Hacker News: tedggh

New comment by tedggh in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

tedggh — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:14:54 +0000

We will go for the third one next year and that would be it for us. I come from a family of 8 children and my wife is a single child. I don’t think I had a better childhood, just different. She has a lot of good memories of traveling with her parents and does not regret not having siblings. I saw my dad a few days a week for a good portion of my early childhood and regret that a bit. My wife and I are equally social, I’m actually more of an introvert in some circumstances. We are both considered of others, and like to share. I would say the one skill I developed that she lacks is the ability to focus and concentrate in public spaces with noise. Because that’s how I did homework and studied all the way from elementary school to college, always around a bunch of loud people, no place in the house where I could close a door and be alone.

New comment by tedggh in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

tedggh — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:06:59 +0000

There’s never a right time to have kids. But having them older has its perks. You are much more calmed, patient, you are wiser and likely financially stable. Throwing money at problems definitely makes life 10X easier when you have kids, something most people can’t do in their 20s or even 30s.

New comment by tedggh in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

tedggh — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:57:20 +0000

Being a dad is fulfilling enough that I don’t want to do anything else but hang out with my kids. Perhaps that’s what Paul Graham meant when he said kids make you less ambitious? And I know the day will come when they won’t like to hang out with me, so I’ll have the time to go back to building things.

New comment by tedggh in "Beware Management Consultants"

tedggh — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:36:47 +0000

I spent a few years on and off consulting working for two of the Big 4. I can’t speak for all the teams but the ones I worked with provided good value. Our job was to protect our customers from poor designs and lack of accountability. Some of the projects I worked with were very big involving dozens of suppliers. Our customers didn’t have the capability to coordinate so much work and they also lacked the know-how and expertise in many of the domains. Also many of the big engineering and tech companies out there can be very sloppy. Don’t think because they carry a recognizable name (I don’t want to name them but they are SP500) they always do good work. I have seen stuff that is really really bad, like unsafe bad. That’s where my team would step in and fill those roles on the customer side. Many of the projects I participated were also highly regulated, and that’s a whole additional layer of complexity for which you need people with experience in very particular areas. A bad design that leads to an environmental disaster or even a violation of regulations can be extremely costly.

New comment by tedggh in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

tedggh — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:42:32 +0000

The way I understand it is, these fabs have massive overheads so not selling is not an option. It is also relatively easy to pivot production from enterprise to consumer. Now if they all start doing that at the same time to stay in business during the down cycle, an oversupply in consumer chips is possible.

New comment by tedggh in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

tedggh — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:43:50 +0000

I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.

New comment by tedggh in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

tedggh — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:11:47 +0000

As feedback, you made that popup way too clean and easy to close. That’s not how it works in reality. You need to make the background transparent and the X so small it’s technically impossible to hit. Also think about adding an ad and a timer and move the popup slightly after N ms so that the user always hits the ad.

New comment by tedggh in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

tedggh — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:01:20 +0000

Economic stability alone is not enough for a currency to be an important store of wealth. China doesn’t have a free floating exchange, it has very strict capital controls and lacks political and legal predictability. You need very specific institutional foundations to have a currency like the USD, which the Chinese political system rejects. The US has an independent legal system. If you have a dispute with the US government you can take it to an independent court. In China, you have no way to sue the CPP. China is a single party socialist republic with all the political authority concentrated at the top, so one high impact event like the sudden dead of Xi Jinping could send its economy into fallout because of political uncertainty. In the US the system is explicitly designed to absorb this type of shocks. So for these and many other reasons the Yuan under the current Chinese political system will never be a serious contender to the USD as global currency, it’s just way too much institutional risk for foreign investors. It’s also very unlikely the CPP will ever pick a Yuan rivaling the USD vs political control over their domestic policy. They can’t have both.

New comment by tedggh in "Mistral OCR 4.1"

tedggh — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:29:12 +0000

A race to the bottom.

