Hacker News: NikkiA

New comment by NikkiA in "Typed Lisp, a Primer"

NikkiA — Sun, 04 May 2025 21:53:10 +0000

praising 'loop' in the same post as describing lisp as 'elegant' shakes head

New comment by NikkiA in "Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart"

NikkiA — Sun, 04 May 2025 17:26:09 +0000

I dunno, '700 AU' gelled for me instantly, '15 times the distance to pluto' doesn't even make sense given pluto's orbit isn't anywhere near circular.

New comment by NikkiA in "Gorgeous-GRUB: collection of decent community-made GRUB themes"

NikkiA — Sun, 04 May 2025 17:19:57 +0000

That's likely something related to USB legacy support being on or off.

A lot of modern BIOS/EFI also allow a hybrid setting that enables legacy support until the OS takes over, which can sometimes be better too.

New comment by NikkiA in "Gorgeous-GRUB: collection of decent community-made GRUB themes"

NikkiA — Sun, 04 May 2025 17:17:22 +0000

ITYM Lilililililililililili....

New comment by NikkiA in "Owen Le Blanc: creator of the first Linux distribution"

NikkiA — Fri, 02 May 2025 21:24:54 +0000

The amount of software available for linux vs the BSDs tells me that the distro model has not hurt linux. If a homogenous software stack from a single centralised set of software was beneficial, it would be more likely that porting to linux from a BSD codebase would be the norm, rather than the other way around.

New comment by NikkiA in "The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis"

NikkiA — Fri, 02 May 2025 13:50:20 +0000

The web was only 3 years old when altavista burst on the scene.

So the window of there being 'no search engine to find what you were looking for on the web' was tiny.

New comment by NikkiA in "U.S. Economy Contracts at 0.3% Rate in First Quarter"

NikkiA — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 14:59:28 +0000

Ironically, replacing multi-million dollar aircraft that 'fell into the sea' is part of what keeps the american GDP so high.

New comment by NikkiA in "Path Isn't Real on Linux"

NikkiA — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:53:40 +0000

to be fair to linux, elf was bolted on after a few years, the original linux used a variant of coff without shared library support.

New comment by NikkiA in "Path Isn't Real on Linux"

NikkiA — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:46:38 +0000

the odd thing is, at some point I ended up with `hash -R` as muscle memory that I always type before I correct it to a lower case r, and I'm not sure why, I can't remember any shell that uses `-R`.

New comment by NikkiA in "Amazon Wants to Be a Satellite-Internet Powerhouse. It Has a Long Way to Go"

NikkiA — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 15:47:22 +0000

> it is not just communist countries that nationalised things. Much of Europe did up to the 1970s, lots of Asian democracies did.

I suspect you're about to have your eyes opened to just how the american right feels about pre-neoliberal europe and asia.

New comment by NikkiA in "USB 2.0 is 25 years old today – the interface standard that changed the world"

NikkiA — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 07:11:49 +0000

Never really had the '3 times' problem, because I realised very early on that the USB logo is always on the 'up' side.

New comment by NikkiA in "Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing"

NikkiA — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 20:41:12 +0000

Tweets were geolocated, with a 'see tweets near me' page until about 14 years ago, so it's entirely feasible that at least some of that infrastructure has survived the feature being removed.

New comment by NikkiA in "Has anyone else found Google's AI overview to be oddly error prone?"

NikkiA — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 22:16:30 +0000

Just invent a 'common' saying and add 'explanation' at the end.

New comment by NikkiA in "First Successful Lightning Triggering and Guiding Using a Drone"

NikkiA — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 14:47:47 +0000

Wind turbines work from about 5 km/h and up winds, so yes, much more frequent than lightning.

New comment by NikkiA in "You wouldn't steal a font"

NikkiA — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 21:55:34 +0000

FACT/FAST are a UK organisation, where font copyright is espressly enumerated in the copyright law.

New comment by NikkiA in "Sixty Years On, We Still Dream of the Arrow"

NikkiA — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:41:02 +0000

Arrow was a high altitude intercepter, TSR was a low level nuclear interdictor. I can't see any way that there was ANY mission cross over.

New comment by NikkiA in "Sixty Years On, We Still Dream of the Arrow"

NikkiA — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:40:15 +0000

The TSR-2 was doomed by progress, by the time it made it to prototype stage britains nuclear bombs had shrunk to the point that they didn't need, nor benefitted from, a giant interdictor.

In the end the tiny jaguar could carry 4 WE177s just fine.

New comment by NikkiA in "Sixty Years On, We Still Dream of the Arrow"

NikkiA — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:37:33 +0000

If you really want to cheat with the starfighter, you need to be using the ZEL version of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-length_launch

New comment by NikkiA in "MinC Is Not Cygwin"

NikkiA — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:46:19 +0000

It might run on 3.1 and 3.11 via win32s, there were occasional odd things that would run on the win32 subsystem as was adapted to 3.1/3.11, but not 95/98/ME.

New comment by NikkiA in "'Nobody has done this before': Britain's beloved steam trains trial technology"

NikkiA — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:15:24 +0000

ETH is a lot more than something a simple battery could provide. 1 ETH 'unit' is 5kW of power at 750-1000V AC. A train will usually require much more than 1 unit.

HEP cars (aka 'generator cars') are a solution, but the UK never really had them, we had converted diesels called 'Ethels', which are functionally identical to the current practice of tagging a diesel locomotive at idle on the tail of the train, but all of those were scrapped.

* Ethel => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_25#Train_He...