Hacker News: abulman

New comment by abulman in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

abulman — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:40:42 +0000

As I pointed out to the OP on Mastodon, I very much believe that it was a reference to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where they filmed a big door, and the original laser sequence from the first TRON movie.

LLL also made an in-house video when they were filming the original movie - https://www.spyculture.com/dept-energy-invent-making-video/

New comment by abulman in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

abulman — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:36:07 +0000

you'd first have to program it to take the picture, and look back at the photographer's eye to get the reflection of the screen with the IP address on!

New comment by abulman in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

abulman — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:32:52 +0000

Michael Sheen is apparently such a fan of TRON, that he might have been lucky to not negotiated himself down to a $0 pay packet - just in case someone else might have gotten the role :D

New comment by abulman in "Starship's Sixth Flight Test"

abulman — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:09:15 +0000

Some of the views their cameras get are fantastic - and the tracking on the last flight test would quite possibly make NASA envious. Cameras on the beach and also just next to StarHopper are in harms way too, they've lost a couple of them. I'm not sure what the cost of repair was after a chunk of concrete from what used to be the pad took out the back of a car!

New comment by abulman in "Starship's Sixth Flight Test"

abulman — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:04:13 +0000

I'll often spend a little time while watching the flight-tests (usually with Tim Dodd / EverydayAstronaut) just doing a search on YouTube for 'spacex live' and usually report 15-20 each time. They are very easy to spot when you've seen a few of them. I'll usually get a report of a few being shut down later in the day, and more over the next couple of days.

But, yes, they should be easy for YT to detect & block automatically - it's frustrating they (and other scams) get to stay online so long.

New comment by abulman in "Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico"

abulman — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 18:11:19 +0000

They might do some minor optimisation in terms of when the fly to keep some coverage but ...

> As of May 2024, there are 6,078 Starlink satellites in orbit, of which 6,006 are working - https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html

New comment by abulman in "IrfanView"

abulman — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 17:35:47 +0000

Agreed - I'm still using it everyday to view and do some minor editing (trimming and resizing pics). It, along with browsers, VLC, Putty, and SublimeText (and now also ObsidianMD) are the first things I will download to a new Windows PC.

New comment by abulman in "Ask HN: What's behind all the UK IT failures this month?"

abulman — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 11:38:23 +0000

Maybe all the interns that were left in charge didn't properly do what the AI had said?

New comment by abulman in "Serving my blog posts as Linux manual pages"

abulman — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 20:22:03 +0000

wow, there. Lets not get crazy there. It's plenty enough to support multiple package managers, but what you are considering is just too much!

New comment by abulman in "My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2022)"

abulman — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 19:56:42 +0000

I'm also using Obsidian daily notes, with all un-actioned items shown on a page with a dataview API[^1]:

    ```dataview
    TASK FROM "VaultName/Journal" WHERE !completed
    ```

Since at least 2012 I've also been using a text file format from http://todotxt.org/ and more recently I wrote a program that takes a crontab-like list[^2] to pre-generate entries on a daily, by-day-name (every Sunday for example), and I also pull in a list of holidays from gov.uk, so they are also populated.

[^1]: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview

[^2]: https://github.com/alister/alister-tools/blob/main/.todo.cro...

New comment by abulman in "Gentoo goes Binary"

abulman — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 15:27:54 +0000

Just don't use -O2 and -fe unless you want to end up with Rust.

New comment by abulman in "Why Is It So Difficult to Map the Ocean?"

abulman — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 21:57:15 +0000

> "The Ocean," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to the ocean."

New comment by abulman in "Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99"

abulman — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 10:15:14 +0000

Ever see the video of a guy walking past a Saturn V (lying in it's side), doing a piece to camera and pointing to the rocket behind him?

'Connections' (1978). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ

New comment by abulman in "Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99"

abulman — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 10:11:21 +0000

"the way God and Robert Heinlein intended."

New comment by abulman in "Drop Table “Companies”;– LTD (2016)"

abulman — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 18:17:21 +0000

I can assure you that as someone that has done a couple Gov-related public-sites, some developers do think about it, and use suitable tools to ensure there's no issues.

Before the last-and-stolen-passports site went live (that I spent most of 2014 getting live - not writing - but mostly trying to get deployed), we did have a conversation, and easily proved that people called Mr or Mrs Null and/or O'Brien would have no problems. That conversation was also somewhat prompted by the Dartford Crossing site that went live a little before us - which had 'some issues'.

New comment by abulman in "Heat Pumps – The Well-Tempered Future of A/Cs"

abulman — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 21:58:56 +0000

Yes.

New comment by abulman in "Ack is a grep-like source code search tool"

abulman — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 08:00:23 +0000

previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=beyondgrep.com

see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3835901 (ag/the_silver_searcher)

New comment by abulman in "Ask HN: Recruiters want people who do side projects, yet contracts forbid them?"

abulman — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 12:56:02 +0000

Every contract of employment I've received initially had a part saying I could not do outside work/projects, or that they would belong to the company.

None of them were there when I started work - as I had them all struck out, or changed to "work I do for the company belongs to the company, and I won't work on similar projects for other people while I work here".

It has never been a problem to arrange that. The only time it was, was during a initial phone-screen interview with the company HR person that said: a) they use Subversion and any discussion of changing to Git was never going to happen (this was in about 2017), and b) any outside projects were totally forbidden. No wonder I hadn't heard of the company before - despite their office being a few hundred metres from Silicon Roundabout and all the various meetups - no one was allowed to improve their skills...

What she had to do with making those decisions, I have no idea. And so that's the only interview I ever rage quit (though I did once tell someone else their puzzle-based questions were dumb during another interview).

New comment by abulman in "Next dream job can be in an HTTP header"

abulman — Fri, 15 May 2020 11:20:31 +0000

I'd expect they would also ensure the Evil bit was set to 0. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3514

New comment by abulman in "Ask HN: Why there are no good services to send money abroad?"

abulman — Sat, 21 Dec 2019 22:57:05 +0000

I started working for a US-based company a couple of months ago. They pay me through a company that handles the contract.

The CEO pays my invoice on Monday and it gets to the contract company on Friday, if I'm lucky. Good for me though - the intermediate has their bank account with Transferwise - so when they pay me, it's in my account in barely minutes after I get the email they've paid me.

From from Transferwise USD account, it's usually seconds to get to my UK-based bank (one of the first group of 'Challenger banks'), and if I want to pay myself from there, it's also seconds to minutes at most from there, to my personal account.

TLDR: It's a week to go from one US company to another, but just a couple of minutes to hop across the atlantic, and between UK banks.