Hacker News Reader

nknealkon Vanguard 50-year anniversary CEO letter

Vanguard regularly pushes the envelope on cutting fees for investment products. In 2025 they reduced their fee structure by 350M (1)

(1) https://corporate.vanguard.com/feecuts

nknealkon Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch

The G7 pairs directly with an Apple Watch and acts as the primary sync device. Unlike the G6, you don’t get null readings displaying on the watch until you open the app. I have the dexcom widget on my Apple Watch series 10 with a G7 paired with direct to watch and it always displays the current reading

nknealkon New iMac with M4

I believe it’s a limitation of the memory controller on the M4 chip. It can only address 32 gb of ram. Addressing more ram would require more die space

nknealkon Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?

I love this feature in Apple’s ecosystem so much. The newer iOS and iPadOS releases when autofilling a sign-up form even give an option to generate a new hide my email address. It’s effortless to not use your real email. If you pay for an iCloud subscription, hide my email is included. Apple tracks what site you used hide my email on when signing up and allows you to toggle forwarding of emails to your inbox on and off.

nknealkon An Intuitive Explanation of Black–Scholes

It’s also frequently used to price stock options given to employees at publicly traded companies.

nknealkon We're Cutting L40S Prices in Half

> You can run DOOM Eternal, building the Stadia that Google couldn’t pull off, because the L40S hasn’t forgotten that it’s a graphics GPU.

Savage.

I wonder if we’ll see a resurgence of cloud game streaming

nknealkon FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python

Take a look at streamlit as well. It’s got a few weird sharp edges but is really easy to pick up

nknealkon New Covid Shots Recommended for Americans 6 Months and Older This Fall

It’s worth noting that companies are testing flu + COVID vaccines as an all in one shot. I think most people don’t want to come to their pharmacy for multiple jabs.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

nknealkon Woman set up a table to share her collection of washers. Nothing was for sale

There's a hammer museum in Haines Alaska with similar vibes. Countless different types of hammers.

https://www.hammermuseum.org

nknealkon He trained cops to fight crypto crime and allegedly ran a dark-web drug market

Is this more safe or less safe than laundering cash the old fashioned way?

Jokes aside, it’s incredible that the FBI could still attribute transactions

nknealkon Ask HN: What are the best articles on managing people?

https://hbr.org/2013/01/the-price-of-incivility

Not explicitly related to management but good advice. I’ve seen too many people put in a position of power and become assholes. It destroys morale.

Edit: a non paywalled link https://www.qualitymanagementinstitute.com/images/hrsolution...

nknealkon Show HN: I created a SaaS with Htmx and Django back end (nicecv.online)

If you’re open to it, can you share what resources you used to learn Django and htmx?

nknealkon I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

Can you please update the terraform docs for google batch? In [1] it’s really difficult to know what everything in the json configuration is under the base64encode() call. What levers can I pull? How do I run something more complex than hello world? Do I need my CICD to upload scripts to GCS and have the instance download them at runtime and hardcode that path into the batch script?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/batch/docs/create-run-job-using-ter...

nknealkon Nvidia to Challenge Intel with Arm-Based Processors for PCs

I think it’s slightly more complex than that. Apple included in their processor design custom extensions to ARM that alter things like memory order to make emulation easier [1]. It’s not just control over the software stack that makes Rosetta so performant.

[1] https://github.com/saagarjha/TSOEnabler

nknealkon 10-year Treasury yield rises to 5%, highest level for the key rate in 16 years

In most financial models, the return investors demand on risky assets like stocks depends on the opportunity cost of the risk free rate [eg 1]. As the risk free rate goes up, the return investors expect on risky assets also goes up which pushes their price down.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capm.asp

nknealkon Tell HN: It's 2023 and you still can't import .ics files into iOS Calendar app

All I want for Christmas is the ability to set multiple timers on my iPhone.

nknealkon Ask HN: What's your residential Internet speed and cost?

I pay $70 for 1 Gb/s but I usually end up getting 800-900 mbps up/down when I run a Speedtest which is fine by me. I switched to centurylink fiber during the pandemic. Before that I was paying comcast $65 for 100 down / 10 up.

Seattle WA

nknealkon Ask HN: How do you exercise?

Soccer.

For those in the Seattle area there are multiple adult leagues (Seattle RATS is what I play in). We play year round on turf, rain or shine. They’ve got beginners divisions and over 30s divisions. They also host a free Saturday skills clinic.

nknealkon Ask HN: How do you navigate Seasonal Affective Disorder?

I live in Seattle, having moved from California. The thing that helped me more than anything was playing soccer outdoors year round. Rain or snow. Several times a week. The exercise more than anything helped me get over the dark and the grey. The fact that it’s a team sport and 10+ other people are counting on me to show up helps keep me accountable.

nknealkon Ask HN: Does anyone else think SQL needs help?

