Hacker News Reader

0_____0on Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

Most blue metros in the US have a bad combination of high labor costs/low labor availability, high regulatory burden, wealthy conservative inhabitants who oppose construction, and working class people who are convinced that construction is gentrification.

I've been racking my brain trying ti figure out what it looks like for US cities to pull out of the housing crisis, and I think it's either going to take about a generation, or there will be some catastrophic event (Great Depression II, WWIII) that changes the political landscape so drastically that nobody can really oppose housing anymore.

0_____0on Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

Public housing projects were and sort of still are a thing. Glass Amendment limits the number of units that can be produced but most areas are well below those limits and the larger issue is that there's no budget or political willpower for social housing projects right now.

0_____0on Animation 10k Starlink Satellites

Hardware gets a bit easier in some respects when you have unit scale and don't need to make COGS+margin back on the sale. If Ubiquiti sell a base station, half of the unit price is gross margin. If SpaceX sell a Starlink terminal, they don't even have to cover COGS for it to be a good business case, because they're selling the service not the device.

The Starlink terminal is a very cool piece of kit, but it's not nearly as interesting as what they're hucking into LEO, and how they're doing it.

0_____0on On a Boat

After all the LLM written or lobotomized^W"polished" writing that gets surfaced here, seeing human writing makes me want to do drugs and fall in love.

0_____0on Honda is killing its EVs

devs have really got to start using NSA style naming conventions where they use the Joycean compound with random stuff that sounds cool e.g. BANNANADAIQUIRI or FOXACID.

0_____0on Have a fucking website

Thanks, I was actually trying to find this the other day. By trying, I mean I thought about it but wasn't near my phone so I forgot to do it.

0_____0on Have a fucking website

looks up latin conjugation chart

fuck this i'll learn mandarin instead

0_____0on Animation 10k Starlink Satellites

Beamforming is an old technology though. It's not hard to do, just a pain to do cheaply when you've got a bajillion emitters unless you have custom silicon.

0_____0on Have a fucking website

In MX and elsewhere lots of them are just mobile number through Whatsapp specifically. Like they have a phone number but it may be data-only.

0_____0on Honda is killing its EVs

1. Synonyms exist in language.

2. You're on a site with a bunch of programmers who regularly use weird words for stuff that already has a name. Reading through HN is wading through a swamp of made up names and tech neologisms, you're just used to it already. I once told a software guy that our team's SWEs had migrated away from React and Node to Stork.JS and Blackadder. He nodded like that meant anything.

3. I like it and you can't stop me.

0_____0on Honda is killing its EVs

CAFE regs made USian hugecars relatively profitable, and car makers got USians to demand them via savvy marketing. That's what I reckon anyway.

0_____0on Honda is killing its EVs

Birds adapt their song to ambient noise conditions. This paper [1] studies the Pearl River Delta (where Shenzhen is) as a natural experiment. It shows spectral changes in the target species correlating to background noise levels. I haven't looked hard enough to make sure there isn't a study that does find complexity changes but it's certainly clear that noise can affect bird song behavior generally.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...

0_____0on 'It's sweet. It's bitter. It's ours.' The chocolate ritual that binds my family

I think sometimes people forget that LLMs were trained on text that actual people wrote.

0_____0on Learning athletic humanoid tennis skills from imperfect human motion data

At least @tyrellcorp on X Social and see if you can threaten their support AIs with a bad viral story.

0_____0on My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

> "Stop" is a song by English girl group the Spice Girls from their second studio album, Spiceworld (1997).

0_____0on Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis

inconvenient for the purposes of recording, sounds like

0_____0on Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)

If we lost Digikey, Mouser, and AVNET, it would be catastrophic. Entire US engineering divisions would leave for Shenzhen.

0_____0on Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables

you are both right of course

but for some reason my fealty to potato does not extend to tomatoes and eggplant quite the same way. i feel toward potatoes sort of how gary Larson feels about cows

0_____0on Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables

1990s research at Novartis, not sure how quickly the new cultivars were adopted,.maybe someone else can chime in

0_____0on Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables

you have done potatoes a profound insult by not including them in this list

0_____0on Centuries of selective breeding turned wild cabbage into different vegetables

The modern cultivars literally taste different, it's not just cooking method. The bitter compounds were identified and bred out.

0_____0on RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one

I once tore apart my laptop and ripped out all the blue leds and replaced them with green amber reds. If yoi hate it that much you can just mod it. Soldering iron and a magnifier if you're over 30.

0_____0on Starlink militarization and its impact on global strategic stability (2023)

Military connectors (e.g. MIL-STD-38999) are deeply multi sourced, like you can buy compatible connector sets from Souriau, Amphenol, ITT Cannon, some others. So it depends.

0_____0on Apple's MacBook Neo makes repairs easier and cheaper than other MacBooks

I've replaced a battery, screen, hinges on a macbook (2015). Did they get considerably worse at repairability after that? Because while there were a fair number of steps, it's not like they required exotic techniques to pull off.

0_____0on Asian governments roll out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis caused by war

It's all Asia. Europe is in Asia. Europeans are West Asian. The traditional boundary of the Ural Mountains is a fabricated one. There is no reason to separate Europe out of Asia except for that "people that look like that go over there."

0_____0on Wiz joins Google

Oof, you got me there!

0_____0on Google closes deal to acquire Wiz

Wiz and Waze are both Israeli companies. Not that suspicious, I think it probably just sounds better in Hebrew.

0_____0on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

Agree, and this is in fact how I treat my devices. I can easily do my own battery replacements on laptops, although I still approach phones with suspicion due to the water ingress problem.