Hacker News: altacc

New comment by altacc in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

altacc — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:27:42 +0000

This is one of the nice things about the juggling community: it's one of the open, sharing communities where people are willing to freely share and teach. It's no cost/low cost entry. The juggling community has been a really important part of my life, so I see it as giving back to teach others.

New comment by altacc in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

altacc — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:12:01 +0000

Go to a juggling club and you'll find that a Venn diagram of juggler, nerd & technology has a lot of overlap.

New comment by altacc in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

altacc — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:35:11 +0000

In the case of Israel, destabilisation and creation of a region of neighbouring failed states is absolutely it's aim as that is an exploitable situation. Iran was the only real opposition to Israel's long term colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing and more recent outright genocide. It was also opposed to Israel's existence and funded terrorism, etc... (whatever caveat the reader needs to understand I'm not a cheerleader of Iran) but historically it is not alone in this and is not the only country ever to be hostile to another. The majority of such situations resolve over time through diplomacy and reason, and yes, significant amounts of violence but it is rare to resolve such an international dispute purely through war. Israel, its government and military have long been clear that they don't seek a status quo, but a chaotic forever war they use to justify their literal bulldozing of surrounding nations.

New comment by altacc in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

altacc — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:24:47 +0000

This is nothing new, history repeats. Prior to the invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq there were numerous regional experts warning that the result would be chaos, failed states, a rise in extremism and long term instability in the region and indirectly the rest of the world. Millions of us marched through the streets, asking our governments not to make what was obviously a massive mistake.

The US & UK governments were convinced that they would recreate the liberation of Europe, with cheering crowds, flowers in their hair, Mission Accomplished banners and then simply totally dismantle a government & civil service and recreate a new one to their favour. Groupthink is a powerful thing.

New comment by altacc in "Mystery jump in oil trading ahead of Trump post draws scrutiny"

altacc — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:07:55 +0000

Elections are already being used for collectively applying "justice", just not the type that stops corruption. Instead it's right wing mob "justice" against the woke and immigrants and all the liberal tears are the prize the braying mob that voted for autocracy wants and they're happy to accept corruption as long as they don't think it affects them. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all types we've tried.

New comment by altacc in "How to Spot a Liar: Kate White on the Techniques of Deception in Mysteries"

altacc — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:38:49 +0000

Good liars are able to avoid these tells and I reckon no system is perfect but the last point, trusting your gut, is probably the best as it combines a lot of conscious and subconscious observations into a judgement. I'm often unable to articulate why I trust or distrust a person but feedback from my close friends is that they'll look to me for signs about a new person we meet. You do also need to be willing to constant reevaluate and change opinions as more evidence is gathered.

New comment by altacc in "Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?"

altacc — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 07:55:54 +0000

Free (for now). Introducing or raising costs for a previously free or cheap service is normal practice for start ups.

New comment by altacc in "Bus travel from Lima to Rio de Janeiro"

altacc — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 07:41:38 +0000

Now I've got small children, we fly instead of taking the long bus, train or boat journey. But the long bus, train and boat journeys and the places we experienced along the way are half of what my wife and I talk about when we reminisce about our travels. In the UK at least we call it "going travelling", which to me acknowledges that the actual travelling is important, not just destination hopping.

New comment by altacc in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

altacc — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:24:43 +0000

Trump/Miller/whomever don't need to be actively involved in every decision. They have defined an approach to strong arm problem solving and weaponisation of the government that anyone that works for them is implicitly allowed to use. The supposed controls that were meant to prevent this have crumbled or aligned.

New comment by altacc in "Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better"

altacc — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 08:38:11 +0000

Hmm, I'm in 2 minds about this. The best online communities I've been in have been small & come across more human and the thought of "this is a person you're replying to" was innate. On larger forums a nudge towards that humanity might be good but I think this at times goes beyond a nudge and is more of an opinionated telling-off, which a lot of people aren't going to react so well to.

I wonder how this would be as a light touch plugin for the browser that would review a comment in context and possibly help test and refine the content.

New comment by altacc in "Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums"

altacc — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:01:46 +0000

I'm obviously wondering which company this is but understand the anonymity. I have a LIDAR vacuum to avoid cameras and from connecting to its debug socket could see the point cloud enough to know that it was very granular.

New comment by altacc in "27-year-old Apple iBooks can connect to Wi-Fi and download official updates"

altacc — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:14:18 +0000

I'd be more impressed if this wasn't the same Apple that's unable to keep Screen Time compatible across the latest minor iOS versions.

