Hacker News: symbogra

New comment by symbogra in "One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household"

symbogra — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 14:08:13 +0000

I used to do this during my first real job and was tracking every sandwich I bought, then one of the senior engineers told me to stop wasting time with it and make more money, and then I was enlightened.

New comment by symbogra in "Linux is good now"

symbogra — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 13:52:20 +0000

Looking at the logs I installed Fedora 35 on this laptop over 4 years ago when I got it and have upgraded through to 43 with no serious issues aside from some mDNS configuration that I had to fix.

New comment by symbogra in "I'm a developer for a major food delivery app"

symbogra — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 06:01:24 +0000

It's the biggest clue that it's typical reddit brained fanfic.

New comment by symbogra in "How AI labs are solving the power problem"

symbogra — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:56:38 +0000

Really cool in depth report, thanks for sharing. It's very interesting to see what these big datacenter deployments are actually doing. Go look at the oil price charts for the last 25 years and you'll see why it makes a ton of sense economically.

I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.

New comment by symbogra in "Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”"

symbogra — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 15:23:37 +0000

For now I'm gonna enjoy my VC subsidized burrito deliveries while I can.

New comment by symbogra in "Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts"

symbogra — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 14:00:04 +0000

Wow, the sample shows that 15 point Calibri on official government documents was truly awful. In software when we make a mistake that causes some production issue the best first action is almost always to roll back. Maybe 14 pt TNR isn't the best, but rolling back to it is a defensible decision.

New comment by symbogra in "HSBC blocks its app due to F-Droid-installed Bitwarden"

symbogra — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 11:50:47 +0000

I can confirm that the Postfinance app doesn't work on graphene. I left some feedback and they said they're working on it so maybe there is hope. But as such I need to keep an old iphone around for banking apps.

Also being an American in Switzerland trying to do banking is eye opening. Local banks mostly tell you to pound sand when they find out you're American. Regardless of this or that administration, the US is really totalitarian when it comes to finance and taxes.

New comment by symbogra in "Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”"

symbogra — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:10:16 +0000

Time to shell out the $200 my friend.

New comment by symbogra in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

symbogra — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 06:18:19 +0000

Swiss trains are very civilized. On an ordinary intercity train can sit at a table with a white tablecloth and have a beer or wine and a proper dinner. It really makes the time fly by. The SBB also has merch store with their own line of watches.

New comment by symbogra in "Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert"

symbogra — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:53:10 +0000

This is really cool, it reminds me of Novosibirsk which I learned about from reading Red Plenty, Francis Spufford's historical novel about the city.

New comment by symbogra in "Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain"

symbogra — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:07:26 +0000

Motivation... it's a cool place for a holiday? See some endemic wildlife?

New comment by symbogra in "Why I Disappeared – My week with minimal internet in a remote island chain"

symbogra — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 05:15:58 +0000

I'm on a tropical island vacation and still checking HN. The typical tropical tummy troubles leave me with some time to fill reading tech news, and I don't see any problem with it. I appreciate the general lack of political stuff on US political stuff HN (except the comments).

New comment by symbogra in "Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?"

symbogra — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:55:05 +0000

Yes especially for after hours fun projects where I might have a few hours a week to work on them. Previously I would get so bogged down by boilerplate I had kind of given up on trying. Now with AI tools I can spend more time thinking about the most important problems and send off agents to do the gruntwork.

New comment by symbogra in "USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994"

symbogra — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:34:54 +0000

No that's a good thing actually, because then we get asteroid mining spaceships

New comment by symbogra in "Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash"

symbogra — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:23:59 +0000

Probably a good old fashioned Mk 1 Human Brain given the use of "slight of hand"

New comment by symbogra in "Deliberate Internet Shutdowns"

symbogra — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 13:25:07 +0000

In Tanzania they went around to hotels during the ban to make sure they didn't have starlink. It's illegal here but many have it. During that time some enterprising individuals charged tourists to access theirs.

New comment by symbogra in "Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?"

symbogra — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 13:30:33 +0000

I will try to record any that I spot in my travels

New comment by symbogra in "Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)"

symbogra — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:03:38 +0000

Thanks for reminding me about that, what a great monologue. I didn't really understand it when I was younger, but now I feel the same thing with regards to software engineering. There was a golden age which finally broke at the end of the 2010's.

New comment by symbogra in "How getting richer made teenagers less free"

symbogra — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:26:15 +0000

The track that the US political economy is on with the feedback loop caused by government backed fixed term fixed interest loans requires an ever increasing LTV, meaning newer entrants in the housing market will have to accept increasingly precarious positions.

New comment by symbogra in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

symbogra — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 15:06:41 +0000

That old bat is the enemy of any kind of US technical progress.