Hacker News: snark42

New comment by snark42 in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

snark42 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:15:35 +0000

That only happens when you have your own data center. That's a whole different issue and most people with their own hardware don't have their own data centers as it's not particularly cost efficient except at incredibly large scale.

New comment by snark42 in "Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android"

snark42 — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 16:32:31 +0000

I have 3 different banks (well 2 banks and a credit union.) I can use Zelle in my browser from all 3. I don't even have the app installed for 2 of them.

New comment by snark42 in "Amazon buys stake in nuclear energy developer in push to power data centres"

snark42 — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 22:42:07 +0000

They at least partly figured out fluoride for brushing teeth and in drinking water was a net positive based on teeth health and natural fluoride levels in wells around the world. CDC estimates it reduces cavities by 25%.

New comment by snark42 in "Amazon buys stake in nuclear energy developer in push to power data centres"

snark42 — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 22:38:07 +0000

So if you build a decent sized data center to consume 160 MWh you can get 2 SMRs and call it a day.

Or you can buy 480 Tesla MegaPacks (about 6 acres) and 1600 acres (it's roughly 1 MW per 5 acres) of solar panels to run the DC and charge the batteries during the day. Sure some can go on the building, but you'd still need way more acreage than that can provide.

I know what I would bet on too.

New comment by snark42 in "Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined"

snark42 — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 18:00:09 +0000

Did you mean rhodium?

New comment by snark42 in "Debian celebrates 30 years"

snark42 — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 22:38:33 +0000

tsx was a MIT server that hosted minix, Linux, etc. It wasn't a distribution per se.

New comment by snark42 in "California Court of Appeal finds geofence warrant unconstitutional"

snark42 — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 16:23:50 +0000

It's the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, you can thank the Supreme Court.

New comment by snark42 in "Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners"

snark42 — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 23:53:50 +0000

> What about those in the northern half of the US that also need back-up heat for when it is very cold?

This heat pump is supposed to work to -15F and includes back-up resistive heat. Theoretically it can replace a heater and air conditioner anywhere. I know people north of Chicago that use a similar heat pump and resistive backup system and it's been fine to -30F keeping the house at 69F.

> I don't know the contractors they are talking about, but I literally had to say the words "heat pump" to my local Carrier installer and they did all the rest.

There's definitely a bias against them when natural gas is available. Until probably the past 3-4 years very few HVAC contractors in the midwest were familiar with heat pumps or had bad experiences 5-15 years back and recommended against them as it's "too cold" for them to work here.

New comment by snark42 in "The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux"

snark42 — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 21:52:50 +0000

Or make it available on DVD.

I know this was the incentive behind a lot of the people financially supporting the warez scene in the past.

New comment by snark42 in "Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range"

snark42 — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 18:32:49 +0000

> but I have not heard one ounce of buyer's remorse from any of the other brands.

The only solid reason I've heard to buy Tesla over others is for the Supercharger network if you travel a lot or can't charge at home. Everything else comes down to preference.

New comment by snark42 in "Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic"

snark42 — Mon, 16 May 2022 20:36:25 +0000

You forgot play the peering game which can lead to substantially cheaper bandwidth when you connect to enough Tier1/2 ISPs. I think Hetzner does this some as well.

New comment by snark42 in "Inside the longest Atlassian outage"

snark42 — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 20:56:03 +0000

I would assume the MSP is running a dedicated instance and can do a full/backup restore just for the user they're supporting.

If it's some multi-tenant solution it's no better.

New comment by snark42 in "Inside the longest Atlassian outage"

snark42 — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 20:55:00 +0000

> but I don't understand why a medium/large business would choose anything but an on-premises setup.

Atlassian is in the process of killing the on-premise small/medium business option, already announced an EOL date.

Move to the cloud, buy a 500+ user solution for a much higher price or migrate away are my choices. Of course I use the local database and have local services JIRA/Confluence talk to so it's not really an option to move to the cloud.

I assume lack of competent on-site staff 24/7, having someone else to blame as well as lower costs are why people choose the cloud over on-premise though.

New comment by snark42 in "Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4"

snark42 — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 22:38:53 +0000

It's probably completely do-able in the US except in the top 20 or so COL locations - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/region_rankings_curren...

New comment by snark42 in "Notes on privacy and data collection of Matrix.org (2019)"

snark42 — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 19:20:04 +0000

Prepaid cellular phones and Google Voice aren't available in most parts of the world with a little effort?

New comment by snark42 in "$1M bounty for details on Tether’s backing"

snark42 — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 22:50:49 +0000

They do the equivalent of investigative journalism. Arguably everything they know is public, just no one has looked or put all the pieces together until they do a press release.

New comment by snark42 in "Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies"

snark42 — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 19:22:15 +0000

I think a material % would go away if we stopped feeding it to cows as well, a la regenerative ag.

New comment by snark42 in "Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic"

snark42 — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 15:02:13 +0000

> but plenty of people want in person school because it IS better.

For some kids, lots of data showing some kids thrived and improved while others suffered.

New comment by snark42 in "Latest Mozilla VPN features"

snark42 — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:55:15 +0000

It supports Mozilla. Browser is pretty important, but they do other things like Rust.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Projects/Complete

New comment by snark42 in "BMW to shame out-of-warranty UK drivers with smart billboards"

snark42 — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 17:32:29 +0000

And motorcycles.