psadauskas (u/psadauskas)

psadauskas commented on Chuck Klosterman on why we've never actually seen a real football game latimes.com/entertainment... · Posted by u/proposal

cheschire · 13 days ago

Whenever I think it might be worth it to finally go watch an NFL game live, and I start looking at those ticket prices, I start to question if it's worth it or not. Then I get to the seat view simulator and instantly close the tab because holy hell are the "affordable" NFL seats absolutely terrible to watch a game from. Can you even see the player numbers let alone the names? I guess you need to be a big enough fan to know all the players by number on offense, defense, special teams, and the full depth chart for every position in case there are injuries.

Nah. A one time purchase of a 77" TV with surround sound was absolutely the better option.

psadauskas · 13 days ago

I went to go see a Broncos game once about 10 years ago, it was $400 for a single ticket. I was in the top section, 3 rows from the back, I needed a Sherpa to help me get to my seat. I could tell there was a game of football being played down below me, but that was about it. I couldn't see the ball, I couldn't read any of the players' numbers, I couldn't see the refs hand signals. A beer and a hotdog was $30, and there was a 10-minute wait for the trough urinal in the bathroom. I was just watching the game on the jumbotron, which based on the distance was comparatively smaller than the TV in my living room.

The atmosphere was great, cheering with 75,000 other fans is exhilarating, but I haven't felt the need to go again. Soccer, hockey, basketball, baseball, I've all been to multiple times, the Denver stadiums for them are great, and the tickets and concessions aren't too expensive. Football is the only sport I really follow, but I'll never go to another game. The local high school is within walking distance, and a ticket is $5.

psadauskas commented on Minnesota activist releases arrest video after manipulated White House version apnews.com/article/minnes... · Posted by u/petethomas

gizmov21 · 17 days ago

What, pray tell, can we do?

Tens of thousands of people are protesting and some getting arrested, anyone with a voice is doing what they can to sway public opinion.

Our higher courts are compromised (and feckless at times even when used correctly), and the police help ICE. And a large number of Americans do, in fact, want this. Others don’t care until it hits them personally.

So what specifically are people to do, like myself, who live in an unaffected area and who’s politicians are in fact speaking out against this?

psadauskas · 17 days ago

And most Americans are just trying to survive, working 3 gig jobs for barely minimum wage, while the cost of everything is skyrocketing.

psadauskas commented on Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale maggieappleton.com/gastow... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

psadauskas · 17 days ago

> In the same way any poorly designed object or system gets abandoned

Hah, tell that to Docker, or React (the ecosystem, not the library), or any of the other terrible technologies that have better thought-out alternatives, but we're stuck with them being the de facto standard because they were first.

psadauskas commented on The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025) thefabricator.com/thefabr... · Posted by u/itvision

beloch · 19 days ago

To those who cling to customary units because...

1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like.

2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there are awkward numbers baked into the system. e.g. 5280 feet in a mile. 128 ounces in a gallon.

3. "It's too much trouble to change." You're already using metric units. U.S. customary units have, metrologically, been defined in terms of metric units since the Mendenhall order of 1893[1]. i.e. A meter is defined in terms of how far light can travel in a period of time defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium. If you needed to know exactly how long a meter is for a very precise measurement, a reference meter could be produced in a lab by aliens who have no idea what a meter is by using this definition. No such definition exists for a foot or yard. Nobody maintains physical reference yards (the old-school method) anymore. If you want those aliens to measure out a yard precisely, you tell them how to measure out a meter and then tell them 1 yard = 0.9144 m.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order

psadauskas · 19 days ago

I read a study many years ago, I haven't been able to find it for awhile. It took people who had grown up using each system, and asked them to estimate things just by guessing. For example, "How long is that wall?" or "How far is it from here to the post office?" or "How heavy is this paperweight?". People who'd grown up using customary were significantly more accurate in their guesses.

The study surmised it was because those units had been developed over millennia to be useful at human scales. When eyeballing the length of a wall, centimeters are too granular and meters are to course, but feet are "just right". You might guess a wall is 12 feet long, and be pretty close, but 3 or 4 meters aren't that accurate, and nobody really guesses 3.5 meters.

Same with temperature. 0 - 100°F is about all we as humans will usually experience, so its very convenient when talking about the weather or HVAC thermostats.

They are worse when doing math or conversions, and while that's annoying for scientists and engineers, in most people's everyday lives it comes up so infrequently it doesn't really matter. If something is less than a mile, you don't suddenly convert to feet and do math, you just say "about a half mile".

