HN Simulatornew | past | comments | lists | submit | otherme123's commentslogin

I liked my Kobo Clara HD for years. A few months ago my wife wanted an ereader, but she reads a lot less books than me. So she offered to inherit my Kobo, and I bougth a Pocketbook Verse Pro. I like it a lot for the physical buttons, the smart ligth is programable with hourly granularity (both intensity and tone), and you get an email address that forwards ebooks attached straight to the device. It is a bit faster turning pages.

Kobo had its store on the home page, and while it was unobstrusive, the Pocketbook has nothing at all. Worth a look, if you are interested.


I have a Kobo and am not quite sure what is on its home page and don't really care, because the device spends all its time in KOreader. I also am not concerned about corporate schenanigans, because I put the device in airplane mode as soon as I unboxed it. I'd say Kobo is a pretty dependable device for people with such concerns.

But also custom date pickers are the most broken thing you can find everywhere. Browse with a combination of browser/phone the developer didn't test, and you can't pick even the most basic single date. The most blatant are the fancy range pickers, instead of two date picker boxes: I have been pushed to a desktop browser because the mobile renders half of it off-screen, or don't hold open after tapping the start date, or works by dragging but breaks on single taps...

Yep. I've also seen a datetime picker (in a log viewing tool) where adjusting time from keyboard is nigh impossible: you have "12:30:00", with the cursor right after the "30", and want to make it "35", so you press [Backspace] — nope, deleting a digit would make an invalid time, so the component undoes it. You press "5", but inserting yet another digit would also make an invalid time, so the component undoes it. You have to text-select the zero, and then press "5" to overwrite it... and you have to do it digit-by-digit, because you can't replace two digits at once with a single key press. Amazing.

It's a lose-lose situation, honestly.


They are notoriously difficult to get right. That makes it especially disappointing that the native one doesn't meet the needs of practically any use case I have for them.

> So Amazon bought a bunch of nVidia hardware, and has been installing it in their datacenters. These are supposedly in-service for Amazon customers, a lot of it available and in-use today.

Bought, yes. Installed and in use? We don't know, but probably on a warehouse waiting for a place to be installed, for an energy source to be build.

Put the GPUs in another business, sell it to investors, and watch it unfold.


We do in fact know:

> The chips in the proposed deal were bought or leased by Amazon. They are installed in more than a dozen US data centres across five states, including Nevada and Virginia, the report said.

The "warehouses full of GPUs" thing might be the most absurd of the AI economy conspiracy theories.


Actually no, the hyperscalers have been saying this themselves. They have bought chips they can’t power on and use because of issues getting enough power and building out data centers. How much of NVidia’s revenue is actually just selling chips that go sit on a shelf somewhere is a closely guarded secret at this point.

If that were the case, the hyperscalers would be ramping down capex, not increasing it.

The not-in-service numbers on the financials are just the normal lag, and have been stable in proportion to capex for years, to well before the start of the boom.


Google used to be the "good company" not that long ago. They changed the whole industry. But today, and very deserved, a lot of people that liked or even loved them, turned against. And that can happen when a company changes, but also when the user changes its point of view: you could be a voter for Trump a couple years ago, but today and after watching the results of his politics (that are not that surprising, is not like the president made an U-turn) you might have a different opinion.

If you hold the same opinion forever, even when things obviously changed, you are just a fanatic.


> If you hold the same opinion forever, even when things obviously changed, you are just a fanatic.

I was a huge fan of Google when "Don't be evil" was still their motto. That opinion changed the moment that motto went the way of the dinosaur.


That is true, and I HAVE personally changed my opinion on Tesla, but Electrek IS about moving from Fossil Fuels to Electric vehicles. I guess I expected them to focus on the tech side of things and not on the politics side of it a bit more, when I read a technical magazine is mainly for the tech, not for the US political fight of the day.

I think you are mixin wealth with money. In the short run it is a near zero sum game: money should go from A (now obsolete) to B. For example, brick and mortar shops replaced by online shops. For example horse business going bankrupt while car business is booming. Wealth is created in the form of more convenient shopping or travelling, not as $$$. AI might help some businesses with their productivity (creating new wealth), but those business are expected to divert $6T from current expenses (wages, or non AI tooling) towards AI pockets, or steal $6T market share from non-AI business.

>For example horse business going bankrupt while car business is booming.

But also the car business is far larger than the horse business ever was. It is not zero-sum; every time Henry Ford's factory spit out a new model T, real wealth was being created.