There’s a LAST_VALUE statement for this kind of thing that most databases support. Partition by sale person name order by number of products.

nknealkon Coinbase earnings: $1.1B loss, lower-than-expected revenue

I actually think the yield is concerning. For fun, you can plug in your own assumptions to this calculator [0], but with assumptions below, the yield on bonds due 2028 implies a 20% chance of default.

Market price is 0.7/face value of 1/coupon of 3.375 (from the article), payments per year = 1 with 7 payments remaining (you could also do 6, depends on whether they've made a payment this year which I didn't bother looking up), recovery rate of 60% (assumption, the model is really sensitive to this input), and the 5 year treasury rate is around 2.97 percent which I used as the risk free rate.

[0] https://quantwolf.com/calculators/bonddefaultcalc.html

nknealkon Google Cloud: Major packet loss between multiple regions – Europe and Asia

They actually break it out now in their financial reporting. It’s a loss of 931 million for the most recent quarter on revenues of 5.8 billion. Likely most of the loss stems from R&D to develop the product offering.

nknealkon Continuous glucose monitoring on the Apple Watch

To add to this, it can be configured to also buzz your wrist while you’re asleep if you go low (eg at 70) before it starts making noise for a very low alert (eg 55). Really convenient to not wake up a partner. Your phone still has to be in Bluetooth range though.

nknealkon Ask HN: Need help in understanding private equity offer

Raising 17M dollars at a 70B valuation is insane for an early stage company. Assume the shares are worthless. Consider avoiding the company all together because whoever is at the top has no clue how finance works.

At 70M the calculus is much different.

nknealkon I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

It’s not “free money”.

The US Government offers a special savings program called iBonds (not an apple product). Technically they’re referred to as Series I bonds.

These bonds are special. Each citizen can only purchase $10,000 per year. The thing that makes them special is that they have really favorable interest rates that are made up of two components. There’s a fixed component largely controlled by the Fed. Currently this is essential 0% though rates are rising. The second component is tied to inflation. Right now, that component is ~8% for the most recent issuance (there are two issuances per year of these bonds where they recalculate the interest rate). This rate may change if inflation goes up or down.

The bond is special because that 8% is really high compared to other risk free instruments. For example, compare that 8% to what you’re earning on your savings account. Hence why many people have taken interest in iBonds recently.

You can only purchase these instruments directly from the treasury department. Google Treasury Direct. Also there are rules about how long you have to hold them and how much interest you give up if you need to withdraw your money early. Those rules are outlined on Treasury Direct.

nknealkon How easy is it in 2022 to find a SHA1 collision?

If I recall correctly Nvidia does not allow you to put consumer cards into data centers. They force you to buy a different line of cards which are like 10x more expensive. That may be a driver of the AWS price.

Update — I do recall correctly. Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-bans-consumer...

nknealkon Ask HN: Tech Salaries and Wealth Inequality

While you’re focused on labor, equity is a stronger driver of wealth inequality than labor wages. Yes, there are engineers clearing half a million dollars a year. That’s nothing compared to how the movement in equity prices affect wealth. For example, Microsoft’s CEO was given 2.5M in base salary vs 33M in stock [1]. A 10% movement in the price of Microsoft stock dwarfs his base salary. In the past 5 years, Microsoft is up over 300%. It’s owner’s equity, not salary, that drives inequality. Many front line workers don’t even quality for equity grants.

[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/report-card-microsofts-board-b...

nknealkon I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

One can buy alternative indexes that prioritize value factors. Vanguard, Schwab, and other large brokerages offer these products. See, for example, VTV which uses a multi-factor weighting scheme to try to find stocks that are “cheap” or FNDX which weights based on debt-adjusted free cashflows.

I think the title should say “too risk-averse for market-cap weighted index investing”

nknealkon Is 30s too late as a first time founder? (never done anything biz related)

I was going to post this exact same HRB article! Age gives you so many advantages. You know your industry. You know who the players are. You have a professional network you can tap when you have a problem (or when you’re looking for your first customers).

nknealkon Show HN: EdgeDB 1.0

Can someone from EdgeDB explain why the SQL isn't as simple as what I have below? What am I missing? Why is that cross join lateral necessary:

  SELECT
      title,
      ARRAY_SLICE(ARRAY_AGG(movie_actors.name WITHIN GROUP (order by movie_actors.credits_order asc)),0,5)
      avg(movie_reviews.score)
  FROM movie
  JOIN movie_actors on (movie.id = movie_actors.movie_id)
  JOIN person on (movie_Actors.person_id = person.id)
  JOIN movie_reviews on (movie.id = movie_reviews.id)
  WHERE person.name like '%Zendaya%'
  group by title