Hacker News: abridgett

New comment by abridgett in "Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban"

abridgett — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 20:05:25 +0000

I'll just leave this little NSA intercepting Cisco products reminder here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

New comment by abridgett in "How Britain built some of the world’s safest roads"

abridgett — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 19:36:44 +0000

The hazard perception test was a great addition in my opinion. (Basically a video plays and you have to press a button when something dangerous has happened).

I passed my driving test 30+ years ago and then took the HPT as part of a motorcycle test 15 years later.

Paying attention (to the kid bouncing a ball at the side of the road, to the cyclist when it's windy weather etc) is a key part of road craft and I hope this made it much clearer with some (contrived) examples. TBH I just wish they let you click earlier (for _potential_ threats - i.e. before they step into the road, not just afterwards).

New comment by abridgett in "Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes"

abridgett — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 11:14:42 +0000

If a president flaps his arms on one side of the planet does this cause a hurricane of chaos on the other side of the world? And everywhere else.

New comment by abridgett in "Forking Work Simplification – Let's Bring Back Eisenhower's Process Improvement"

abridgett — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 13:44:51 +0000

This sounds reasonable. However there was a study showing major economic benefits if was free. These benefits came from more people implementing it, time saved by all those additional users, removal of licensing hassle.

New comment by abridgett in "The 2005 Sony Bravia ad"

abridgett — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 19:01:23 +0000

Their "paint" advert wasn't bad either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ut_2GWIm4 though it can't compete with the music.

New comment by abridgett in "Slides that convinced Boris Johnson about global warming (2022)"

abridgett — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 22:14:24 +0000

It's a sad indictment that it took all this effort, in 2019, to convince a world "leader" that climate change was real.

New comment by abridgett in "AWS re:Invent 2024 Swag Review"

abridgett — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 09:47:59 +0000

I wish companies were more environmentally conscious and stopped churning out swag. It's such a waste. Much of it you would never have bought, most is low quality. We don't need it.

New comment by abridgett in "Evolve Bank and Trust confirms LockBit stole 7.6M people's data"

abridgett — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 21:07:33 +0000

I've asked them: a) _what_ details may have been involved. Currently the criminals know more than we do. b) why EBT had any data if Wise stopped working with then in 2023.

I'd except there to be a fairly strong obligation (probably on both parties) under GDPR to ensure that EBT destroyed that data.

I'll be following up

New comment by abridgett in "X debut 40 years ago (1984)"

abridgett — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 21:24:00 +0000

I still remember playing Quake on Linux - with the X display being displayed on a different computer over the network. The different computer was running HP-UX (HP's Unix) on a PA-RISC chip.

New comment by abridgett in "Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced"

abridgett — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 16:33:50 +0000

I'm not sure it can replace non-trivial setups - sudo/doas looks set to stay.

e.g when you need to restrict a set of users to run only certain applications with certain other users. sudo can do this (even if the config format can be painful).

New comment by abridgett in "The Three Body Problem Netflix adaptation trailer [video]"

abridgett — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 22:17:31 +0000

No major spoilers that I noticed. Really recommend reading the books, each was pretty mind blowing to me in a different way. The best kind of sci-fi - that which makes you think and wonder.

New comment by abridgett in "It's My Monitor"

abridgett — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 12:06:39 +0000

I've only seen this behaviour once. Someone very publicly shouted at and then privately apologised to. Needless to say the shouter lost any respect I had for them - firstly for blaming without facts, secondly for being so pathetic they didn't make a public apology. The victim in this case went up in my estimation and us now a very successful team leader.

New comment by abridgett in "Show HN: Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news"

abridgett — Sat, 13 May 2023 07:24:07 +0000

Google weather desperately needs this whenever it reports weather from "The Sun" (awful awful "newspaper").

Today: "Brits to bask in 20C sun" (that's 68F) Yesterday: "Yellow thunderstorm warning..set to spark travel chaos"

Just a tad over the top! Genuine weather extremes in the UK are pretty rare :)

New comment by abridgett in "French publisher arrested in London for refusal to tell police his passcodes"

abridgett — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 21:06:31 +0000

It's even worse - under RIP act not only can you be "forced" to reveal any passwords:

- the onus is on _you_ to "prove" that you don't know it or have forgotten it - you can be told not to reveal that you've told them the password

Anyone administering systems might want to think about this, governments aren't known for good security.

New comment by abridgett in "UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k"

abridgett — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 09:34:47 +0000

No doubt this will lead to complaints that foreigners are coming over stealing our secrets _and_ our jobs at the same time :-)

New comment by abridgett in "IBM creates 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle database license"

abridgett — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 09:39:16 +0000

IIRC they did something related a long time ago when you could get a 8 CPU box which was physically restricted to 6 CPUs purely so that it didn't fit into the "can have 8 CPU" Oracle license. About 2/3rds of the servers we sold at the time probably went to run Oracle and it gave us a massive TCO (total cost of ownership) advantage compared with other vendors, especially as the POWER chips were faster than the competition too. When most of the cost is in the software, the choice of hardware can still make a big difference.

New comment by abridgett in "GeForce Now: A Review"

abridgett — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 22:45:22 +0000

GeForce Now was/is great. Bethesda though (amongst others) have lost a formerly loyal fan due to pulling their games. Why? I own the games, I paid for them. If I had my old PC still I could play them just the same. Presumably so that in several years they can run their own cloud service.

The greed of companies will be their own downfall.

New comment by abridgett in "One of Norway's biggest CS players tries playing under a female alias [video]"

abridgett — Tue, 10 May 2022 20:45:33 +0000

Might want to change the subtitles from "that was sick" to "that was disgusting" just to prevent anyone misinterpreting that (unintentionally or otherwise) as "sick" is slang for "excellent" in some places.

New comment by abridgett in "Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter"

abridgett — Tue, 03 May 2022 20:35:30 +0000

It's particularly silly when you consider the number of offices and timezones. Not only is a large amount of interaction via video call, when on site there'll be a shortage of rooms and the sound quality is usually pretty dire.

New comment by abridgett in "Ask HN: How to Become a 100x Engineer?"

abridgett — Mon, 02 May 2022 17:55:03 +0000

I think there's a better idea: how should you become a better you.

Attempting to be 100x better "than the rest" strikes me as a _very_ unhealthy approach. To paraphrase an answer I read somewhere else:

"The best way to be a 10x developer is to make 10 of your colleagues twice as effective"

Note that _you_ don't achieve anything more - you've just unlocked the potential elsewhere. It's also immensely satisfying - much more so than being a "rockstar" developer (also known in many circles as the "a*hole").

Looping back to your question:

- look around you - solving a key problem currently ignored could be the best thing you can do for the company - compound interest - invest in making repeated actions better (automation, cookie-cutters etc) - improve efficiency - IMO docs, single source of truth are typically seriously undervalued leading to questions and mistakes both of which waste a lot of time - take a healthier attitude - it comes across to me as a rather immature "look at me, aren't I _amazing_" desire which will rub people up the wrong way. - learn at every opportunity - senior devs don't know everything - I've also learnt from kids still at school, sales people, friends...