Hacker News: sparrc

New comment by sparrc in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

sparrc — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:09:52 +0000

A screen for the backup camera doesn't necessarily mean everything has to be through the screen at all.

Most Toyotas I've seen have a screen for the backup camera and the carplay/music/gps console, but everything else is still knobs and buttons.

This is true on both my 2013 and 2026 Toyotas.

New comment by sparrc in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

sparrc — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:07:35 +0000

As a parent, two reasons:

1. The admin work of parental controls in Apple is non-trivial and obscure. I would guess there are something like 300 different knobs and settings you can control for each kid individually. The UX is terrible and there are features missing that seem extremely basic and fundamental. For example, I can't see how much time left my kids currently have, nor can I block any app "now".

2. "the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it." This has not been my experience at all. My kids know that less-locked-down devices exist and frequently complain about the restrictions.

New comment by sparrc in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

sparrc — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 07:16:34 +0000

As someone who grew up in America but lived abroad a few years, you just start using different markers but it's the same idea. Something like 0, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 gives you the full range from freezing to pleasant to very hot.

New comment by sparrc in "Australia's social media ban risks isolating kids with disabilities"

sparrc — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:07:55 +0000

> Advocacy group Children and Young People with Disability Australia (CYDA) ...

Cynically I have to wonder if Meta recently made any major donations to this organization.

New comment by sparrc in "The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in USA"

sparrc — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 07:30:34 +0000

While they do show it live, it's in the middle of the workday, so almost everyone in the USA will have watched it delayed by many hours at "prime time", aka around 8pm local time in each zone.

That being said, I'm in the US and I heard boos on the delayed broadcast.

New comment by sparrc in "Everyone Is Stealing TV"

sparrc — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:16:54 +0000

This would be much easier said than done, most video segments are served up by CDNs, so it would have to be done via processing on CDN edge nodes. Cloudflare might support something like this but most CDNs don't as far as I'm aware. Doing it server-side would kill CDN cache hit rates and massively increase cost.

New comment by sparrc in "Everyone in Seattle hates AI"

sparrc — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 23:32:27 +0000

I'm in Seattle at AWS and haven't encountered this attitude towards AI at all. All of my coworkers pretty much love using Cline and Kiro.

New comment by sparrc in "Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'"

sparrc — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:27:03 +0000

The US is not perfect by any measure, but your argument that the US doesn't have innovative nor "high-value" jobs is absurd beyond belief.

New comment by sparrc in "Improving performance of rav1d video decoder"

sparrc — Thu, 22 May 2025 16:14:04 +0000

Playback is 100% handled by the device. The primary (and essentially only) benefit of H.264 is that almost every device in the entire world has an H.264 hardware decoder builtin to the chip, even extremely cheap devices.

AV1 hardware decoders are still rare so your device was probably resorting to software decoding, which is not ideal.

New comment by sparrc in "Meta in talks to reincorporate in Texas or another state, WSJ reports"

sparrc — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 22:00:30 +0000

He's a director not a "in the trenches" researcher anymore. He's being paid for being a highly technical leader who enables and recruits researchers he employs to do great work, similar to Oppenheimer in a way.

New comment by sparrc in "Saturated fat: the making and unmaking of a scientific consensus (2022)"

sparrc — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 21:27:49 +0000

Nina Teicholz is a bit of a controversial figure in the nutrition world so I'd advise people to take this with a grain of salt...

New comment by sparrc in "Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules"

sparrc — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 01:20:59 +0000

That's a bit of an exaggeration, social security (state pension) and medicare (state healthcare for retirees) are not perfect but they're not terrible either.

New comment by sparrc in "Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules"

sparrc — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 23:00:02 +0000

On the other hand, I know someone from the UK who moved away and lived in places like Qatar and Oman for 20-30 years, keeping their UK citizenship and paying zero taxes to the UK (and extremely low taxes in the gulf countries).

Then they retired, returned to the UK, sent their kids to subsidized state universities (in the UK), receive free healthcare on the NHS, and receive state benefits for retirees.

They receive all of these state benefits and they paid almost no taxes to the UK government for most of their adult life. Is that fair?

New comment by sparrc in "Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules"

sparrc — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 22:52:35 +0000

You are correct, but this only applies because:

> Unlike the UK, the US levies capital gains tax on proceeds from the sale of a main residence.

I understand why it can feel unfair but by definition this is not "double taxing". The gains on the house were not taxed by the UK which is why he had to pay US taxes.

New comment by sparrc in "The rise of the disposable car"

sparrc — Wed, 29 May 2024 16:06:16 +0000

Phoenix has extremely wide and straight roads, with very few pedestrians, and very little rain or snow.

Compared to the entire world this is VERY anomalous, so I think we're still pretty far from "most people" using self-driving cars.

New comment by sparrc in "Nintendo to announce new console by end of fiscal year"

sparrc — Tue, 07 May 2024 23:11:05 +0000

To be fair to Nintendo, they're very much still in the former category of making good products every few years. The switch was originally released 7 years ago, which is ancient in the world of consumer electronics.

New comment by sparrc in "Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure"

sparrc — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 16:50:04 +0000

Modern airplanes should be compared to what is possible in modern times with modern safety standards. If you want an objective measure then compare the Boeing Max planes to their Airbus equivalent: the A320neo.

The A320 neo has had zero fatalities. This is an objective measure that Boeing should be compared against.

AFAIK there have also been zero manufacturing defects at the scale of missing bolts on a door panel.

New comment by sparrc in "Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure"

sparrc — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 19:43:46 +0000

Not really. No airplane was ever grounded by the FAA since the 1970s, when they grounded the McDonnell Douglas DC-10.

Since the merger, the FAA has grounded both of Boeing's new planes (The 787 Dreamliner and the 737 Max).

Boeing's safety record is objectively declining. They are shipping out airplanes with safety issues that are being found "in production". This is why their planes are being grounded (something that never happened to Boeing pre-merger).

New comment by sparrc in "Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora"

sparrc — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 15:50:37 +0000

You may not like his movies, but saying Tyler Perry is a "shit businessman" is a bit of a stretch...

New comment by sparrc in "95% of container ships are now going around the Southern Tip of Africa"

sparrc — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 18:42:52 +0000

They're free to patrol the waters in the South Red Sea though. Doesn't Egypt have a navy? To me this situation seems like it would warrant sending nearly their entire fleet to the South Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.