Hacker News: Finnucane

New comment by Finnucane in "My First Winter in Boston"

Finnucane — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:12:16 +0000

He arrived just in time for the 'Snowmagedden' winter--four blizzards in the space of a month, dropping a record snowfall. That's going to leave a mark.

New comment by Finnucane in "LEDs’ potential to save our night skies"

Finnucane — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:03:38 +0000

Get rid of cars and they'd take down all the lights.

New comment by Finnucane in "In Germany if you say a restaurant is just ok they send the gestapo after you"

Finnucane — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:22:19 +0000

Also "histrionics".

New comment by Finnucane in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

Finnucane — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:25:12 +0000

Or slowly boiling a human. The frog is actually smart enough to not fall for that.

New comment by Finnucane in "Why is healthcare so much slower than IT?"

Finnucane — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:15:58 +0000

They're not anywhere close to how bad the software business is.

New comment by Finnucane in "Why is healthcare so much slower than IT?"

Finnucane — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:44:42 +0000

Because software producers don't have to give a shit if their product actually works or solves a problem? Programmers moved fast, broke things, but didn't fix anything they broke.

New comment by Finnucane in "Starlink 2X Price Increase"

Finnucane — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:01:44 +0000

Rich people are screwing over the slightly less rich, get out the silver pitchforks.

New comment by Finnucane in "eBay is down this looks like a global incident 07142026"

Finnucane — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:42:26 +0000

I guess they got over it.

New comment by Finnucane in "The Company That Owns AOL Gets a Million Job Applications–and Rejects 99.9%"

Finnucane — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 01:33:11 +0000

AOL is still a thing?

New comment by Finnucane in "TabFont – guitar tabs rendered as you type"

Finnucane — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:55:06 +0000

Yes, but music notation is not simple text. Markdown was made for simple text. If you try to represent more complex text, it turns into Asciidoc or Rst.

New comment by Finnucane in "TabFont – guitar tabs rendered as you type"

Finnucane — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:36:47 +0000

Isn't that what LilyPond does, more or less?

New comment by Finnucane in "Camera with transparent display launches for the equivalent of $29"

Finnucane — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:03:44 +0000

Or even just using a plain old light meter. I use a Gossen Luna Pro (with 'spot' attachment) with my meterless cameras (which is most of them). It's reliable.

New comment by Finnucane in "The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?"

Finnucane — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 22:49:14 +0000

Lileks is still going. What else matters?

New comment by Finnucane in "Ask HN: Are you guys happy with existing social networkin apps?"

Finnucane — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 21:22:58 +0000

Mostly spending time on Mastodon these days, which is only made tolerable by its lack of capabilities.

New comment by Finnucane in "Slow Tuesday Night (1965)"

Finnucane — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 21:14:31 +0000

Ray wrote a later story ("I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows") in which there becomes a trend of different kinds of brain-enhancement technologies to make everyone super-intelligent. Of course, the enhancements are sold by hucksters who are using the enhancements to control the enhanced.

New comment by Finnucane in "We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works"

Finnucane — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:15:09 +0000

This has always been true. I never fixed my car. I knew how it worked well enough to know, hey, that sounds like its coming from the exhaust pipe. Then I took it to the mechanic. I can do basic maintenance on my bike, but I still take it to the bike shop. I have a small collection of vintage cameras, which means tracking down the few people left who know how some particular model works, might have parts. If your Synchro-Compur shutter needs parts, forget it. For most people, most of the time, the assumption has always been that someone else knows how to do that.

New comment by Finnucane in "Crypto firms have spent $189M so far on 2026 US election, report says"

Finnucane — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:58:47 +0000

Some of them have gotten out of jail.

New comment by Finnucane in "Crypto firms have spent $189M so far on 2026 US election, report says"

Finnucane — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:56:21 +0000

Because they're not as much 'freedom loving' as they are 'selfish dicks.'

New comment by Finnucane in "PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts"

Finnucane — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:12:28 +0000

everything degrades. We live in a world ruled by entropy. Even digital stuff degrades. It has to be stored somewhere, in some form, and there is always a risk of loss. No matter what.

New comment by Finnucane in "Phones Alerted Millions Before Quakes Shook Venezuela"

Finnucane — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:50:47 +0000

I recall reading some years ago about a study of tornado warnings that showed that every additional minute of warning time had significant value in terms of preventable damage and casualties. Presumably it would be similar for earthquakes, but early detection is a much harder problem.