Hacker News: angst_ridden

New comment by angst_ridden in "W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty"

angst_ridden — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:52:03 +0000

Tell me you don't understand the point of Mastodon without telling me you don't understand the point of Mastodon.

New comment by angst_ridden in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

angst_ridden — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:16:25 +0000

Do non-Europeans not let their children outside? Or are you suggesting that non-Europeans make everyone else keep their kids inside out of fear?

New comment by angst_ridden in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

angst_ridden — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:07:08 +0000

You can't control a society without keeping them afraid, so roll that tape of predators, kidnappers, gangs, and drug pushers!

What? A child doing something without adult supervision? Next thing you know they'll start thinking for themselves, asking uncomfortable questions, or looking for forbidden books in the library. Better call the cops and accuse them of vandalism or something.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin"

angst_ridden — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:11:20 +0000

The the tar tar pits.

(La Brea means "the tar").

A bit west of downtown, too, but I'm an annoying pedant.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

angst_ridden — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:31:30 +0000

Ha. My first job in '89 was working for an FFRDC reviewing IBM's Jovial code that was going to "revolutionize ATC" by modernizing everything.

I'm gonna guess that code never went into production. The problem seems easy until you start looking under the hood.

New comment by angst_ridden in "GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple"

angst_ridden — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:37:42 +0000

A lot of the restricted stuff is cargo-cult fear of symbols that could be used in SQL-injection or XSS attacks.

A properly-coded system wouldn't care, but the people who write the rules have read old OWASP documents and in there they saw these symbols were somehow involved in big scary hacks that they didn't understand. So it's easier to ban them.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Yawning has an unexpected influence on the fluid inside your brain"

angst_ridden — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:12:49 +0000

contagi-yawn

New comment by angst_ridden in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

angst_ridden — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:08:06 +0000

It was earlier than the 90s, and came with popular 8-bit CPUs in the 80s. The Z-80 microprocessor could address 64kb (which was 65,536 bytes) on its 16-bit address bus.

Similarly, the 4104 chip was a "4kb x 1 bit" RAM chip and stored 4096 bits. You'd see this in the whole 41xx series, and beyond.

New comment by angst_ridden in "SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation"

angst_ridden — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 01:53:25 +0000

Ignoring all this drama.

But I've always found Paul to be a good guy, who was helpful and honest and provided a great product. Teensy is a great platform, and it's too bad these other players will have a negative impact on it.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Show HN: Stash – Sync Markdown Files with Apple Notes via CLI"

angst_ridden — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:34:04 +0000

How hard would it be to extend this to support bulk export of Apple Notes?

New comment by angst_ridden in "I am just sooo sick of AI prediction content, let's kill it already"

angst_ridden — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:40:02 +0000

Those who know how to fix the messes made by AI today will replace those who don't tomorrow.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?"

angst_ridden — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 19:12:52 +0000

Agreed. Prince also has a lot of good features for headers, footers, page numbering, etc, that make it very powerful.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Imgur's community was in revolt"

angst_ridden — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:11:21 +0000

It's not like Imgur didn't finance with ads. They did that for a long time. Dunno if it paid the bills. The latest kerfuffle is because they were bought and the new owners fired all the moderators in favor of "AI moderation."

New comment by angst_ridden in "Defiant loyalists paid dearly for choosing wrong side in the American Revolution"

angst_ridden — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:02:27 +0000

If you're not part of a group that will suffer under a white-supremecist theocracy they look very similar.

If you're part of a group that will, there is a visible difference.

Picking the lesser evil is actually a good thing if you can reduce harm. It doesn't solve the problem of it being a lesser evil, but it may make space to change that.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Sidekick: Local-first native macOS LLM app"

angst_ridden — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 17:25:39 +0000

Any idea how long Experts should take to import/index data? I pointed an expert at a big directory of source files on a M4 iMac with 32G RAM, and it pinned a CPU at 100% for 24 hours but was not finished.

A single file seems to finish quickly, but folders (even with just a few files) seem to be very slow.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)"

angst_ridden — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:39:06 +0000

Never ask ol' Chesterfield about his fence.

New comment by angst_ridden in "iText PDF Library turns 25"

angst_ridden — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 17:16:45 +0000

They're now owned by "copyright trolls".

They hit up a company I know because their web-crawler found a PDF that someone generated using their library over a decade ago.

https://beemanmuchmore.com/software-licensing-trolls-apryse-...

I'd avoid it.

New comment by angst_ridden in "By the end of today, NASA's workforce will be about 10 percent smaller"

angst_ridden — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:32:45 +0000

Of course, the Space Shuttle (and SLS, for that matter), are bad designs and inefficient not because NASA teams design them that way, but because of the way Congress funds things. They add mandates, and require the contracts to be spread across lots of organizations and states to "budget proof" the projects.

For example, NASA's original space plane was a much better design that the shuttle, but they were forced to make it a joint project with the Air Force to get budget. The different requirements added up, and eventually we got the system we've all seen.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead"

angst_ridden — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 17:30:44 +0000

In the early aughts, I spent a lot of time writing and maintaining Open Source software. I burned out on that because of rude users. I had one guy track me down offline and phone me at all hours to demand that I drop everything and fix a bug for him. When I pointed out that my day job came first because I have to pay bills, he went on an online screed accusing me of holding him hostage unless he paid for fixes and listing my cell number so people could "encourage me to be a better developer."

In those days, I was part of a core development team for a project with a fairly large community. A few bad users and a few bad development team members is all it takes to poison something like that.

Now I barely even contribute to Open Source projects even when I fix them for my own uses.

New comment by angst_ridden in "Bacteria (and their metabolites) and depression"

angst_ridden — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 18:09:05 +0000

There is also a known phenomenon of "starvation euphoria." I don't know at what point of caloric deficit that kicks in, but it probably varies dramatically.