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nickv

491 karma · joined May 20, 2011

Nick Vlku - Hey, I am working on something new. Stay tuned! nick at backplanes.com
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nickv··on Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)
There's literally an entire section in the Treaty of the EU on the exact criteria to leave the EU. A country has literally _left_ the EU. Nobody is being held hostage to stay in the EU.

"Despite their citizens having opposed going in there." Can you point to a vote to invoke Article 50 that was not honored by the EU? Can you point to a country getting admission into the EU without a vote from their people?

nickv··on Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)
I typically don't have to worry about somebody "sneaking and selling my body for their profit" without me, at least, being aware of it.
nickv··on Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)
And Minitel, they had networked computers in people's homes in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel.
nickv··on Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026
People use the Gemini CLI? What poor souls...
nickv··on New York to tax luxury second homes in NYC
Because wealth is also distributed in a very lumpy way across the city.

154 residents of NYC own 33% of the entire wealth of the city... notice I didn't say 1%, I said top 154. They are not contributing 33% of the tax income to the city.

So yes, the ultra rich pay "less taxes" if you look at how much of the resident wealth they control.

Also, property taxes are significantly lower than appraised value and the richer you get the bigger the disparity. That Ken Griffin’s $238M penthouse pied-a-terre? It's assessed value is $9M. So yea, he's paying like $150k/yr in property taxes.

And finally, it is a known fact that sales tax definitely hits poor people harder (re: "everyone pays sale tax equally"). What you want to look at is what percentage of a person's post taxincome vs sales tax paid, because if you make like $60k/yr you're probably close to 60% of all post tax income paying some form of sales tax (you buy with all the money you make). If you have $2B, your percentage of "tax paid as sales tax" is significantly lower, because you don't typically spend a billion dollars the same way you spend $60k.

nickv··on New York to tax luxury second homes in NYC
You're right, when I think of a place that has an overabundance of 2 floor single family homes, I think of Manhattan.
nickv··on Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play
Oh dude, this game is going to rock your world. I'm like giddy for you experiencing this for the first time with no spoilers.

I was like "meh" too at first ("what are people TALKING about?") and, then, it just gets incredible.

nickv··on Linux is good now
I have been watching this thread and you are triple downing on a point that you have no real experience with. Competitive e-sports is a real thing. There are e-sports arenas. (How are people even arguing this on HN?)

The International (a DOTA 2 competition) has like $40m in prizes. EWC in 2025 was $70m. 99.6 million people watched the League of Legends World Championship final. And we're not even talking about the millions of dollars of sponsorship involved.

That's great your mom isn't competitive in Valorant, but massively irrelevant. It's like me saying "I play flag football with friends, there is no competitive football."

Anti-cheat is important because this is how the best players are discovered, this is how they're recruited. If a game is 50%+ cheaters, the game will die... DOTA2 would cease to exist today as a big deal. Same with Valorant.

Aside from competitive gaming, GTA V online makes $1 BILLION in ARR. That would be $0 if the game was flooded with cheaters.

Now this isn't me defending kernel level anti-cheat, I think there are better ways to do it and some games do a great job here.

But man, calling GTA V online and competitive e-sports a "tiny bubble" is like calling the NFL a "tiny bubble".

nickv··on Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library
Datahorder here, a 26tb drive is about $375, so I don't think your quote of 30tb drive prices make sense. You can get about 80tb for $1000
nickv··on NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months
I get it, remember the congestion zone isn't the entire borough of Manhattan. It's just below 59th street. And, if you were driving down there, good luck finding parking in the literal densest place on planet earth during work hours (187k people/sqm). Driving in the congestion relief zone is not a right.

(Also, this thread's root was "regressive tax affecting the poor" which I assert again, is just a silly mischaracterization)

nickv··on NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months
But we're talking about New York City here, not Kansas. Specifically the congestion zone which during the work day is the most congested place in the world (187,500 people/sqm).
nickv··on NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months
I'm confused, if you lived in Westchester and were parking by Columbia why would you be in Midtown? Mind you, it's still like $14-$22 to cross the GWB and if you parked by Columbia after driving down from Westchester you don't have a congestion charge to worry about.
nickv··on NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months
You act like driving in NYC is free even without the congestion price. You realize how much it costs to park in Manhattan right? $50/day? And if you are coming from the Jersey side, you realize how much the toll is for the tunnel? $17-27.

So yea, if you're poor, you're not driving your beater to SoHo and parking in a lot for $50 daily.

nickv··on Wayland Nvidia
Games I've played on my Arch Linux desktop with a 4090 in the past few months: Clair Obscur, Disco Elysium, Outer Worlds, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk, Dispatch, Silent Hill f, FFVII Rebirth. I haven't had a single issue with any of these games. What games do you think will struggle? I can give them a shot if I own then and let you know how they do.
nickv··on [dead]
This is silly and then I saw the domain name. September was the best month in history for EV sales (especially leases which had no income restrictions on the tax credit) and this is because most people moved their purchase up earlier than they wanted to so they can get the credit.

Of COURSE, October will be basically 0 sales. Who would have bought 15 days after the $7500 credit disappeared vs before?

