Hacker News Reader

mconeon Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

Our 2026 hybrid gets 64mpg in Albuquerque. The last time I did the EROI calculation it beat everything by a long shot.

mconeon Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

This particular machine has 64GB, but the model is on the RTX 3090 with 24gb. Context is 156k with Pi mono.

mconeon Show HN: Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

The idea that you need a new machine is pretty ridiculous. I bought a used HP Omen with a 3090 last month for $2k. 57t/s with Qwen 3.8.

mconeon Drivers Are Taking Extreme Measures to Avoid New Car Technology

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/cars/driver-assistance-technol...

mconeon Show HN: Imgur for Markdown

GitHub Gists look like a code repo, Pastebin looks like a code paste. JotBird pages look like normal web pages. Ever try sharing a Gist with someone who's never used GitHub?

mconeon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

https://www.jotbird.com

A small tool that does one thing: publish Markdown and give you a link—no accounts, no setup, no project scaffolding. Paste or write Markdown, click Publish, and you get a human-readable URL you can share immediately. You can update or delete the page later using the same link.

The idea came from frustration with how oddly hard it still is to put a Markdown document on the web without turning it into a repo, a static site, or a login-gated doc. JotBird is editor-light but publishing-first, and I’m now exploring CLI and editor integrations so it can act as a simple publishing layer for tools people already use.

mconeon Show HN: JotBird – A simple Markdown editor with one-click publishing

Thank you for the feedback!

mconeon Adding my home electricity uptime to status.href.cat

Do you have trees where you live? :) Because we have above-ground power lines in much of the US, wind and ice are always bringing branches down on power lines.

mconeon America's Greyhound bus stations are disappearing

The majority of Americans didn't fly anywhere last year and I'm not sure they would agree with your assessment. This is a case where more democracy — putting region airports on ballots — makes a lot of sense. If the majority of people vote for it, then by all means, subsidize it.

mconeon Show HN: Dirt Cheap Gold – Find the cheapest gold prices

Thank you for the feedback!

mconeon When does federal debt reach unsustainable levels?

> Putting all of your money into Bitcoin/gold right now is a terrible idea for an event predicted to occur in 20 years.

How is it a worse idea than, say, putting all of your money into your 401k fund for 20 years?

mconeon Show HN: Metadocs, kinda like Reddit, but built into every documentation

Genius was working on something similar for a while, but I don't think it ever took off: https://genius.com/web-annotator

mconeon UN says “No credible pathway” and “woefully inadequate” to stop global 1.5C

But what happens in the morning when people wake up to an empty car battery and they need to drive to work?

mconeon For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry

Some of it is, yes. But a lot of the water flowing through the Albuquerque stretch comes from the Colorado River basin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Juan–Chama_Project

mconeon For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry

This isn't true. I live in Albuquerque about 1/4 of a mile from the river and there's literally no water anywhere. The ditches are dry, the reservoirs in the northern part of the state are tapped out, and the Albuquerque Water Authority stopped diverting water from the Rio Grande several months ago.

mconeon Car Repos Are Exploding. That’s a Bad Omen

I tried to use cash to purchase a new Honda CR-V from the dealership in 2019 but they wouldn't let me. When I spoke with the manager, he explained that the dealership made more money off the loan than they did from selling the vehicle. Maybe things have changed since then though.

mconeon Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

Our kids are 11 and 6 and we've always homeschooled them. As a secular homeschooling family, our headaches aren't related to curriculums or anything academic-related (there are lots of good options and resources out there) but rather the lack of socialization options outside of the home. If your experience is like ours, you'll quickly discover is that most homeschooling families are very religious or pulled their children out of school due to some kind of behavioral issue.

mconeon Can growth continue?

> We are currently funded by donors including Patrick and John Collison

This message brought to you by individuals who have a vested interest in seeing growth continue.

mconeon Tell HN: Job interview canceled due to looming recession

Mind sharing a link to that article?

mconeon An unsolved math problem on the Colorado River

Evaporation is a huge problem for these lakes. By some estimates, each lake loses 800,000 acre feet of water to evaporation annually.

mconeon An unsolved math problem on the Colorado River

There's no mention of deadpool in the article, but water managers are actively discussing it. Current estimates project that deadpool is ~10 years away for Lake Mead. If (when?) Lake Mead and Lake Powell hit deadpool, the Colorado River literally stops flowing past the dams. See https://sky-lights.org/2021/10/04/deadpool-at-hoover-dam/

mconeon Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

Hey, congratulations on the launch! One thing I'm curious about is why you've raised so much money. Can you shed any light on other future products, or is the teams offering is the main thing in the works? I also thought you had a personal hosted offering (subscription), but I'm not immediately seeing that on your website anymore — is that still a thing?

mconeon Apple's plan to “think different” about encryption opens a backdoor to your life

I wish there was a privacytools.io for hardware. I've been an iPhone user since the beginning but now I'm interested in alternatives. Last I checked, PinePhone was still being actively developed. Are there any decent phones that strike a balance between privacy and usability?

mconeon 100k+ page views a month for $5 with a self-hosted static site

Just out of curiosity, why aren't you using a CDN like Cloudflare?

mconeon U.S. has its wettest 12 months on record again

Not in the Southwestern United States, where recent studies indicate that the odds for decades-long "megadrought" are as high as 99%.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1600873.full

mconeon A cartoon intro to DNS over HTTPS

> Does anyone know of a way to force all DNS queries in windows to use DoH?

I think you could use pi-hole to do this. https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns-over-https/

mconeon The Engineer vs. the Border Patrol

I visited Tucson, Arizona several years ago with my parents and the area south of town resembles a war zone. There were blackhawk helicopters searching for illegal immigrants, hundreds of CBP vehicles all over the place, dozens of buses waiting to transport the illegal immigrants to detention facilities, and of course the military-style checkpoints where officers with assault rifles can essentially do anything they want to you (many of these checkpoints are in the middle of nowhere). I'm a natural-born citizen and I was afraid. I can't imagine living down there and going through those type of checkpoints every day.

mconeon NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

"Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law."

- Edward Abbey

mconeon [dead]

> Yet his philosophy changed it largely for the worst: the 40% of humanity who lived under Marxist regimes for much of the 20th century endured famines, gulags and party dictatorships.

"Marxist" is not the same as "Communist." A subtle distinction, perhaps, but one would think it would be an important one in an article like this.

mconeon Rural Kansas is dying

The Ogallala aquifer is only mentioned once in passing, but that's the real reason rural Kansas is dying. With the aquifer being completely depleted in some areas, conventional farming of the usual cash crops won't be an option for much longer. See http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722....