Personally, I do woodworking (which in the US is always imperial) and 3d-printing (which is always metric), and often combine the two. When doing woodworking or carpentry, its nice that a foot is evenly divisible by 3 or 6, or that half of 3/8ths of an inch is 3/16ths.

psadauskas commented on How AI destroys institutions cyberlaw.stanford.edu/pub... · Posted by u/JeanKage

vixen99 · 19 days ago

I'll focus just on food here: people do have a choice. I don't live in the US but is it impossible to buy basic ingredients, fruit, vegetables, grains, meat whatever etc., and actually cook something? Eating this kind of food you can even stack your life chances more in your favor. Huge amounts of information abound as to the how you can do that. Consumers, if they are free to choose, determine value and entrepreneurs will respond. It can be profoundly distorted, that's true but at base, capitalism is doing something that someone else finds of value or not.

psadauskas · 19 days ago

Sibling comment is correct, also in the US we have "Food Deserts"[1]: lower income areas that lack typical grocery stores, and might only have convenience stores that only stock prepackaged or processed foods. Any raw ingredients available are expensive and/or low-quality.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

psadauskas commented on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe noheger.at/blog/2026/01/1... · Posted by u/happosai

nine_k · a month ago

Why, running KDE in VirtualBox in full-screen mode must be fine :) At least, I did it breathlessly with Xfce, on much older Apple hardware, and it was... just fine.

(OTOH running text-mode Emacs from a headless VM in a full-screen built-in Terminal may suddenly feel sluggish. Kitty or WezTerm solves this.)

psadauskas · a month ago

Last time I tried, it didn't work well (or at all) with multiple monitors.

psadauskas commented on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe noheger.at/blog/2026/01/1... · Posted by u/happosai

nine_k · a month ago

Happened to me many times. As my other colleagues, I ran a Linux VM inside macOS. The overhead is not that large and is totally worth the sanity. Of course I had to use a few corporate-managed macOS apps, like Zoom, or Outlook, but this is not a very big deal.

psadauskas · a month ago

I’m in the same situation, have to use Mac for SOC2 reasons after having used Linux for 10 years. The apps are fine, it’s the KDE window management I miss the most, and a VM won’t really help there.

psadauskas commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

psadauskas · 2 months ago

Location: Boulder, CO

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: 20 years in the Rails webdev stack: Ruby, Rails, Turbo, Stimulus, Hotwire. Various Javascript frameworks as they come and go: React, Svelte, Vue. DevOps with Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure.

Résumé/CV: https://resume.sadauskas.com/

Email: psadauskas@gmail.com

There’s an inflection point in every startup, where you’ve got your MVP and first customers, and now you need to scale everything. You need to make the application faster while also adding features and fixing bugs. You need to grow the whole team, not just engineering, and build the tools to support them.

This is where I’m in my groove. I’ve grown teams from 3 to 100+, improved performance while scaling to 100x the load, and designed and built features from the ground up in an iterative and agile manner to minimize time-to-delivery while maximizing flexibility for future work.

I have over 20 years of experience as a full-stack web application developer, primarily as a Rails developer since its inception. I also have experience with a large variety of languages, frameworks and technologies. I’m comfortable working at entire levels of the app stack, from CSS to SQL. I have the experience to know when to hack together a quick solution, or take the time to architect a foundation that will scale and provide a platform upon which the team can build stable features for years.

If you’re an early stage startup that has found product/market fit, and needs someone to scale both your product and your team, then I’d be a great choice to help you out.

psadauskas commented on Private Equity's New Venture: Youth Sports jacobin.com/2025/11/youth... · Posted by u/wahnfrieden

wahnfrieden · 3 months ago

Just the free market at work

edit: Would like to understand from downvoters how this does not meet free market principles?

psadauskas · 3 months ago

A "free market" is one in which all the participants of the market have perfect information and act completely rationally. This is, of course, an academic ideal, similar to solving a physics problem that tells you to ignore friction.

What we have here is a "capitalist market", where those with more power (capital) within the market leverage it to exploit the other participants. Private Equity uses their money to extract as much money as possible from a segment of the market, usually destroying it in the process. But for a beautiful moment in time they created a lot of value for shareholders!

psadauskas commented on Ruby already solved my problem newsletter.masilotti.com/... · Posted by u/joemasilotti

aldousd666 · 3 months ago

I discovered this a few years ago when someone who didn't understand what semver is was trying to do a rails version upgrade for us. They were practically throwing stuff when I got there and explained that lexicographical comparison of the strings would not work. I was about to write my own class for it, but then I thought that since Bundler knew how to resolve deps we should see what it uses. The rest is history!

psadauskas · 3 months ago

I use it quite a bit when I have to monkeypatch a gem to backport a fix while I wait for a release:

    raise "check if monkeypatch in #{__FILE__} is still needed" if Gem::Version.new(Rails.version) >= Gem::Version.new("8.0.0")

This will blow up immediately when the gem gets upgraded, so we can see if we still need it, instead of it laying around in wait to cause a subtle bug in the future.