HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mikkupikku

3,647 karma · joined October 11, 2025

submissionscomments
mikkupikku··on America tells private firms to “hack back”
Jennifer Government anyone?
mikkupikku··on Bets on US-Iran ceasefire show signs of insider knowledge, say experts
If the administration decides to end this stupid war just so they can cash out some profitable bets... I don't even know what I would think. The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt.
mikkupikku··on General Motors is assisting with the restoration of a rare EV1
The earliest prototypes of what would become the Tesla Roadster used lead acid batteries.
mikkupikku··on American aviation is near collapse?
Safety / incident data collection and publishing from the FAA and NTSB are basically live, you'll get incidents logged within days at most and preliminary reports usually within a few weeks. What lags the most are data analysis and interpretations, but major newspapers should probably be prepared to do their own data analysis if they're making grand proclaiments like the collapse of an industry...
mikkupikku··on American aviation is near collapse?
I'm not saying the article's thesis is wrong, much of it rings true to me, but we have very comprehensive data and statistics concerning air travel so I'm deeply unimpressed by this article instead hanging its argument on a hodgepodge list of incidents instead of digging into the data to get some proper numbers.
mikkupikku··on I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop
Absolutely, routinely.

Often the relevant information is a pain to find on a website, but even if it isn't, the people who answer the phone often have important context like "Usually we do offer that recently but one of our suppliers..." or "We can do that, but maybe instead..." or "Oh the website isn't updated with..."

mikkupikku··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
Undoubtedly. Doesn't change the fact that one kind of coal burns smokeless with a clean blue flame while the other will cover everything for miles in a film of soot and tar.
mikkupikku··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
The smell of wood might be nice for flavor, but that's beyond the point of anthracite being clean. That particulate pollution from wood burning is severe compared to the smoke you'll get off anthracite, which is virtually nonexistent.
mikkupikku··on I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop
I routinely call businesses instead of using their websites, but I do this to talk to a person instead of a machine.
mikkupikku··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
Anthracite burns clean enough to use in a pizza oven. If your neighbor told you he was going to install a new furnace and offered you the choice of it burning wood pellets or anthracite, from a smell standpoint you should absolutely choose the anthracite.

Anthracite, in these regards, is very different from bituminous coal.

mikkupikku··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
People laugh at this, but anthracite genuinely is cleaner than other coal in every regard save CO2 emissions. People just think it's a joke because they've come to believe that CO2 is the only coal emission worth caring about, which definitely isn't true.
mikkupikku··on US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects
If the government would like to pay me to also not build wind turbines, hit me up. I mean, I wasn't going to build any in the first place, but I think this makes me qualified to continue not building any.
mikkupikku··on PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading
What's more, betting with friends is vastly less harmful than betting at casinos (digital or otherwise.) When you bet with friends, your loss is their gain and their loss is your gain, the money more or less sticks around, the community as a whole isn't impoverished by it. But when people are gambling away their days wages playing rigged slot machines on their phone, that money might as well have been set on fire. It goes into the pockets of investors who might as well be on the other side of the planet and in the long run it will never be won back. The community as a whole is impoverished by this kind of gambling.
mikkupikku··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
> Well nothing is truly meritocratic

How do you figure? Many things in life are meritocratic. Apply for a job welding, they'll ask you to weld some coupons. If you can do it, you get the job, if you can't then you can't. If your father was a welder or a banker makes no difference, merit is about being able to do the work, not whether life was fair to get you to that skill level.

mikkupikku··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
> and athletic achievement more than you might expect.

Yeah, it flies in the face of Hollywood's jock/nerd dichotomy, but in my experience there's an awful lot of correlation between honors students and athletic participation. I think the root of it might be good genetics and early life nutrition contributing heavily to both.

mikkupikku··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
Reminds me of Mike Vining in his dress shirt: https://primegazette.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/mike-vin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vining

mikkupikku··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
I've heard that special forces guys tend to be smaller, but I'm not sure that's true. It seems like there could be a few tactical advantages to being shorter, less likely to bump your head maybe, but who knows.
mikkupikku··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
Paying attention in class might be a legitimate issue requiring medication for some people, but otherwise it, and doing optional assignments, are a choice.
mikkupikku··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
Tutors barely move exam scores, particularly if they're only hired for test prep. You can crush tests without cramming, tutors or any of that if you just pay attention in class and do all optional homework.
mikkupikku··on General Motors is assisting with the restoration of a rare EV1
It's a trap, they've got a car crusher at the ready for sure.
mikkupikku··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
Best way to get a manager position is to be a few inches taller than everybody else. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but pay attention to how often the boss is taller than everybody else on the team. Not always, but far more often than random chance can account for.

(Incidentally, the best boss I ever had was barely 5 feet.)

mikkupikku··on Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
HR loves video interviews for precisely this reason. They understand their role in the company to use their social expertise to suss out bad vibes, and it turns into something like Mean Girls.
mikkupikku··on White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit
In between the brainless masses mindlessly regurgitating press releases (most of whom are human, not bots) or reddit doomerisms from the other side, there are tons of people discussing real successes and failures they've had with the tech. If you can't see the middle, it's probably because you're in one of the extremes.
mikkupikku··on PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading
Unless we nut up and ban gambling, there will never be a shortage of broke motherfuckers who should be able to make ends meet with their job but simply never will be able to. You have no idea how badly gambling suppresses a large subset of the working class.
mikkupikku··on PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading
Normies don't have good intuition for the size of different kinds of data. They'll stream Netflix for a few hours then genuinely wonder how they hit their data limit because they "weren't even using the internet."
mikkupikku··on White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit
I implemented HN article triage years ago using nothing more than naive Bayesian classification on the text of the headlines. Worked surprisingly well, you might try that.
mikkupikku··on White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit
Nobody thinks this way, so all the posts saying it must be bots. Wow, look at all the posts saying the thing, there must be a lot of bots.

Or maybe you're choosing to perceive bots when actually a lot of people disagree with you?

mikkupikku··on White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit
AI needn't respond, it can instead be used to sort the meaningless noise from the actionable complaints, where previously all would have been ignored. Raise only the issues that matter and can be addressed to the human.
mikkupikku··on White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit
Years ago when you went into computers, you didn't have normies warning you that one day computers will program themselves? 20 years ago, nobody could tell you if this would happen in 20 years or 200 years, but I do believe there has been a general sense of this sort of thing happening eventually.
mikkupikku··on The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
Macros. Lots of macros.
← PreviousPage 8 of 34Next →