Hacker News: accrual

New comment by accrual in "Haiku R1/beta6 has been released"

accrual — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 18:40:54 +0000

I love the UI style of HaikuOS, so cool to see new ports like Firefox and a Go runtime in this release. Congrats to the team!

New comment by accrual in "Glacier Mice"

accrual — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 23:10:45 +0000

I like how they installed a GPS module into one of the rocks to track its path.

New comment by accrual in "The turbulent AI era is here"

accrual — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:25:17 +0000

Yes, it's a shame. It's in part due to scrapers and AI. There's a wealth of relevant knowledge inside Reddit, and agents aren't able to easily check there for updates on recent topics.

New comment by accrual in "Win-V combo from Windows on Ubuntu"

accrual — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:29:27 +0000

Yeah, I do wonder how this works for those copying keys and other private strings around. I'd rather they disappear on the next ^c than be pushed into an array somewhere, or worse, stored on disk.

New comment by accrual in "Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS"

accrual — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:39:58 +0000

I always liked the feeling of getting a proper video driver installed and unlocking "true color" support, the desktop background and icons were suddenly much richer and saturated.

New comment by accrual in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

accrual — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:32:39 +0000

> lighting up colored LEDs for notifications so you can see them “at a glance” without looking at the screen

My old Blackberry Bold had this feature and I loved it! I had it customized so it would pulse a different color depending on who had messaged me.

New comment by accrual in "Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386"

accrual — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:12:48 +0000

I agree, and I think one can put in more effort on a project and get a better result, especially if the prompter is already an experienced software developer. For example on one toy project I requested the use of ADTs (algebraic data types), strict linting and code formatting at every commit, tests, frequent code review rounds, and a strong initial plan which led to a very solid personal-use project.

Similar strategy can help smaller local models achieve greater results too. Small steps + many guardrails.

New comment by accrual in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

accrual — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:11:31 +0000

Been there as well. You just want to play a game you own and end up making new accounts and sharing personal details, and even then might not even succeed.

This is a big reason I try to keep my old consoles alive. My OG Xbox is queued up ready for a clock capacitor replace so I can fire up real Halo CE any time I want!

New comment by accrual in "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork"

accrual — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:57:23 +0000

Filelight / ncdu are my friends for finding random 30GB directories containing cached models.

New comment by accrual in "Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF"

accrual — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:07:52 +0000

This is really cool, it gives me SimCity 2000 vibes. I like that I can click on neighborhoods and regions and get more information about them!

New comment by accrual in "Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust"

accrual — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:08:26 +0000

This isn't quite right, Windows Me was a stopgap between Windows 98 and Windows XP. Microsoft had no intention of keeping anyone on Me for long. There were already plans to get consumers onto an NT-based OS when Me launched, the initial version of this was codenamed Neptune.

> Microsoft discussed a plan to delay Neptune in favor of an interim OS known as "Asteroid", which would have been an update to Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5.0), and have a consumer-oriented version. At the WinHEC conference on April 7, 1999, Steve Ballmer announced an updated version of Windows 98 known as Windows Millennium, breaking a promise made by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in 1998 that Windows 98 would be the final consumer-oriented version of Windows to use the MS-DOS architecture. [0]

So XP was not a reaction to Me's reception, it was already in the works as a replacement when Me came out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_XP

New comment by accrual in "Just because a game is on disc doesn't mean it will work in the future"

accrual — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:14:33 +0000

I think item 1 will be most provable. Sony says "you can have X experience for Y dollars". You pay Y dollars. 10 years elapse. Sony says X is no longer available. Sony has absorbed Y dollars but your X is gone and you cannot access it. This is the new model.

New comment by accrual in "NetBSD 11.0"

accrual — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:18:47 +0000

There are some ISA USB cards with custom drivers to support them and present them as normal drives under MS-DOS. Never tried it myself, but they exist and seem to work!

Other commenter is correct, there are some late 486 boards with PCI support that would allow USB 1.0 or even 2.0 cards to be installed and used. Probably slow, but should work.

On the topic of modernizing a 486-class machine, there also exist a few with native PS/2 mouse support, and certain Matrox PCI cards have digital out, so it'd be possible to build a 486-class machine with USB 1.1, DVI/HDMI, and PS/2.

Since some Logitech wireless mice support PS/2, one could connect a 486 rig to a crisp digital LCD, use a wireless mouse, and plug in USB flash drives, sound, 10/100 network, NT 4.0, etc. -- all supported. Can make a fairly "modern" machine out of a pre-Pentium chip.

New comment by accrual in "The AI Aesthetic"

accrual — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:23:53 +0000

> where you have desktop AI apps on the left (Claude, Codex, Cursor) and macOS apps from Apple on the right (Finder, Photos, Mail). You can see how the AI apps all have much smaller, thinner icons than their native counterparts.

This would be such a simple, easy fix too. Increase the icon size, increase the stroke width slightly, raise from light grey to white or near-white (inverse for light mode). Then it would look like the system.

New comment by accrual in "Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5"

accrual — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:13:39 +0000

The author's email obfuscation holds up well against small local models too, just for kicks neither Qwen-9B, Gemma-12B, nor GPT-OSS-20B could read it, giving results like "poc.otulptcejorp@otulm".

New comment by accrual in "We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447"

accrual — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:28:44 +0000

It seems the agent was stymied by being bot blocked so often.

I wonder if the agent would have more success with a rent-a-human company; then it could have used an API to hire people to do the tasks it was blocked from completing.

New comment by accrual in "My web version of Mars MIPS, now has built-in C compiler"

accrual — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 16:57:39 +0000

I also noticed the web UI right away, very clean and functional.

New comment by accrual in "My security camera shipped a GitHub admin token in its login page"

accrual — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:45:38 +0000

I also know of a company who does this. The reason in their case is they act as a network concentrator, bridging hundreds of client IP spaces, so this helps them avoid conflicts with their own space without having to NAT constantly. There is still a lot of NAT for the more common ranges.

New comment by accrual in "What Happens When You Eat a Shoe? Health Risks, Safety Concerns and Consequences"

accrual — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:52:49 +0000

I imagine there are similar risks for eating one's hat as well, though perhaps a bit safer since it's not in contact with the ground and contains fewer materials.

So if you're going to make a bet and eat something if you lose - take the hat.

New comment by accrual in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

accrual — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:08:39 +0000

> without ever directly mentioning anything

I think both for attribution reasons and because the average user probably won't care, (or won't care enough for an ad-free tier), they can absolutely get away with messages like: "Hey user! Glad to hear you're cleaning your favorite t-shirt. I recommend trying the new BrandName™ stain remover pen based on dozens of reviews. It's perfect for people who value easy stain removal just like yourself!".