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koolba

38,050 karma · joined December 12, 2014

CXO at a Fortune 500 company.

Please forward all complaints to hn dot username at the big G's electronic letter service.

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koolba··on ChatGPT Pro now starts at $100/month
Does this give you something different than the $20/mo plan when using codex?
koolba··on John Deere to pay $99M in right-to-repair settlement
Depends on which specific model as about half of them are made in the USA: https://www.kubota-kma.com/about/
koolba··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
How much did Iran make? There’s plenty of unregulated futures markets for them to make a massive short bet on oil.
koolba··on USD Purchasing Power in Real Time Since 2000
Double cheeseburger has always had and still has two slices of cheese. The McDouble (which used to be $1) always had a single slice of cheese.

The real hack was asking them to put Big Mac sauce on the McDouble. For $.30 it was pretty damn close at 1/3 the price.

koolba··on S3 Files
If you though locking semantics over NFS were wonky, just wait till we through a remote S3 backend in the mix!
koolba··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
I knew a guy that would bring a steak sealed in a vac seal bag to the gym and leave it in the sauna while he worked out. One hour later he was done working out and it was ready to eat too. Not sure I can actually recommend it to others but the novelty was interesting till they nearly kicked him out of the gym.
koolba··on Costco sued for seeking refunds on tariffs customers paid
If Costco had miscalculated its tariffs and was on the hook for some additional tax, they wouldn’t be passing it on retroactively. So it is not reasonable to expect any kind of refund either.
koolba··on OpenClaw privilege escalation vulnerability
Over 50% of people have a below average understanding of statistics.
koolba··on How to make a sliding, self-locking, and predator-proof chicken coop door (2020)
Would a fox be able to lift the wood without the hinge lock? Say if it was just tied directly without the hinge to block lifting it.
koolba··on SpaceX files to go public
Maybe not $200, but $20-$50 for a cross country flight for sure.
koolba··on My son pleasured himself on Gemini Live. Entire family's Google accounts banned
This is the exact scenario I described one month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195943
koolba··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
> Both versions were published using the compromised npm credentials of a lead axios maintainer, bypassing the project's normal GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline.

Doesn’t npm mandate 2FA as of some time last year? How was that bypassed?

koolba··on Coding Agents Could Make Free Software Matter Again
Reading this I hear The Roots playing The Seed 2.0[1] in my mind.

It’s a wild thought to think that of all the things that will remain on this earth after you’re gone, it’ll be your GPL contributions reconstituting themselves as an LLM’s hallucinations.

[1]: https://youtu.be/ojC0mg2hJCc

koolba··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
Already in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Games
koolba··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
My fav metric for codebase improvement (not feature improvement) is negative LOC. Nothing beats a patch that only deletes things without breaking anything or simply removing tests. Just dead code deletion.
koolba··on Passengers who refuse to use headphones can now be kicked off United flights
> Depending on where you live it may not really be relatable to you, but living in NYC -- there are people that will intentionally jay walk on a green light and even _stare you down_ knowing that you will stop and let them pass.

This is the speed walking equivalent of picking up pennies in front of a steam roller. Saves a min here and then until you pay for it big time.

koolba··on Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords
Somebody tell Apple to fix the login screen for MacOS as well. If your password is longer than the incredibly narrow box, you do not get any additional feedback that your characters are being entered.

Combine that with a flaky keyboard (say from a single grain of dust where it shouldn’t be) and you get a very annoying login experience. Over and over…

koolba··on A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)
> 移り箸 Utsuribashi (also known as 渡り箸 wataribashi)

> To keep putting the chopsticks into the same side dishes. It is proper etiquette to first eat rice, move on to eat from a side dish, eat rice again, and then eat from a different side dish.

So keto itself is a faux pas?

> 返し箸 Kaeshibashi (also known as 逆さ箸 sakasabashi)

> To turn the chopsticks around when serving food so that the tips of the chopsticks that have touched one’s mouth do not touch the food.

Ewww. I’d rather be rude than share germs.

koolba··on AI coding is gambling
> When you’re staring at the diff view,

Bold assumption that people are looking at the diffs at all. They leave that for their coworkers agents.

koolba··on Aliens.gov ~ domain registered 17MAR2026
Who said it’s a binary choice? Could have extraterrestrials taking advantage of our weak southern border to enter the country.
koolba··on Node.js needs a virtual file system
And if you thought malware hiding in a mess of files was bad, just wait till you see it in two layers of container files.
koolba··on Linux 7.1 to Retire UDP-Lite – Allows for Better Performance with Cleansed Code
> So per that messaging, the UDP-Lite code really hasn't been used in years and doing away with it can net some measurable (+3~10% packets per second) for other UDP workloads.

Often times removing deprecated code is purely for developer purity. You just don’t want it lying around.

But 3-10% pps improvement is quite an achievement for removing some branches.

koolba··on US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says
> Risk free revenue to the VC.

How is that risk free? If the clinic goes bankrupt the VC will be on the hook for the rest of the loan. It’s not free money.

koolba··on Hisense TVs add unskippable startup ads before live TV
Pro tip for devices that refuse to simply remove working WiFi credentials (cough Samsung), is to connect them to a different “dummy” WiFi and then simply turn that off.

I’ve yet to see a device that caches more than one set of credentials. But I suppose it’s only a matter of time.

koolba··on Remotely unlocking an encrypted hard disk
Oh for sure something is needed for a full start from zero. But the much more common case for a computer with backup power is regular restarts after applying patches that require a reboot. Would be much more pleasant for that to work out of the box with no manual interaction at all.
koolba··on Remotely unlocking an encrypted hard disk
Why is this needed at all? As the decrypted key is in memory before the reboot, can’t it just be written to a know location in memory and have kexec be instructed to read it early on?
koolba··on Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs
> If two companies come to you with an offer to sell the refunds, and one has strong ties to a central figure in the administration — which can, in the future, subject or exempt you from new tariffs and otherwise use the Federal government’s powers to mess with you - are you truly free to choose either offer?

Yes, because tariffs, like all taxes in the USA, are not imposed on individual people or entities. They’re on industries and specific materials.

If a company truly thought the chance of winning was low and needed the money now, they would pick the best offer. Regardless of who is making it.

koolba··on US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters
We already charge different rates for residential vs industrial water usage. Why not do the same here and simply charge them more? The state could also impose a direct data center surcharge on their usage.
koolba··on Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs
How is it extortion? They could have gotten a different deal from anybody else or no deal at all. Nobody was twisting there arm or forcing them to deal with this one company to sell their tariff claims.
koolba··on The Xkcd thing, now interactive
> If only it wouldn't collapse by itself after clicking anywhere (clicking seems to activate physics) this would be 10/10

I think that's the other metaphor here.

It's not just standing on the tiny shoulders of one forgotten maintainer. The entire system only appears stable because we're looking at a snapshot of it.

In reality it's already collapsing.

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