Money is just a standin for wealth. If we suddenly doubled the amount of wealth in the world, we could just print more dollars to match - or the existing dollars would just become worth twice as much.


This. Positive sum games are deflationary. Economic policy can, and has, offset the deflation of techno capital growth.

If you show productivity, banks have no problem lending you money (new freshly printed money)

Indeed, although there are also pressures pushing banks to lend out money regardless of created wealth. This is why there's so much investment into stupid things like AI - they call it TINA or "There Is No Alternative" (to put your dollars into). The scale of AI is as big as it is because there were huge pools of money sloshing around looking for things to invest into, that's the underlying problem that caused the RAM crisis, not AI itself.

Key eink patents are expired since c. 2017. But they bought potential competitors and keep innovating (and patenting), so the monopoly stays strong. If someone entered the market right now, with 2000 eink tech, and pricing at very low margin prices, they will go bankrupt: would you buy a 20" screen, no touch, ~70 ppp, refresh around 2 seconds for maybe $300? Also, patents might have expired, but key tech, such as precise micro-sphere manufacturing, is not under patent protection, but under trade secrecy: on top of old tech, it would be unreliable. Some like Zhiwei specialize in epaper for tags using old tech, but only for b2b and barely below Eink prices.

Competition explores completely different technologies: Daylight DC-1, Reinkstone, ChLCD e.g. from Iris... but either the tech isn't good enough to generalize or be cheap (the later), or the niche economics don't allow the inventors to keep investing (the two first).


Very informative thanks.

Right now I would hesitate to buy a used car with 5 years and a 100% of 300 km range but down to 250 km due to battery wear, when I could buy a new car with 500 km range. Owners of first Leafs got hit by already low initial ranges (~120km), so even a 20-30% battery wear have huge impact or car usability. That would change when ranges stops growing (about 700 km, maybe, the same as ICEs?), and used cars have the same range than buying new. 600 km instead of 700 km? Good enough.

Nobody is doing battery swaps yet? That sounds like an obvious thing? Or is the mobile "glued in battery not serviceable component" thinking spread like poison so much that people don't consider it?

If the rest of the car is fine, it should be one visit to a shop to swap out old battery for new (and the shop handling recycling/disposal of the old one), and off you go with car good as new.


I guess the real problem is pricing: right now it is buy used, then swap batteries for 8-10K? No wonder the car deprecates.

I vaguely remember a guy swapping modules of the battery of a Prius at home for peanuts, because the dealership asked 4K for the same service. There are a few places that do a battery refresh for 1 or 2K (eg. texashybridbatteries.com). In the future this might be a good business, today it seems to be a Prius thing... because it was the most successful car a while ago.


Liquid cooled, large EV traction batteries last 250,000 miles. Pre-2023 Prius's are neither, which is why they need replacement.

The game is really cool, but it allowed me to cheat on mobile when asked for coastal lines: it shows the actual coastal line for a second, then draws the rest of the map over. Also, it said Belgium is landlocked.

Thanks for the bug report I will fix these asap!

Wait, insurance includes repair costs? What kind of insurance are we talking about? In Spain, mandatory insurance plus some perks is about the same: includes damage to others, own car broken glasses, theft and fire, and road assistance. Maybe Tesla is slightly more, expensive because the horsepower of their cars is too high, and it gets in the group of cars with over 300 HP, so insurers assume it is a bit of a sports car. Anyway, the difference with similarly powered ICE car is negligible.

> Wait, insurance includes repair costs?

Yes of course, it's part of the actuarial calculation. As cars age they become more expensive to repair and eventually will cross a boundary where the insurer will write them off on any type of accident, rather than trying to repair. This naturally increases the base insurance price.

OEMs in the EU are only required to produce spare parts for 10 years after a model is withdrawn, which is a strong indicator of when write-off becomes the primary option.


In Germany full coverage does include some level of repair costs.

I have had my side mirrors and windshield repairs covered.


I am author in two author papers, but also in 200 author papers. Nothing wrong with it. In our field they are studies among a dozen centers, where each center has to do something and the results are pooled to some central hub. If I do a relatively easy data prep before sending to the hub, I go among the authors, it is just the way it works. A huge work that is spreaded thinly, or else can't be done unless you ask people to work without attributio. That might work once or twice, but not more, if you are the person who ask for favours but returns nothing.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | DMCA | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: