Hacker News: venzaspa

New comment by venzaspa in "Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds"

venzaspa — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:43:57 +0000

It just goes to show that people have very different views. I think when I hear people thinking out loud (ums and ahs) it's a marker that they are actually engaging with the question, thinking through an answer and not bullshitting without thinking.

New comment by venzaspa in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

venzaspa — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:02:58 +0000

Hold on, why isn't this a touchpad setting in the OS?

New comment by venzaspa in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

venzaspa — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:44:01 +0000

American football originated from Rugby and Baseball originated from Rounders.

New comment by venzaspa in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

venzaspa — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:38:08 +0000

I watched a game of American football once and was blown away by how many adverts there were. It's such a slow game too - so much stopping between tackles for deliberation (seemingly). Don't get it personally.

New comment by venzaspa in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

venzaspa — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:26:41 +0000

I think you're probably underestimating just how much time kids in other places spend playing football in their spare time. When I was a kid, we were out 2-3 hours every night after school playing it.

New comment by venzaspa in "Meta enables ADB on deprecated Portal devices [video]"

venzaspa — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:59:09 +0000

Perhaps you're not the target audience for this announcement.

New comment by venzaspa in "Americans don't know how to fight AI so they're fighting data centers"

venzaspa — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:31:16 +0000

As far as I can work out, tokens aren't fungible which makes them a pretty poor thing to tax instead of just taxing the profits of the companies behind the models.

New comment by venzaspa in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

venzaspa — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:04:52 +0000

Why not settle on a chat which actually uses e2e encryption by default though?

There's truth to the Russophile comment though, Telegram is regularly used by GRU and the FSB to recruit people to commit acts of vandalism and terror and is pretty well documented. It's also commonly used to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories. My mum has fallen for several of these via Telegram.

New comment by venzaspa in "SF startup is testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims"

venzaspa — Fri, 29 May 2026 10:53:50 +0000

But why don't they take the same money and get a cheap industrial unit and build some mock rooms up. Surely it costs the same as hiring and subsequently fixing peoples houses.

New comment by venzaspa in "Volkswagen blocks Home Assistant by requiring client assertion"

venzaspa — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:34:33 +0000

That's pretty brave.

New comment by venzaspa in "Volkswagen blocks Home Assistant by requiring client assertion"

venzaspa — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:14:16 +0000

Quite a few other manufacturers have done the same thing. I use a reverse engineered Polestar library to get charging status but I'm in the middle of building a CANBUS sniffer to do the same job because I don't trust they won't do the same thing as this.

I don't really understand it, it doesn't seem to offer a huge potential revenue stream and it pisses off the people who are most invested in your product.

New comment by venzaspa in "Show HN: I made an emergency page for my family"

venzaspa — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:21:41 +0000

Depends where you are, in most European countries, everyone including their grandmas will use Whatsapp.

New comment by venzaspa in "Ferrari Luce"

venzaspa — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:01:49 +0000

They only really became better (more efficient) when they ditch torque converters and use some form of direct shift automatic gearbox or CRV instead which adds complexity. Small and cheap cars are far more popular in Europe and both of the above add cost and complexity.

I've driven manual cars daily for years and once you get used to it, changing gears is not even something you think about.

New comment by venzaspa in "Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI"

venzaspa — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:34:19 +0000

The vast majority of people in the UK don't have to fill out a self assessment because their tax situation is simple and handed by their employers. For the people who do have more complicated tax arrangements, the process takes like 10-15 minutes on the HMRC portal and importantly it's free.

New comment by venzaspa in "Two EA-18 fighter jets collide at Mountain Home airshow, pilots ejected safely"

venzaspa — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:24:05 +0000

Always enjoy looking through the Martin-Baker site for their database of successful ejections. They've saved a lot of lives!

New comment by venzaspa in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"

venzaspa — Sun, 17 May 2026 22:57:58 +0000

Just looking into it for my house in the UK (read, not very sunny) and it'll pay for itself in around 6 years. Seems like a no brainer for a house I'm not planning on moving out of.

New comment by venzaspa in "Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha"

venzaspa — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:01:02 +0000

There's been repeated efforts to depopulate the Island by the UK government because it's expensive when you have to do drops like this - the people living there want to be there and prior to them getting there it was an uninhabited island.

I'm not really sure it meets the definition of a colony in the modern sense of the word.

New comment by venzaspa in "Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha"

venzaspa — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:53:28 +0000

No, you're correct Britain is a collection of islands in the northern hemisphere. This however is an island in the Atlantic ocean and is a British Overseas Territory.

New comment by venzaspa in "Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7"

venzaspa — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:21:14 +0000

I know it should be the default, but if you turn off online searches for the Start Menu, it operates exactly how you'd expect it to on Windows 11.

Windows 11 is also a lot faster than 7 was on equivalent systems. Windows 7 would take minutes to boot.

New comment by venzaspa in "Don't hijack my mouse pointer"

venzaspa — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:48:49 +0000

Not nearly as nasty as scroll hijacking so the page moves at a different speed than what I've instructed it to move at. Or pastejacking - when you're trying to copy a piece of text and the page makes you grab an entirely different string to what you'd highlighted and selected.