Downloading updates seems fairly trivial. Host the file, maintain compatibility for the request/response from the OS, which might not have changed much over time, and whilst API versioning is annoying it isn't super difficult for a small API.

New comment by altacc in "Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass"

altacc — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:06:26 +0000

Yep, it sounds like it was written to be falsely reassuring and it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Facial recognition works on data, not just images, such as the ratios between features, jawline, cheek structure, etc... Most people won't spot this.

New comment by altacc in "Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists"

altacc — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:59:52 +0000

What you describe is not a real choice that is being made. The unemployed in Ireland get unemployment benefits, so this isn't favouring one over the other. The Artist's UBI is not enough to live on (neither are most countries' unemployment benefits to be fair) but in general a salesperson or carpet installer when in employment will make a decent living, whereas artists don't. Society tends to under value the arts and overvalue commerce (and any free market arguments about this consistently fail to reflect reality), and this address some of the balance. They did an analysis (probably generously) and found that there would actually be an ROI for this UBI.

New comment by altacc in "Why more companies are recognizing the benefits of keeping older employees"

altacc — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 08:24:04 +0000

Almost every young developer joins the enterprise I work at and spends the first 6 months ranting about how bad everything is and how we could do things so much better with xyz or whatever. We wait, we educate, we leave them to come to the understanding that when you're in a business with billions in turnover, millions of customers, thousands of employees and hundreds of developers, what you learnt at university or building small side projects isn't enough to immediately judge and make changes. After about a year the good developers are proactively contributing good ideas that will actually work. It's not an environment that fits everyone, so we're fine when people decide to leave for somewhere smaller.

New comment by altacc in "How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital"

altacc — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 08:37:04 +0000

I think you're right that the ambitions in Europe are smaller and I'd say more likely healthier for those involved and maybe the world in general. I have spent some time working in a start up hub in Scandinavia and there was the usual talk of innovation, disruption, work hard, etc... but by 4:30 the offices were empty and people had gone home to their families. Work life balance still came first.

New comment by altacc in "Congress wants to hand your parenting to big tech"

altacc — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 22:41:14 +0000

The problem with "let the parents decide" is that so many parents take the option of least resistance and currently that's a terrible option. From what I see of my childrens' peers, it's not parents are deciding to let their children run wild on social media, it's that they don't even think about it, they just hand over a phone or tablet, often with their own login, and don't think much about it.

One way of solving this is if the default was everything locked down, then effort needed to give the children anything, forcing parents to consider each permission.

However I also see that parents are addicted to their devices and social media, so don't see the problem.

New comment by altacc in "Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK"

altacc — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:53:08 +0000

I moved from the UK to Scandinavia, where there is a federated ID (BankID) that you use to access pretty much everything and it removes all this complexity that the UK has. I can't imagine life without such an easy system. One of the downsides is that there's a bit of a catch-22 to getting an ID in the first place but once you've managed that it's done.

A key difference is the relationship between the people and the government and the motivation behind creating a federated ID. There's definitely an element of governmental monitoring to the Scandinavian model but the relationship with the government is less adversarial than in the UK.

New comment by altacc in "I charged $18k for a Static HTML Page (2019)"

altacc — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 07:54:39 +0000

The inefficiency of large companies is widespread. In many there are layers of managers whose jobs are little more than to attend meetings with each other and tickle down the bare minimum of requirements to delivery teams. So it's no surprise that they can be willingly blind to the inefficiency of the process that guarantees their job.

My story of being paid to do nothing involves spending a month waiting for my own PC and login details at a large corp, being billed at $1200+ a day. It was mind-numbing and demotivating and I soon left.

Hopefully these experiences made me a better manager when I started hiring contractors. I always had a computer & user account ready, scripted any local environments needed and work lined up, plus never asking them to start first thing in the morning due to my experience of waiting around in a new office whilst waiting for everybody I needed to arrive and have their first coffee. Just because somebody is a temporary contractor doesn't mean you can't show them some respect for their time & profession.

New comment by altacc in "50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player"

altacc — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 11:09:32 +0000

A couple of decades ago most people I knew were spending considerable time thinking about the best folder structure to use to manage large collections of MP3s (and then making them available on Limewire). Then you'd move over selections to your or someone else's MP3 player.

One great product of this among my friends was the MP3 mix tape swap parties. You'd select a bunch of your favourite songs and put them on a thumb drive, then go hang out at a friend's house. All the MP3s would be put together, virus checked and then copied to everyone's thumb drives. It was a great way of discovering new music.