News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

alphakappa

Re:I Built a Stereo Vision Board for Hardware Hackers on Sunday October 25, 2026 @12:23PM (#50233246)
You can assume that the motivation is for the author to build something and share it with like-minded hackers. If he picked something OTS, that wouldn't be a story on HN.
Re:California is chasing wealth that has feet on Friday September 25, 2026 @01:06AM (#49840377)
Exactly $0 of high speed rail infrastructure was funded by sales taxes. State dollars came from prop 1a and cap and trade funds. About 12B over a decade and a half for heavy engineering, land acquisition etc. if that money was not spent it would have a negligible impact on your taxes.
Re:California is chasing wealth that has feet on Friday September 25, 2026 @01:01AM (#49840354)
The Noe valley bathroom was enough of an anomaly that it made the news. Do you have actual evidence that California taxes are not well spent?
Re:What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x on Friday August 21, 2026 @02:50PM (#49392364)
That is OP's point. The underlying technology has gotten faster but the computer you use feels the same as 20 years ago because the software that utilizes it does a lot more too.
Re:Flat Chair by Sara Paculdo on Friday August 21, 2026 @01:32PM (#49391374)
Thank you. The original website is a uniquely awful ad-infested page.
tangent: ridiculous that a site called designbloom has such an atrocious user experience. popovers, things that take over your reading space, and just general shiftiness all over the page that's unrelated to the content you are reading.
Re:Picasso's Guernica (Gigapixel) on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @03:52PM (#47784328)
It is stunning, particularly so if you read up on the history beforehand and then see all the elements in the painting. It’s the first time I was able to appreciate a Picasso for all the complexity he put into his paintings.

I was similarly stunned by one of the Anselm Kiefers at the Bilbao Guggenheim. Some paintings can only be appreciated in person.

Just look at the size of Kinect and compare it with faceid embedded in a phone. The word “just” is doing a lot of work in the parent comment.
Re: on Monday January 20, 2025 @11:51PM (#42776753)
If a country enters and leaves accords and organizations on a whim, at what point does it become a liability to have that country be at the table at all?
Re:Canada euthanasia now accounts for nearly one in 20 deaths on Sunday December 15, 2024 @11:47PM (#42428085)
That’s an odd comparison to make. The ‘school system’ isn’t a monolithic system that is actively refusing to acknowledge or take action against sexual predators. Is there an example of a school district that has been shielding predators on an ongoing basis and refusing to take remedial action?
Re:What Is Founder Mode? on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @02:13PM (#41780153)
It's also crazy that people are buying into the idea of 'Founder Mode' when Airbnb is one of the companies that is very much riding on the moat it created a while back while not doing anything much that can even remotely be called customer-obsessive (which is the lesson they could really learn from Steve Jobs)
Re:Show HN: A Website for Comparing Protein Powder Prices on Monday October 07, 2024 @03:55PM (#41770265)
This is great. You are missing True Nutrition.

Also if you could add a simple way to reset the filters, that would be great.

Re:Apple introduces M4 chip on Tuesday May 07, 2024 @11:01AM (#40286430)
Any product that uses this is more than just the chip, so you cannot get a proportional change in battery life.
Re:The cities stripping out concrete for earth and plants on Saturday February 24, 2024 @10:23PM (#39497299)
Worth mentioning the depaving efforts in Mexico City, particularly in Pedregal in an effort to replenish the ground water. In this case, for the lava bed, not earth and plants.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/depave-paradise/

Curious to know where in SF you lived. Generally there’s bodegas all over the place and you can find fresh produce there. Not to mention, the city has good bakeries everywhere. Fast food (the well known chains) are quite hard to find in most neighborhoods.
Sorry to be pedantic, but not up until, but from the 15th century or so (Babur) until some time in the 18th century (Battle of Plassey). And not all of India but a northern region. Indian history and geography are just too vast to be contained in simple phrases (including what I said above)
Article gift link (if you cannot get past the paywall): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/health/coolsculpting-side...
Re:Garum Masala: trade between ancient Rome and India on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:59PM (#35534506)
Having read many of his books, that’s absolutely not the case. His book ‘The Anarchy’ (and the podcast) go into great detail about the excesses of colonialism.
Re:Garum Masala: trade between ancient Rome and India on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:10PM (#35532964)
So interesting to see William Dalyrumple pop up on HN. He has been writing fascinating history books for decades, particularly about India. He’s currently hosting a podcast called Empire[1] (season 1: British Empire, season 2: Ottoman Empire). This podcast is one of my favorite things

1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/empire/id1639561921

Re:The Rezwan Razack’s Museum of Indian Paper Money on Friday January 20, 2023 @03:50PM (#34459743)
Tangential to the article itself - the page is fairly unreadable, at least on mobile due to the silly number of ads, an overlaid video ad that doesn’t seem to have a close button and so on. I understand that this is a business that needs ads for revenue, but how do publishers feel good shipping such awful experiences and somehow expect users to want to return to their sites?
It doesn’t always work that way. We sometimes have friends we might not stay actively in touch with, but are able to pick up where we left off when we are back in contact. Friendships are complex.
Re:San Francisco: The reckoning is here on Friday November 04, 2022 @12:44PM (#33469666)
>California has the same age-adjusted excess mortality as Florida, so the destruction was wrought for naught.

Seems arbitrary to compare with Florida when the linked data shows California ranked 38, and nearly half the excess mortality of states at the top that seemingly didn’t take the same COVID-19 precautions.

When the article begins with such a false premise, it’s hard to take the rest of it seriously

Re:San Francisco: The reckoning is here on Friday November 04, 2022 @12:38PM (#33469561)
>San Francisco has replaced its DA and now re-funded police

When was SF police de-funded? Budgets have only increased each year, any rhetoric notwithstanding [1]

1. https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...

Ask HN: Why isn’t there a high quality self guided audio tour app?

With smartphones and GPS, it would seem that self guided audio tours would be a no-brainer. With all this focus on augmented reality, why isn’t there a bunch of high quality apps targeting this market? Detour tried a few years back and failed, but every day people continue to spend money on travel and tour guides, so what gives?

( Read More... | 1 comment | 2 points | on HN )
The 87,000 additional auditors is a misleading interpretation [1]

Summary: - IRS used to have over 100,000 employees a decade back. This number has fallen due to funding cuts etc to less than 78,000 today.

- The employees are not just auditors - they are support people for tax filing, IT etc.

- There will be further employee attrition over the next decade that would need to be backfilled.

- What Congress has given them is funding to cover hiring of 87,000 employees over the next decade. This will cover backfill for employee attrition + new employees that will include auditors, enhanced support, IT etc. The total growth (again over the next decade) is expected to be 20-30,000 with will bring the IRS back to last decade levels.

TL;DR: IRS isn't going out and hiring 87,000 new (and in some misleading reports, gun toting) agents tomorrow and doubling their workforce. Instead, they are bringing their employee count (auditors and others) back to last decade levels and also replacing departing employees.

1. https://time.com/6204928/irs-87000-agents-factcheck-biden/

Unrelated to the product itself, please make pricing/licensing clear upfront. “Try for free” leads to a page that says “signing up is free”. Great, but what comes after that? Please don’t leave your users guessing.
Re:Oregon expands electric vehicle charging statewide on Sunday June 05, 2022 @09:57PM (#31636643)
EVs have plenty of mechanical parts that are not brakes and wheels. It will need servicing, just of a different sort.

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