You're going to see depressed purchases for a few months because of the mad rush to hit September 30. This is expected, we'll probably see the moved up purchases flush out of the system by Feb or so.

nickv··on HN Search isn't ingesting new data since Friday
Sorry for the delays here. All the stories and comments missed should be backfilling as we speak. It's almost done. I posted updates further down, but wanted to post here since it's the top comment. We'll get an update on what happened and our plan to make sure we are on top of this in the coming days.
nickv··on HN Search isn't ingesting new data since Friday
Quick update.

We are backfilling the comments and stories we missed. You should start seeing them in the search results page. I will update when it's all caught up.

Apologies for this again, didn't want to send an update until I had something and every time it felt so close.

We'll work on an HN update on what happened here and lessons learned. (spoiler alert: ownership has become muddled over 10 years so we had to figure out how the portion that stopped crawling worked. That was fun. We'll make sure to work on a clear plan here and be transparent about it. So sorry :( )

nickv··on HN Search isn't ingesting new data since Friday
Hey folks, sorry for the delay on this. We're investigating and I promise a response on what happened here. Will update in a bit when I have more, and will make sure to let you all know what happened.
nickv··on PuTTY has a new website
No, if somebody has access to edit your home page directly, your blog, your company site, etc - you've already lost the game.

How is this any different than your email address being compromised? How is this different than having your laptop compromised and somebody downloading your .ssh folder?

The issue here isn't "is this reliable identification" - because it IS reliable. Your concern is "how likely is this to be compromised vs other things" and that's a fair concern - but there are plenty of very secure web sites out there. This isn't saying "I am john doe and this is my identity", this is saying with some confidence "this person on mastadon is the same person as the person who wrote this web site copy" and that's a totally fine piece of identification for the right context.

nickv··on OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats
Give me a break, they're literally spending money fighting this court order.
nickv··on You Can't "Win" in Tech Unless You Cheat
Notwithstanding modern time, Google is notably absent in this article because it provides a good counter to it.
nickv··on OpenAI: Out of Ideas
just like Bell Labs UNIX gave way to BSD UNIX which gave way to SunOS/Solaris which gave way to Linux... this is a tale as old as time. The question is will this end the same way?
nickv··on New Mac Mini with M4
I do this exact thing with my M2 Mac Mini (plex, a few home lab things with no display).

I use Chrome Remote Desktop to get into the box remotely. If the box does end up losing power/restarting, I also make sure to have SSH on so I can ssh into the box and start remote desktop before being logged in (Google provides instructions).

I found this to be the path of least resistance to getting it remotely accessible.

nickv··on Apple introduces M4 chip
I guess we can agree to disagree, but I find the 2020 rev Macbook pros have a good number of USB-C ports (2 on the left, 1 on the right -- all can do PD), a magsafe charger, headphone jack, HDMI port and SD card slot. How many USB-C ports do you need? Sometimes I wish there was ethernet but I get why it's not there.

I agree, the butterfly keyboard was shitty but I absolutely love the keyboard on the 2020 rev. It's still not as great as my mechanical desktop keyboard, but for a laptop keyboard it's serious chef's kiss. Also, I have yet to find a trackpad that is anywhere as good as the Macbook. Precision trackpads are still way way worse.

Finally, the thing that always beings me back to MBPs (vs Surfacebooks or Razers) is battery life. I typically get a good 10+ hours on my MBP. Battery life on my old Razer Blade and Surfacebooks were absolutely comically horrible.

nickv··on How Hertz’s bet on Teslas went sideways
So weird (and I'm not a Tesla apologist at all) but I have never in 5 years seen this happen - and I've driven across America 4 times in a Model 3.

In fact, mid drive Tesla will auto-reroute you to a supercharger station with more open slots if the one you're going to gets busy while on the drive. The UI is extremely accurate (like I can see open station numbers increment when a car pulls out).

Are you sure you're not hearing complaints about non-Tesla chargers?

nickv··on Electric scooter company Bird files for bankruptcy
Different market, different product.

You ain’t scooting in Manhattan or San Francisco at 65mph.

I assume this was a Vespa style scooter, not a “stand on a board with no protective gear at all” type of scooter?

nickv··on Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
Sam literally has 0 equity in OpenAI. How did he “choose money”?
nickv··on New York, California Lose Firms Managing an Estimated $2T in Assets
The "red state" part will eventually bite the "blue cities". Sure, Austin and Houston are blue - but the gun laws in Texas practically encourage gun purchases, you still can't get an Abortion in Austin, the state is still out to get you if you're LGBT, weed = jail, and companies are constrained in what they can say.

Look at Disney and Florida as a good example. Big firms (and the employees that want the personal freedom to love who they want, and make the medical decisions they need to make). This is a very (unsurprisingly) short minded perspective. It matters if the states are blood red.

nickv··on Westfield Gives Up Downtown San Francisco Mall
I always thought it was lack of universities in Detroit. Henry Ford hated cities, “elites”, etc which is you don’t see a major Ford University in Detroit. There was no Leland Stanford or James Duke in Detroit. So no CMU, Case Western, etc. [1]

NYC has a few great universities which means it has a pipeline of students for high information/innovation business employees. Same with the Bay Area. Chicago, LA too. Detroit doesn’t really have any world class universities.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/could-a...

nickv··on GM to use Tesla charging network, joining Ford
I think GM and Ford are paying a licensing fee to use the supercharger network, not to use the connector type.
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