Hacker News: sparrc

New comment by sparrc in "Spotify just hit 300M Premium subscribers"

sparrc — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:32:39 +0000

I've been a subscriber basically ever since it launched in the US and haven't noticed any discernible difference in the service in that entire time. What has turned people off? I haven't noticed any AI features at all to be honest. Then again I only use it for music, not podcasts nor audiobooks.

New comment by sparrc in "How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood"

sparrc — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:41:00 +0000

I don't think you can argue that California is significantly worse off in terms of housing than London, which is where a large number of productions go due to tax incentives.

New comment by sparrc in "'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack"

sparrc — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:49:41 +0000

I work at AWS, we got access to Claude Code very recently, most people are using Kiro and that seems to be the defacto standard.

I have not heard of any nor run into any token budgets.

There is generally a lot of team-wide usage of CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, team-specific skills, oncall skills, etc.

Not as much org-wide, although my org has an MCP server built for helping with oncall.

New comment by sparrc in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

sparrc — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:35:38 +0000

My favorite solution to this is to use the Cline coding agent, which is open and allows you to easily switch between different providers and models.

New comment by sparrc in "The real cost of owning a home"

sparrc — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:20:33 +0000

The author mentions interest but not that there is the mortgage interest deduction, which is a massive tax deduction especially during the first years.

New comment by sparrc in "Show HN: Write your BPF programs in Go, not C"

sparrc — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:52:46 +0000

I'm primarily a Go developer and love the language and will defend it for most use-cases, but to be honest BPF seems like Rust's place to shine.

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.