Hacker News: akuchling

New comment by akuchling in "A list of fun destinations for telnet"

akuchling — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:30:41 +0000

Or its modern incarnation, Gemini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

New comment by akuchling in "Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team"

akuchling — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:25:35 +0000

Stray thought: adding a library the PR submitter controls would be a good starting point for an XZ/SSH-style supply chain attack: badger & threaten the maintainers to add the dependency, and then sneak something into a future library update.

New comment by akuchling in "The New Kindle Scribes Are Great, but Not Great Enough"

akuchling — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:00:32 +0000

That's not correct; Wired still produces a print edition every other month.

New comment by akuchling in "I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon"

akuchling — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 20:54:30 +0000

From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...

New comment by akuchling in "The "most hated" CSS feature: cos() and sin()"

akuchling — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:56:05 +0000

Sex On Holidays Can Advance Happiness To Outrageous Amplitudes. Not suitable for a high school class, though.

New comment by akuchling in "2025 Pulitzer Prizes"

akuchling — Mon, 05 May 2025 22:44:55 +0000

Who would you cite as having done significant investigative reporting on Youtube? (setting aside the Pulitzers for poetry, music, fiction, non-fiction, none of which would be first published there...)

New comment by akuchling in "The Board Game Industry Is Burning – and It's Their Own Fault"

akuchling — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 14:00:38 +0000

I have rarely read a smugger blog post than this one. While the author isn't wrong about Final Frontier and their ultimately doomed practice of completing Kickstarter N with the funds from Kickstarter N+1, I find it hard to believe that companies like Cephalofair or Stonemaier are unaware of an escape hatch as simple as using a different freight code.

New comment by akuchling in "Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry"

akuchling — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:24:17 +0000

Also Violet Blue's weekly cybersecurity roundups: the most recent is https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-15-126689368 .

New comment by akuchling in "Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)"

akuchling — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:49:14 +0000

Asimov's story The Feeling of Power seems relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

New comment by akuchling in "Foreign visits into the U.S. fell off a cliff in March"

akuchling — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:41:21 +0000

A documentary from PBS's American Experience: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nazi-town-...

New comment by akuchling in "Youth and what happens when it's gone"

akuchling — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 19:28:55 +0000

Tom Lehrer: "It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years!"

New comment by akuchling in "Police arrest apparent leader of 'Zizian' group"

akuchling — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:37:43 +0000

Rebecca Watson wrote about them a week ago: https://skepchick.org/2025/02/the-rationalist-death-cult-spr...

New comment by akuchling in "Pluralsight unilaterally cancelling lifetime licenses"

akuchling — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 12:52:19 +0000

My rule: when buying a 'lifetime' service, assume that equals 10 years and weigh the cost accordingly. A lifetime Nebula subscription is $300, so $30/year. Is that reasonable to you for the service? Then go for it, and be pleasantly surprised if it lasts more then 10 years.

New comment by akuchling in "WordPress CEO quits community Slack after court injunction"

akuchling — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 21:12:57 +0000

You're motte-and-baileying here, since you began with "WordPress has been built by people employed by Matt either via Automattic or via his other entities", and are now writing "WordPress would not be where it is today if it depended on free labour." The second sentence is unquestionably true, but doesn't mean that "every piece of Wordpress was produced by paid labour".

New comment by akuchling in "Xylella Fastidiosa: A crisis brewing in Europe's olive groves"

akuchling — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 14:57:55 +0000

"The Good Virus", by Tom Ireland, is an entertaining book about bacteriophage therapies, their history, and why they're difficult to scale up.

A Personally Significant Bluesky Moment

akuchling — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 02:34:49 +0000

Article URL: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/12/02/a-personally-significant-bluesky-moment/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42302587

Points: 19

# Comments: 4

New comment by akuchling in "PEP 760: No more bare excepts"

akuchling — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 20:37:38 +0000

Erm, Python has accepted semicolons to separate statements since version 0.9.2, released in the fall of 1991.

New comment by akuchling in "Show HN: Retronews – TUI for HN and Lobsters emulating classical Usenet readers"

akuchling — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 14:27:35 +0000

I noticed the README comment about NNTP's limitations. I wonder if a new NNTP-over-HTTP protocol could find enough traction among the text-using crowd, or if ActivityPub could be used to provide a similar feature set efficiently.

New comment by akuchling in "2024's Hugo Award Winners Announced"

akuchling — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 11:23:51 +0000

I think this just shows it's possible to write boring summaries, and log lines are often very non-specific. I read almost all of the Hugo-nominated fiction, and wrote these summaries for my own blogging:

SOME DESPERATE GLORY, by Emily Tesh, is set roughly twenty or so years after the Earth was destroyed by an antimatter bomb, deployed by a galactic civilization called the majoda. Now a small remnant of a few thousand humans live in an authoritarian military encampment, hiding in a small planetoid called Gaea. 17-year-old Valkyr and her brother Magnus are teenagers about to be assigned to their own duties, perhaps in the attack squads or perhaps to the internal divisions such as Oikos (maintenance), Nursery (pregnancy and childrearing), Suntracker (energy production), etc. Valkyr and Magnus are both warbreed, biologically enhanced for combat, so she's horrified to be assigned to Nursery. This leads to her escaping Gaea with an alien prisoner, and then things get complicated and timey-wimey.

... T. Kingfisher's THORNHEDGE is another re-spin of Sleeping Beauty that takes a different angle: our POV character is Toadling, the fairy who now lives in the forest surrounding the castle and spends a lot of her time in toad form. She watches passers-by with suspicion, hoping they don't notice the castle hidden behind the hedge, and then after a few centuries a knight arrives in search of the lost castle. Its approach is reminiscent of Gaiman's story "Snow, Glass, Apples", but brighter ...

"The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer, is set in St Paul MN after an unspecified disaster and follows a neighbourhood as they self-organize, share resources, and face different obstacles over the course of a year.

New comment by akuchling in "I run a software book club"

akuchling — Fri, 31 May 2024 15:20:43 +0000

In the book club I run, we voted on books for a few years. I kept hoping the non-attending voters would choose the right books to bring them to a meeting, but the choices sometimes felt aspirational like that -- people voted for a heavy title but still didn't attend, and it was irritating to be reading dull books chosen by someone else.

So we switched to making selections in person at a session; if you can't come, you can submit suggestions, but the people who actually bother to show up make the final choices. We choose a monthly book for a whole year at a time, so we just do an hour-long discussion in December and pick 11 titles. In a monthly group you could probably do it in 10 minutes after the regular discussion.

Also, as the organizer feel free to put your thumb on the scale: pick 3 books you'd personally like to read, and ask them to choose one. You may want to be completely democratic about it, but people often appreciate someone else reading reviews and limiting the choices (avoiding the paradox of choice).