Hacker News: zelos

New comment by zelos in "Replacement of petroleum based products with plant-based materials (2025)"

zelos — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:42:26 +0000

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

Maybe Marx was on to something after all...

New comment by zelos in "Toyota is taking the Corolla electric"

zelos — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:02:10 +0000

But you can't really compare a petrol car and an EV. Petrol cars are going away, that's not optional.

An EV that takes an extra 10-15 minutes over 300 miles seems like a reasonable alternative: there may be others.

New comment by zelos in "Show HN: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021"

zelos — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:27:30 +0000

£180/year (£60 for black and white only!). It is becoming increasingly hard to defend given the low quality of a lot of their output.

If they could find a way to fund Radio 4 without it I'd be in favour of scrapping the fee.

New comment by zelos in "Holden's Lightning Flight"

zelos — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:47:04 +0000

This paragraph from near the end of that article gives the incident a different feeling:

Some years after the incident, my hidden fears of high speed flight came to the surface and I had to spend two periods in hospital. I had not come to terms with the emotional side of the event

New comment by zelos in "A Small Telescope That Surprised Me"

zelos — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:28:43 +0000

> The objects are pretty faint and at best, you will see a milky smush

With an 8 inch dob, things like globular clusters are going to look granular and pretty amazing in reasonably dark skies. Similar for bright nebula.

But, yes, it's a philosophical question.

New comment by zelos in "A Small Telescope That Surprised Me"

zelos — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:20:52 +0000

There is something fundamentally different about actually looking at Jupiter... The image might be faint, imperfect ... But it is live.

The astrophotography/live viewing split in astronomy is interesting. For me, the whole reason I do backyard astronomy is to find the objects myself and observe directly, to the point where even using an app like Stellarium feels a bit like cheating.

New comment by zelos in "Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo"

zelos — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:49:36 +0000

Yes, in the wide shot of the band the left side looks significantly better to me, are the labels the wrong way round?

New comment by zelos in "US gas prices hit an average of $4 a gallon again"

zelos — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:55:29 +0000

Does Germany have anything similar to the cheap off-peak electricity tariffs we get in the UK? Generally 6-10c/kWh.

New comment by zelos in "US gas prices hit an average of $4 a gallon again"

zelos — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:03:12 +0000

US gallon is 3.8 litres. Even so, that's pretty inefficient.

New comment by zelos in "CarPlay Is Additive"

zelos — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:33:08 +0000

Locations as well. Carplay picks up locations from calendar appointments, messages etc, so very often you just plug it in and click "Go".

New comment by zelos in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

zelos — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:49:45 +0000

I totally agree about school-level homework: it was many years before my pre-frontal cortex developed enough that I could have forced myself to do the work.

That said, though, one thing I don't understand about the heavy users of AI in academia and software development is that the thinking and coding is the fun part. And that's the part so many people seem to be so keen to automate away.

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

zelos — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:36:28 +0000

Seeing and hearing the last remaining Avro Vulcan pull up over the chalk cliffs at Eastbourne a few years back is something I won't forget for a long time.

New comment by zelos in "The Upper Middle Class Trap"

zelos — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:42:25 +0000

It’s the same in the UK, house prices in the catchment area of a good school are significantly higher.

New comment by zelos in "The Upper Middle Class Trap"

zelos — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:19:17 +0000

"a college degree made you stand out. But now that so many have them, it’s table stakes. Now, we spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars to end up in the same place."

That kind of depends what you're measuring, doesn't it? A better educated population is presumably generally a good thing. My life is probably more interesting because I spent 4 years at university learning.

Is that worth the price? I don't know, but it's not the same place.

New comment by zelos in "BYD Seal 08 debuts with Blade Battery 2.0: 1,000km range, 5-min charging, 684hp"

zelos — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:33:23 +0000

That 100kW claim seems pretty unlikely, or maybe it's UK only? Driving long distance in Europe I see the max ~230kW charging of the car everywhere apart from the rare times the charger's broken.

Actually, although UK provision is pretty bad, I got 235kW sustained last week in some small charging station off the M4.

New comment by zelos in "BYD Seal 08 debuts with Blade Battery 2.0: 1,000km range, 5-min charging, 684hp"

zelos — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:41:33 +0000

I've avoided Chinese EVs for political reasons, but it's getting harder. After the lease on my Kia EV6 ends in 6 months I can either upgrade to the new model with a whole 10% more range, or switch to one of the European brands which mostly have around half the charging speed.

The Mercedes CLA seems to be the only model that's significantly better and not totally crazy money.

New comment by zelos in "10 years ago, someone wrote a test for Servo that included an expiry in 2026"

zelos — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:26:55 +0000

Generate fuzz tests using random values with a fixed seed, sure, but using random values in tests that run on CI seems like a recipe for hard-to-reproduce flaky builds unless you have really good logging.

New comment by zelos in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

zelos — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:52:18 +0000

I was forced to work out a 3 month notice period at my previous company in the UK. I don’t see the point of keeping an already-checked out employee around so long when you have basically no way of getting anything but the bare minimum out of them.

New comment by zelos in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

zelos — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:37:12 +0000

Not to open a can of worms, but there are probably people who still consider Northern Ireland a colony.

New comment by zelos in "Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland"

zelos — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:31:48 +0000

Argentina only had 6 Exocets. I think the parent is referring to the failure of the fuses in the bombs the Argentinian pilots dropped on British ships.