Hacker News: sporkland

New comment by sporkland in "Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds"

sporkland — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:54:31 +0000

We can agree scalpers are net negative.

And I like your ideas but I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay enabled by what the parent comment suggested.

I wonder if in your system it actually attracts fans or just people that have the time to wait for tickets.

New comment by sporkland in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

sporkland — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:37:59 +0000

Or a Ford f150: https://www.jalopnik.com/youre-not-wrong-american-trucks-and...

New comment by sporkland in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

sporkland — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:27:32 +0000

The article seemed full of weak rationale leading up to the conclusion which made me doubt the whole thing:

1. He kept citing things like PGP, C++ and distributed systems as things in common between Satoshi and Back, but would have described 75% of pragmatic comp sci folks at the time.

2. His end section about word correlations where he started with Back's weird isms and then started finding them in Satoshi's writings seemed like pure Texas sharp shooter fallacy. He started with broader scoring mechanisms and when those didn't work he started seeking out measures that fit his case better.

All of this based on a vibe of how the guy seemed in a Netflix documentary.

I have no idea if Satoshi is Back or not and would love to close this chapter. But this "reporter" seems to have started with a conclusion and then tried to find data that proved the conclusion.

New comment by sporkland in "Music for Programming"

sporkland — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:54:00 +0000

I survived my Microsoft internship in 2001 by listening to Weezer blue, pinkerton, green album on a continuous loop.

New comment by sporkland in "I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era"

sporkland — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:59:38 +0000

I remember living pre-internet and post-internet, especially post-google and feeling like my own memory was being replaced with an Ethernet cable. The current AI models are definitely carving even more of my brain off, the only thing I'm unsure of is if I'm a better or worse cyborg at each stage. Like even with facts and data at my finger tips I still had to process decisions. I'm wondering what my bio brain's role will be as LLM's progress.

New comment by sporkland in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

sporkland — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:42:25 +0000

My deeply naive take is all of this stuff should be done similar to weight classes. I'm not sure what key measurable testosterone or other doping effects but measure that and separate athletes into classes based on that. Want to do steroids? Fine but you just get to compete against other dopers. As a low-T male I can go get my butt kicked by women at athletic events if I want.

New comment by sporkland in "US Job Market Visualizer"

sporkland — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:06:17 +0000

Don't a lot of CEO's famously pay themselves $1 and make their wealth on equity appreciation / capital gains?

New comment by sporkland in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

sporkland — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:53:09 +0000

I assume a lot of people don't know the fundamental odds of something happening but have a vague sense on if Mr. Market has gone bananas or not.

New comment by sporkland in "1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6"

sporkland — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 01:54:10 +0000

Can someone help me with insights about large context models? Are there relationships that pop up at the beginning and end of long context windows that don't transitively follow from intermediate points? Is there value in the training over these longer windows vs using the more basic/closer weight distributions over different sliding windows?

New comment by sporkland in "Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs"

sporkland — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:09:09 +0000

So the consumer ate the tariff (I saw somewhere that they just got passed on for the most part). Now the companies are just gonna get the money back and either enrich their exec staff or shareholders?

It feels like a company should have to prove they didn't pass the tariff on to consumers in order to collect this.

New comment by sporkland in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

sporkland — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 23:52:38 +0000

You're talking abstractly but the author mentions SF and NYC in the intro where cars come with deep pain points, but at least in SF there are so many bus stops it leads to trip times that are much slower than say an Uber/lyft/waymo.

New comment by sporkland in "A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs"

sporkland — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:03:16 +0000

While I don't disagree with your point about Epstein case being a massive cya for a ton of people in power, the fact is that if they deeply wanted to cover up something the right way to do it would to be to actually print it and scan it, this does look like someone shortcutted some broad order to print and scan all digital media.

New comment by sporkland in "Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants"

sporkland — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:13:09 +0000

As a regular bike commuter in cities with hit and miss roads, With big enough tires (tyres?) it's totally fine, there are some ebikes out there with massive tires. I'd be more concerned about the blind bends and presumably due to semi-rural people driving very fast. If there's a broad shoulder or you can get off the road at a moments notice then it could be okay but as with most things the cars are the biggest danger.

New comment by sporkland in "Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down"

sporkland — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:35:06 +0000

As a collector of off kilter bigotry, I love finding new forms of it. Gave me a smile thinking about how much you must have nursed this grudge against morning people (they are a judgey holier than thou group on average). The particular group I harbor bigotry towards is car drivers with tinted front windows, which I find to display anti social behaviors as a group.

New comment by sporkland in "Garage – An S3 object store so reliable you can run it outside datacenters"

sporkland — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 07:22:36 +0000

Not dismissing your point, but Looking at the article, it looks like it's in rust unsafe code. Which seems to me to be a point that the rest of the rust code is fine but the place where they turned off the static safety the language provides they got bit.

New comment by sporkland in "AI agents are starting to eat SaaS"

sporkland — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 01:34:39 +0000

As told in Innovator's Dilemma mainframe companies would have told the exact same story right up until the cheaper alternative met all of their core needs. But in this case I don't think you get disrupted by copycats but instead by savvy business users building their own disposable alternatives which get just enough done.

Though I think one thing that is being overlooked is that Platforms are the hidden hero under all of this. A lot of AI products are benefiting from various cloud platforms that have been created that make it easy to deploy and opperate these apps. So as long as you are providing a sufficiently general, high productivity platform that can't be emulated by one of the major vendors you'll likely become the new runtime.

New comment by sporkland in "Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board"

sporkland — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 15:27:23 +0000

Hearing about Richard Nixon at the Bohemian Grove gave me similar vibes.

New comment by sporkland in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

sporkland — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:54:05 +0000

Garbage reporting: 1. AWS had an outage 2. AWS has lost a lot of employees

Conclusion: The brain drain lead to the outage...

I need an LLM trained explicitly on folks confusing correlation and causation and put a big old red dot in my address bar.

I love that there's a whole section "The talent drain evidence" trying to defend their journalistic integrity, but they then go on to totally face plant.

New comment by sporkland in "Show HN: Rift – A tiling window manager for macOS"

sporkland — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:47:10 +0000

I've been using divvy, had no idea it isn't maintained... but I'm not sure if I'd need any more features outside of what it already does. What items do you want to see them add?

New comment by sporkland in "Show HN: Rift – A tiling window manager for macOS"

sporkland — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 19:34:49 +0000

I currently use divvy and effectively a desktop per app. It's not perfect but gets me most of the way there.