Hacker News: xvedejas

New comment by xvedejas in "France pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain"

xvedejas — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:55:09 +0000

> the price of gold continued to rise as they did this

This would mean they sold low and bought high, right?

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

xvedejas — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:02:34 +0000

A couple of the lines I ride in California have decent on-time rates (mostly I ride the line formerly known as the San Joaquins)

New comment by xvedejas in "An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]"

xvedejas — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:34:56 +0000

Yes, to be clear I was intentionally not responding to the GP directly.

New comment by xvedejas in "An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]"

xvedejas — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:11:42 +0000

I was not talking about tract housing. Where I live there is no tract housing construction.

New comment by xvedejas in "An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]"

xvedejas — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:53:13 +0000

New multifamily construction in the US that has to undergo design review is arguably fairly custom in that each site will have different requirements. I think it's fair to say that commoditization is a spectrum?

New comment by xvedejas in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

xvedejas — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:39:14 +0000

I've been using Linux for a long time, which might sound like I'm comfortable with all its rough edges, but it's honestly the opposite. Early on it was a new toy and I would accept issues as part of messing around with it. The past 10~15 years on the other hand, I've needed to get serious work done on it, and also use it for PC gaming, so I've gone the other way and focused on getting the most no-nonsense easy setup where I don't have to be tinkering with things all the time.

Based on that, I'd say: go for a popular distro with KDE. I'm sure there are other very polished options out there, but my recommendation is Kubuntu, even though it's not the one I use today (I use Arch mostly), as it's very simple to set up and well supported.

New comment by xvedejas in "Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English"

xvedejas — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:19:15 +0000

We already have a language for talking to LLMs: Polish

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/polish-effec...

New comment by xvedejas in "U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth"

xvedejas — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:42:11 +0000

Shouldn't it be the same symbol but turned 90 degrees? Seems to mimic the sextant operation if so. I've always used some set of greek symbols (theta, phi, maybe psi) for these kinds of angles.

New comment by xvedejas in "Billion-Parameter Theories"

xvedejas — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:17:28 +0000

The empty land is not very valuable. Suburban homeowners are sitting on relatively valuable land, and it's valuable because of access to jobs and services.

In my personal experience, adding density to established neighborhoods improves those neighborhoods' character. Sometimes it gets those afraid of change to move out, improving it even more.

New comment by xvedejas in "We installed a single turnstile to feel secure"

xvedejas — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:09:08 +0000

> they locked all the side doors

And this didn't get them in trouble with the fire marshal?

New comment by xvedejas in "How to make a living as an artist"

xvedejas — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:29:46 +0000

As a resident of SF I've only ever heard of fnnch in the context of people hating his art (I still don't understand why). Is it a case of any publicity being good publicity?

New comment by xvedejas in "BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp"

xvedejas — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 01:24:38 +0000

It all depends on age group in my experience. My friends all a bit older than me prefer Messenger for everything. My friends all younger than me prefer Discord. I think my parents and their generation use iMessage, but I use WhatsApp with them. My generation used to use snapchat a lot, I think, but I never got on that boat.

New comment by xvedejas in "Private equity firms acquired more than 500 autism centers in past decade: study"

xvedejas — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 01:40:12 +0000

You are implying people should shut up about it because it's not novel information. I think "are you surprised?" is a very lame and unoriginal response I see everywhere and doesn't even care to engage with the problem. I think HN's rules suggest you should put in more effort than this.

New comment by xvedejas in "Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success"

xvedejas — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 08:25:28 +0000

I think it depends on whether you're planning on holding it in currency or using the currency to buy other things. Does the cost of material goods and services mostly stay the same in EUR, or does it somewhat follow the S&P? If more the latter, then converting to EUR is just a very temporary exchange and its nominal amount doesn't exactly matter.

New comment by xvedejas in "US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes"

xvedejas — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:26:44 +0000

Marginal buyers have a big impact by adding a lot of liquidity, but I'm not sure they manipulate prices that much, given that if they ever tried to move prices far from the margin they would cease to be marginal buyers.

New comment by xvedejas in "SF lawmakers vote to create reparations fund $5M per Black resident"

xvedejas — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 07:05:16 +0000

Only to black residents as of 2025? Intentionally ignoring the black former residents who cannot afford to live in their city anymore?

New comment by xvedejas in "Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon"

xvedejas — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:33:28 +0000

I'll note that for two rates (a, b) the general formula for this kind of comparison would be:

    a (1-b) / (b (1-a))

New comment by xvedejas in "2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web"

xvedejas — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 01:42:54 +0000

I started using spotify about 5 years ago, if you're a long time user I don't really know what it was like before then.

New comment by xvedejas in "2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web"

xvedejas — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 07:50:20 +0000

In my experience Spotify's song/playlist recommendations are not great, but the album recommendations have a pretty high hit rate. I'm not sure why this would be.

New comment by xvedejas in "America's betting craze has spread to its news networks"

xvedejas — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:14:57 +0000

In how much of the US is sports betting legal so far anyway? I'm pretty sure it's not legal here in California yet.