Viewing profile — kumarsw

PG&E screwed up pretty bad prioritizing shareholder dividends over maintenance/vegetation management. That said, their potential exposure for liability feels something like the sit…

No one has bit yet so I will: - Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter cost: $583M - Artemis II cost: $4.1B Manned spaceflight is the most expensive PR program ever to get money for unmanned…

Given that this is hacker news, the answers here are unsurprisingly biased towards building toys. Blocks/Duplo are great, but who is going to explore the newly built environment? E…

I was hoping that the pendulum would swing the other way with the scandal over too many passengers bringing out their bags on a recent AA evacuation caused by a burning tire. The p…

Paying for a group to sit together is really just a roundabout way of charging extra for the middle seat that solo travelers don't want. There's something gross about it, creating …

I don't know about their other expenses, but SEO/advertising is probably one of their better uses of money even if we don't like it. It's hard to gain market share against a browse…

It might, or it might just become the next CAFE. Disappointingly, the proposed regulation does not apply to vehicles over 10k lbs gross weight. This notably includes heavy duty pic…

Context: As of September 2024, the NHTSA is proposing that the US adopt pedestrian safety crash requirements for vehicles up to 10k lbs. North Americans may not be aware that engin…

The original sure looks bland, but a HTML4-esque webpage gives absolutely the wrong message about the maturity level of a browser regardless of how much more usable it may be. Bran…

The browser is good, but Mozilla has been consistently losing market share despite being well-funded. There is considerable debate as to what specific mistakes were made, but the f…

I dunno if it's practical, but the idea of an urban "garage" for woodworking/storing your kayak sounds kinda awesome.

Back when I worked out of an office in an industrial park in the suburbs of Boston, a number of the younger/single folks would reverse-commute in from the city. Since it was agains…

See my other comment - current Toyotas will let you disable the 4G modem with a series of button presses.

Adding to the list of 2010s-era Japanese cars, the 2nd gen Mazda3s have good reliability without the "Toyota tax." If you don't want to go with a 10yo car, current Toyotas will let…

I was about to post a snarky reply, but after actually reading TFA, it's not clear that this plane does anything different from a modern-ish commercial aviation autopilot except fo…

JabRef. No cloud component and as a bonus the database is just a BibTex file which you can keep in Git.

I'm sad to hear that not only the man himself but Harris Cyclery passed sometime in the middle of COVID. For the younger folks, it's hard to appreciate how influential his kludgey-…

This one does seem too expensive for what it is. The GBD-200 at $150 seems much more appropriate for a smartwatch-lite, besides scratching the itch for a modern take on the old Cas…

This is when I'm glad that pressing F9 to invoke reader mode in Firefox still exists. Try it!

For a more modern language that scratches the same minimalist syntax itch as Forth, try Red [1]. It's list-based rather than stack-based and includes the "killer app" of a really n…

I work with a lot of uncompressed structured binary files so I finally broke down and wrote my own system based on the Restic chunker: https://github.com/akbarnes/dupver It's prett…

I recall some figure that 90% of the Canadian population lives in a thin band extending a few hundred miles north of the US border. So average population density is very misleading…