hierarchy. The entire office - execs and rank-and-file alike - was respectful, with a fair number visibly upset and mourning.

New comment by snaily in "Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair"

snaily — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 13:09:43 +0000

This does not ring true to my experience.

I was at the Spotify office the day the news of Steve's untimely death broke. It was a solemn day, and the the one senior executive I spoke to expressed true sorrow, as if a longtime friend had passed. Jobs was incredibly respected by the Spotify crew, as far as I'm concerned.