Hacker News: zol

New comment by zol in "China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990"

zol — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 02:18:55 +0000

My guess is as a species it will relocate to somewhere with the right temperature zone but because coral takes so long to grow from the perspective of those of us alive the existing “old growth” coral will die.

New comment by zol in "Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button"

zol — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 06:59:30 +0000

Today it’s Nue. Tomorrow it’ll be Olde and we’ll complain about all the boilerplate or repetitive update logic we now have to write.

New comment by zol in "It doesn't cost much to improve someone's life"

zol — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 01:55:53 +0000

What do you think constitutes a collapse? Can you give a modern times example of a country collapsing in a way you’re imagining the US might?

New comment by zol in "We're bringing Pebble back"

zol — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 10:42:02 +0000

This is fantastic! I hope you can foster a truly open, high quality, light and fast operating system that draws in multiple hardware vendors each with their own take on what a watch should be.

New comment by zol in "Bioinspired weather-responsive adaptive shading"

zol — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 11:34:01 +0000

The material changes shape based on the amount of humidity in the air. The article doesn’t explain how that makes it respond to sunlight, which is what their demonstration system does. I didn’t think sunlight and humidity were always correlated. Am I missing something obvious?

New comment by zol in "Official DeepSeek R1 Now on Ollama"

zol — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 07:41:30 +0000

Censorship is different than learned bias.

New comment by zol in "Bunkers in Albania"

zol — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 11:28:29 +0000

I’ve heard this all too. My father grew up and lived in the former Yugoslavia. He’s since spoken about how well regarded Tito was and the opinion many had that he played a big hand in keeping Yugoslavia united whilst he was alive. He’s also talked about how Yugoslavia was sort of a buffer zone between the east and west and so a lot of freedoms were available to citizens there that weren’t in the full on communist countries. E.g when he was younger he did some work trips to Germany and on top of earning deutschmarks had a side hustle smuggling back jeans and records to sell.

Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.

New comment by zol in "Celebrating the timeless allure of Tintin's aesthetics"

zol — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 11:31:37 +0000

Ahh Tintin. This takes me right back to the pre-internet era perusing the Tintin section at my school’s library. It was such a delight to occasionally come across one that I hadn’t read yet. Somehow this happened surprisingly often, I guess a bunch of us borrowers kept the series under heavy rotation.

New comment by zol in "AI founders will learn The Bitter Lesson"

zol — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 12:38:13 +0000

This was my takeaway from the article too.

New comment by zol in "The era of America’s subminimum wage for tipped restaurant workers may be ending"

zol — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 18:46:52 +0000

This. Same in Australia.

New comment by zol in "Giving up the iPad-only travel dream"

zol — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 04:42:59 +0000

You’re even forgetting the supercomputer they’re carrying on their wrists.

New comment by zol in "Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?"

zol — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 05:43:39 +0000

> A centralized service runs on computers wholly under control of a single entity. They can change, monitor, amplify and bury all information. They can read your private messages. They can delete content, promote other content, and even impersonate you.

Apart from reading your private messages, does that mean you still need to trust that the server you’re connected to isn’t doing all those other things?

New comment by zol in "Blue Sky: Can Twitter be owned by its users?"

zol — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 05:36:16 +0000

> Having all the data of the entire network on all the Big-World Servers. That's what you need to do if you want to crunch the data, make it searchable, and provide algorithms that help you discover new content and new people to follow.

How is this all possible if the data is encrypted? Also, what’s the economic incentive for building and maintaining the software that runs on the servers?

New comment by zol in "The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England"

zol — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 06:00:23 +0000

As an affluent tech industry Australian living in the US (Bay Area) I’d say there’s very little practical difference in my standard of living here compared to back home. It’s more the poorer parts of society here where the figures quoted in the article apply and that feels just as removed from my life here as it does to you sitting in Australia. The US is a big place.

New comment by zol in "The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England"

zol — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 05:47:47 +0000

As a counterpoint I’m an Australian living in the Bay Area and drivers here are more considerate than back home. In law abiding Melbourne where I grew up, drivers will happy run you over if you’re jay walking because they supposedly have right of way.

New comment by zol in "The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England"

zol — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 05:40:30 +0000

I’ve noticed this trend as well around my neighborhood since the pandemic.

New comment by zol in "The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England"

zol — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 05:34:56 +0000

Since the second amendment doesn’t specify what arms I have the right to bear does that mean I should be allowed to wander down to my local gun store to pick up a surface to air missile so that I can shoot down an airliner? Of course not, that would be insane. So why not put similar limits on automatic weapons that can mow down an auditorium full of kids?

New comment by zol in "Programming isn’t coding (2020)"

zol — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 05:08:34 +0000

Teaching programming via the technologies in fashion and practical for getting a job today is flawed. Teach the fundamentals - math, logic, algorithms. But, most importantly, teach how to learn and problem solve. If your students can’t figure out how to quit their editor they’re doomed in this career. Forget about React and hooks, those will be out of date by the time they’re entering the workforce.

New comment by zol in "Remote work is starting to hit office rents"

zol — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 04:35:59 +0000

Yep, that’s been my experience as well. This might actually turn downtown around if it’s forced to convert more to residential.

With its hills, access to green space, forests, ocean, waterways and culture it’s a fantastic city to live - up there with the best in the US in my books.

I’ve even grown to love the fog and wind, it feels amazing to come back to in the summer when everywhere inland from the coast is baking in 100+ degree weather.

New comment by zol in "Shields Up"

zol — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 04:02:06 +0000

I run into frustrations whenever I search for anything to do with products or something popular like parenting. Results are swamped by garbage as filled SEO content some of which I swear is written by chatGPT. I don’t know why Google doesn’t penalize those results. Come to think of it they don’t seem to mind surfacing content that’s behind a paywall either. I’m really not sure what’s going on over there these days…