New comment by tedggh in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

tedggh — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:29:15 +0000

It’s very unlikely that the USD will lose its status particularly to the Yuan. You can do that mental calculation yourself. Would you convert all of your lifesavings from USD to Yuans today or in the next 10 years? The answer is probably “not a chance”. The reason is simple, liquidity and trust. China has no comparable open and independent financial institutions international central banks can trust, nor can they have them without surrendering control over their monetary policy. So as long as there’s no alternative to the USD (BRICS will likely fail), it will continue being the default global currency for reserves, debt and trade.

New comment by tedggh in "Five Programming Books That Changed How I Think"

tedggh — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 03:38:57 +0000

Effective Java by Joshua Bloch helped me grow from amateur to decent developer. And I never wrote a line of Java.

New comment by tedggh in "Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)"

tedggh — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:52:39 +0000

Drugs are regulated with the same care in the US, the problem is you are comparing a drug in Europe with a dietary supplement in the US. You can’t expect to grab a high quality of any dietary supplement from say Walmart. It’s the same in Europe. In the US there are labs making high quality dietary supplements, but you usually don’t find them at retail stores or even Amazon, so it needs a bit of research.

New comment by tedggh in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

tedggh — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:17:22 +0000

I work in renewables in the US. The current picture is actually a lot more positive than people believe. But good news are usually boring at not good for click bait, so they aren’t covered by the media. There’s a lot of work on solar energy currently and the forecast is VERY good. We do have some issues like grid connectivity and shifting policies but the market economics are working extremely well. The fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it. Texas for example, the conservative oil and gas hub of the US, is already outpacing California in total capacity additions because 1) they have tons of land and 2) no BS, quick local permits. So if you are a solar builder, you go to Texas not California. And yes, Texas is still pro fossil fuels, but the laws of supply and demand will continue favoring solar so that’s where the money will flow to.

New comment by tedggh in "BMW Is Showing Commercials on Their Car's Dash Screens as a Treat"

tedggh — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:28:11 +0000

I don’t think is fair to compare Asian and German cars. I personally dislike Asian designs regardless of how reliable and efficient they are. Subarus are objectively ugly cars and they are not great as daily drivers. Lexus offer a closer driving experience as German cars, meaning you can have both a sporty and family car without the annoyance of a sport ride and noise of a WRX. But is still very Asian looking with the sharp angles, ugly headlights and large grills.

New comment by tedggh in "BMW Is Showing Commercials on Their Car's Dash Screens as a Treat"

tedggh — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:16:59 +0000

If you are looking for luxury performance and can’t afford a Porsche or Ferrari but don’t want to look on a budget driving an Atlas or a Genesis then you only have BMW, Audi and Benz. The latter usually doesn’t appeal to under 60 except for AMG which is out of budget, so your decision always ends between Audi and BMW. They offer a different driving experience IMO, so if you are a beemer guy ads won’t deter you from buying one.

New comment by tedggh in "Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified"

tedggh — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:31:33 +0000

Speaking of enshitification, this blog is an unreadable mess of ads and popups. As fast as I was in I was out.

New comment by tedggh in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

tedggh — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:21:22 +0000

FIFA controls the largest event, so it should be the driving force for revenue but it’s not. But even if you add UEFA the whole thing still less profitable than an American professional and barely surpasses hockey. By the way, UEFA crying about this while they are the owners, regulators and revenue distributors is pretty crazy. It seems to me they are more concerned about not being able to hop on the FIFA deal themselves.

New comment by tedggh in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

tedggh — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:16:04 +0000

The UN is a poor analogy. The UN does not operate a large commercial business like FIFA which exploits the World Cup, Libertadores and other events. The only strong similarity they have is their non profit status. You should have used the IOC as analogy.

New comment by tedggh in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

tedggh — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:06:34 +0000

That’s part of their poor commercial vision. Even the World Cup brings less revenue than one season of the NBA. Doesn’t even make sense to compare it with the NFL.

New comment by tedggh in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

tedggh — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:02:52 +0000

The most beloved, most watched sport in the world making less than the American/Canadian hockey league is a commercial failure. Non profits are generally inefficient at running businesses. With the right guardrails a private arm that knows how to run a business could help FIFA make a ton of money. And yes a lot of rich guys will become even richer too, so what?