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bald

354 karma · joined June 9, 2016

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bald··on Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
Re firmware updates, I've had the same problem and written a blog post about how to update the firmware on ThinkPad under Linux without a Windows computer. Find it here: https://random.xdiez.com/it/2024/02/03/Lenovo-BIOS-update-do...
bald··on Museum of Plugs and Sockets
Schuko can do 16A permanent load, the Swiss can do 10A afaik
bald··on Laptop Ports: Is USB-C only fine, or should I get HDMI,USB,Audio if I need them?
There's now AMD laptops certified for Thunderbolt 4 coming to the market, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 [1], so it's no longer this clear cut.

[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/coming-soon/lenovo-thinkpad-t...

bald··on Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more
If you tap on the minutes left text in the lower left corner of your screen, it will cycle through pages, minutes left in chapter, section and blank
bald··on America's new millionaire class: Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs
Mars is one of the biggest manufacturers of pet food in the world
bald··on Pooled number of deaths by age group in EU
Cyprus is also included while it's on the Asian continental plate
bald··on Raspberry Pi CEO: Supply should be “unconstrained” in second half of 2023
I recently needed to buy a raspberry for my hobby project and find one close to retail price via [1] which tracks availability across different online stores.

[1] https://rpilocator.com/

bald··on Gigafactories are recycling old EV batteries into new ones
Not sure why you're being downvoted, but this is the right answer
bald··on Apple expands Self Service Repair to Mac notebooks
I'm living in Cyprus; had a Lenovo technician come here from Nicosia (~150 miles return) to fix my left-side USB ports of my ThinkPad T590 about six weeks ago.

In the past, I've had come Lenovo to remote parts of Switzerland and Germany, as well.

bald··on Ask HN: Affordable places in the world with 10G unmetered fiber home Internet?
also mobile plans are cheap in Switzerland. You can get a plan including unlimited calls throughout most of Europe+Canada+US (incl. roaming) plus unlimited 5G in Switzerland plus 40GB of data roaming throughout Europe (not only EU)+Canada+US for 35-45 CHF/month. These are sales that happen 3-4 times a year, e.g. via qoqa.ch or on wingo.ch. I have two of those from two different providers.

Regular prices for such plans are CHF 100-130, which I also do not find overly expensive compared to US.

bald··on Watch Windows 95 crash live as it exceeds 49.7 days uptime [video]
> 5 user

I think he's referring to CAL

bald··on Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago
yes!! big time Casio Business Navigator BN-40A fan when I was 12 years old. had it for like 2 weeks before selling it to my best friend because my excitement had dropped off. But so cool to have something that looked like a super small laptop and such a wide screen.
bald··on Brian Armstrong sold $291.8M in Coinbase shares on opening day
it is for direct listings
bald··on Ask HN: We have the expertise but no clients. How to reach them?
This. In my previous company, I did ~3k cold calls to get it off the ground. In my current one, ~1k cold calls. Get on the phone. Yes it's painful, so what
bald··on Apple for the first time makes a top-of-the-line iPhone model in India
VAT is taxing the difference between the procurement price and the sales price (thus its name Value-Added Tax), not the revenue.

E.g., if Apple Finland procures the phone from Apple Inter Co., two separate entities, for USD 499 and sells it for USD 500, the tax would be on the USD 1, i.e., 20 cents, since Apple Finland would get the VAT paid to Apple Inter Co offset by the Finnish tax authorities.

bald··on Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
> confidential information

aka, we did not sign an NDA with the party across the table

bald··on The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate”
the thought of supporting this mentality & behavior towards customers makes me cringe. This is the primary reason why I will never buy any Apple hardware again.
bald··on I bought netflix.soy
there is the Trademark Clearinghouse which actually deals with these cases (by either automatically registering the domain for the trademark holder, or notifying them immediately if the domain is registered so they can take semi-automated action) [1]

[1] https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/trademark-clearinghouse

bald··on Fed’s Balance Sheet Exceeds $7T for First Time in History
> deutschmarks

reichmarks

bald··on Fed’s Balance Sheet Exceeds $7T for First Time in History
> It's a lot harder to work through a rigorous model of how the economy actually works, that's consistent with historical and geographic precedent. That kind of thinking would help me a lot, but I'm not sure where to find it.

Even though it's not quantitative models, I can only recommend "Navigating big debt crisis" by Ray Dalio. Also, he published some chapters of his new book -- The changing world order -- online recently: https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/#introdu...

bald··on Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%
In order to draw a conclusion, we should look at the _real_ interest rate vs. the nominal one.
bald··on ICANN board withholds consent for a change of control of the .org registry
it is the classical principal-agent dilemma that we face in society since the point in time we started delegating individual tasks to individuals, for any individual will carry the seeds of greed and egoism in it in varying degrees. thus there will always be a conflict of interest for evolutionary reasons.

over the millenia we've developed mechanisms like the division of power (checks & balances) for governments and the board system for corporations.

what I want to say with this is that if organizational stewardship is not working, it's most likely a flaw in the structure of the system (and/or the processes), and my instinct would tell me to investigate if the right amount & scrutiny in terms of checks & balances is in place.

bald··on Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021
This development of market dynamics & structure has been famously featured in the book "Only the Paranoid Survive" by Andy Grove, which I can only recommend (it's a quick and easy read).

Anecdotally, it seems to me that today, the more successful companies are those that tend to be vertically integrated, such as Apple, Tesla, and Amazon.

bald··on List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
as a native German, I can say you might want to skip Neuss, you won't miss out on a lot :P
bald··on Show HN: Reboot aviation – track development of air traffic during the crisis
hi there! we originally built this tool for internal purposes (we're making an AI to optimize ground processes in the aviation industry, with our main customers being airlines, aiports & ground handlers) to understand if/when/how air traffic will return (and thus our customers!)

especially interesting for us would be the recovery in China as leading indicator (which, interestingly, so far did not really happen as capacity expressed in seats flown has not really taken off again, despite the lockdown having ended). we will use this as a first indication of how the aviation industry will restart all over the world.

After some feedback from advisors, we decided to publish this dashboard. appreciate any feedback!

bald··on Post YC Depression
Having been rejected 2 times by YC, could not agree more.

biz #1 is now series B at $120M valuation

biz #2 is now series A with $50M valuation

biz #3 is now seed with $15M valuation

I did not bother to apply with biz #3 to YC, probability-weighted, it was not worth the effort to me.

bald··on The new business of AI and how it’s different from traditional software
> The company in the end changed course. They built out the product to focus on a single vertical that was getting traction in finance.

Building a startup in the "AI" space myself since more than 2yrs now, I'm more convinced than ever that this one major elemnent of a successful strategy for such companies: focus on 1 vertical.

bald··on A foundation course in reading German
> On the same page: "All nouns that end in –ei, –heit, –ie, –in, –keit, –schaft, –tät, –ung are feminine."

I would hazard the guess that, in this explanation, the author refers to syllables and not just a combination of letters.

The counter-examples you gave all end in syllables different from those mentioned by the author:

der Brei - one syllable / das Aller-lei / das Ben-zin

bald··on Ask HN: Which stack will get my MVP API off the ground fastest?
fully agree. I wrote a pretty complex API within a couple of days in Django + Django Rest Framework. I did not know how to build web applications or APIs before. Great experience.
bald··on McCharge: McDonalds Is Now Charging EVs
In Germany there's also lots of McDonalds with chargers, some of them have already been there for 2 years or more.
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