Hacker News: SloopJon

New comment by SloopJon in "RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one"

SloopJon — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:18:32 +0000

I held my nose and bought an RTX 5070 Ti for $100 over MSRP in January. The very next week the same model was up $200. It turns out that NVIDIA had been subsidizing retail graphics cards with its Open Pricing Program. Not the whole story, but it may help explain the relative flatness of the graph until the end of January.

The other part of it is that the MSRP already baked in a substantial increase from the previous generation. While RAM was near rock-bottom pricing when this hit, current-gen GPUs definitely were not.

New comment by SloopJon in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

SloopJon — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:00:18 +0000

An editor that tries to be layout agnostic is almost certainly going to be a nightmare for people like me who set the layout in the keyboard itself. I downloaded the editor (I'm on Windows at the moment), and tried it with my keyboard set to Dvorak, which was plainly broken. I'm sure there's a way to fix the mapping, but when software thinks it's smarter than you, you end up feeling pretty dumb.

New comment by SloopJon in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

SloopJon — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:21:26 +0000

The article links to a YouTube mini-review of USB enclosures from UGreen and Acasis, neither of which he loves.[1] I've been happy with the OWC 1M2 as a boot drive on a Mac Studio with Thunderbolt 5 ports.[2] I just noticed that there is an OWC 1M2 80G, based on USB4 v2.[3] I didn't know that was a thing, but I guess it's the USB cousin to Thunderbolt 5.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaV-O6NPWrI

[2] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-express-1m2

[3] https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/US4V2EXP1M2/

New comment by SloopJon in "California issues fine over lawyer's ChatGPT fabrications"

SloopJon — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:27:49 +0000

The article links to the opinion[1], which notes more than once that "the quoted language does not appear anywhere in the opinion," and "Goldstine appears to be a fabricated case." I don't know whether it's easy to get a copy of the complaint in question.

[1] https://www4.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/B331918.PDF

New comment by SloopJon in "Linux Ready to Upstream Support for Google's PSP Encryption for TCP Connections"

SloopJon — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 16:47:36 +0000

The blog post announcing the PSP Security Protocol as open source:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/ann...

HN discussion at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31437033

New comment by SloopJon in "Pass: Unix Password Manager"

SloopJon — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:36:52 +0000

I found the idea of a password generator appealing, mainly due to vault anxiety. I didn't (and still don't) like the idea that I can't access a resource without this precious vault. If I'm home with my tools, great. Otherwise, give me the right hash function, and I can MacGyver my way to PBKDF2 and generate my password.

However, once you introduce metadata (e.g., to deal with password rules), the idea loses most of its appeal. I wouldn't feel any more comfortable posting such a thing publicly than I would a vault.

New comment by SloopJon in "Stop writing CLI validation. Parse it right the first time"

SloopJon — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:06:45 +0000

I don't see anything in the post or the linked tutorial that gives a flavor of the user experience when you supply an invalid option. I tried running the example, but I've forgotten too much about Node and TypeScript to make it work. (It can't resolve the @optique references.) What happens when you pass --foo, --target bar, or --port 3.14?

Pixel Watch 4

SloopJon — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 20:26:52 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel-watch-4/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44966050

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by SloopJon in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

SloopJon — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 16:13:42 +0000

Gemini says: pressing Option on the Swinsian menu changes the "Check For Updates..." menu option to "Check For Updates (Beta)..."

I don't have specific complaints about the current version, but I'm going to give it a try. If nothing else, it's probably ARM native.

New comment by SloopJon in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

SloopJon — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 16:08:38 +0000

Petrichor shows my albums as a single track. CUE sheet support is a must.

I also have a hard time seeing myself using a desktop music player without an iTunes-style column-mode browser.

New comment by SloopJon in "SIMD.info – Reference tool for C intrinsics of all major SIMD engines"

SloopJon — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 14:33:31 +0000

I don't think it's that it's not stripping "e.g.", but that the search criteria are empty. The empty result set is prefaced by "Search results for:".

I actually like that the example is a complete, standalone program that you can compile or send to Compiler Explorer.

New comment by SloopJon in "Institutional Books: A 242B token dataset from Harvard Library's collections"

SloopJon — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 22:50:56 +0000

Although this is characterized as 1.0, it is governed by the Terms of Use for Early-Access, which are quite limiting, including: "You may use the Service solely for noncommercial purposes."

New comment by SloopJon in "PS5 shooter goes from 5 players to bestseller after devs defend game"

SloopJon — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 22:04:09 +0000

The video on Steam shows both first- and third-person perspectives. Speaking of LLMs, Gemini says: "Hypercharge: Unboxed is both a first-person and third-person shooter. You can switch between perspectives based on your preference."

New comment by SloopJon in "“Bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production” study might not exist (2021)"

SloopJon — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:28:13 +0000

> The thesis is predicated on the idea that people claim this is the result of some study. I’ve never once heard it presented that way. It's a rule of thumb.

Code Complete cites eight sources to support the claim that the average cost to fix a defect introduced during requirements is 10-100x if it's not detected until after release. My qualm with Hillel's original assertion is that "They all use this chart from the 'IBM Systems Sciences Institute'" (emphasis added). I haven't personally vetted Steve McConnell's citations, but I am skeptical that they all share this common origin.

New comment by SloopJon in "How we made our OCR code more accurate"

SloopJon — Thu, 22 May 2025 12:39:52 +0000

The product appears to be similar to Microsoft's embattled Recall feature. In order to remember your digital life it takes frequent screenshots.

New comment by SloopJon in "Webflow makes GSAP 100% free – plus more updates"

SloopJon — Fri, 02 May 2025 13:58:12 +0000

The obvious question is, what does free mean? Here's the license:

https://gsap.com/community/standard-license/

Basically freeware with express prohibitions on competing with Webflow.

New comment by SloopJon in "Firefox tab groups are here"

SloopJon — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:45:00 +0000

This is a better link for the actual feature, as opposed to the process that led to its prioritization:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-tab-groups/

New comment by SloopJon in "Ask HN: Memory-Safe Low Level Languages"

SloopJon — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 15:02:03 +0000

Personally, I don't know what you mean about Rust being too massive. One thing I am wary of is using a truly massive language like C++ on a multi-programmer project without consensus on which features to use and how to use them. Maybe you have in mind something like that?

If you want the simplicity of C with more safety, maybe tooling like Frama-C, a MISRA C conformance checker, or just aggressive use of static and dynamic analysis tools like ASAN and UBSAN. You can also disable certain optimizations (e.g., strict aliasing) to steer away from some of the major pitfalls of UB.

New comment by SloopJon in "Anatomy of a SQL Engine"

SloopJon — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 14:28:49 +0000

When I read SQL for Dummies almost thirty years ago, it made a point of distinguishing "sequel" as a historical predecessor to standard "SQL." As I recall, the author even asserted that SQL is not an acronym/initialism for structured query language. I felt funny saying sequel for the next decade or so, because I wasn't an old timer experienced with this pre-SQL technology.

Now I usually say sequel because everyone else does. That and it rolls off the tongue better than S-Q-L.

New comment by SloopJon in "Native frame transposition coming to Emacs 31"

SloopJon — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:40:52 +0000

For a while I used dired-sidebar-show-sidebar and dired-omit-mode to give me a list of files in a narrow window on the left. I kept messing it up with C-x 1, though.