Hacker News: vl

New comment by vl in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

vl — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:49:53 +0000

Or get a Dremel.

New comment by vl in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

vl — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:49:06 +0000

They actually reduced sharpness in M MacBooks Pros.

Unibody Intels before that were really really sharp.

New comment by vl in "Midnight train from GA: A view of America from the tracks as airports struggle"

vl — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:43:58 +0000

Delays? What if you can’t buy tickets at all.

I was looking at Tucson to Seattle trip on a relatively short notice - all sleeping tickets were sold out multiple weeks in advance. And due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat.

New comment by vl in "We broke 92% of SHA-256 – you should start to migrate from it"

vl — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:07:14 +0000

What does it mean to “break broken 92% of SHA-256“?

New comment by vl in "OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream"

vl — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:11:53 +0000

What are you using for email integration?

I want to setup agent to clean up my gmail inbox which has many thousands of unread messages.

New comment by vl in "ArXiv declares independence from Cornell"

vl — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:43:39 +0000

What is unclear why they need stuff of 27 and 6.7 million to operate essentially static hosting website in 2026.

New comment by vl in "Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?"

vl — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:23:34 +0000

After deal is done it becomes rational to describe how good it is in comparison to completion to promote it.

New comment by vl in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

vl — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:07:03 +0000

> There just aren’t as many good new movies.

Is this true, or you just can’t discover them anymore because everything else competes for your attention? Arguably in the last decade more great content in both movies and TV shows produced than ever, it’s just so much, that it’s hard to choose.

New comment by vl in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

vl — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:00:26 +0000

Arguably this existed for the limited time in history with invention of over-the-air TV and ended with advent of cable. Event before internet streaming nobody watched same stuff anymore.

New comment by vl in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

vl — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:21:46 +0000

This rule is just for enabling witch-hunts. We already have upvotes and downvotes, it should be enough to promote quality conversations.

New comment by vl in "The Hunt for Dark Breakfast"

vl — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:19:01 +0000

While you are technically correct, since any triangle is a simplex, this is not relevant to this visualization.

For this visualization: get positive quantities in 3D space, normalize to 1, now you have dot on a triangle on 1-sphere in a positive octant. Project triangle into 2D space a this is your visualization.

New comment by vl in "Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place"

vl — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 07:22:09 +0000

I actually enjoyed the writing. It's clearly reflection on the experience presented as an "advice list" somewhat jokingly. Since author didn't enjoy the experience, tone is somber. After spending childhood in the cold place I can relate.

New comment by vl in "Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B"

vl — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 03:59:42 +0000

Yes, on some credit cards it's actual 2% cash - Apple Credit Card, Fidelity.

Amazon gives you 5% back for using their credit card, it's criminal not to use it.

If you buy a lot of equipment or expensive equipment - B&H credit card covers sales tax! I.e. 10% for my area! (I don't use it since I don't buy that much, but still it's an option)

New comment by vl in "Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B"

vl — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 03:52:47 +0000

What 2% drag? Aren't you using credit card with 2% bonus? Just see it as 2% reduction in prices.

New comment by vl in "No knives, only cook knives"

vl — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:54:05 +0000

The article says you need to show there at 5 am though.

New comment by vl in "An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm"

vl — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:45:02 +0000

But any modern house is too airtight and essentially requires ERV.

Which brings us to next interesting problem - you would think that ERV should be built-in into modern cooling/heating systems, but it’s no the case.

New comment by vl in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

vl — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 21:53:20 +0000

For schema design phase I used web UI for all three.

Logical bug of using BIGSERIAL for tracking updates (generated at insert time, not commit time, so can be out of order) wouldn’t be caught by any number of iterations of Claude Code and would be found in production after weeks of debugging.

New comment by vl in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

vl — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 21:41:00 +0000

Honestly, I don’t understand universal praise for Opus 4.5. It’s good, but really not better than other agents.

Just today:

Opus 4.5 Extended Thinking designed psql schema for “stream updates after snapshot” with bugs.

Grok Heavy gave correct solution without explanations.

ChatGPT 5.2 Pro gave correct solution and also explained why simpler way wouldn’t work.

New comment by vl in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

vl — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 18:56:08 +0000

DB last year: I took train last year from Frankfurt airport to Bonn only to see Bonn sail past the window and train to go to Cologne.

I asked locals what is going on, turns out that all trains were late, and this train departed from the platform already marked for Bonn! “You should watch what train number you board on DB, not trust sign on platform!” locals helpfully advised me.

New comment by vl in "Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18"

vl — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 18:50:42 +0000

“does it all well” is a stretch.

Any non-trivial amount of data and you’ll run into non-trivial problems.

For example, some of our pg databases got into such state, that we had to write custom migration tool because we couldn’t copy data to new instance using standard tools. We had to re-write schema to using custom partitions because perf on built-in partitioning degrades as number of partitions gets high, and so on.