Hacker News: billnad

New comment by billnad in "What Being Ripped Off Taught Me"

billnad — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:53:31 +0000

Yes, I guess also trust the situation when it looks completely wrong. your gut is not lying when it sees that as well

New comment by billnad in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

billnad — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:56:27 +0000

Also in BC and I agree completel;y. The one hour offset seems strange. The trouble with any time change is that I still wake up a couple hours before the sun in the morning in the Winter in Vernon and in the Summer I couldn't get up early enough for a sunrise. I try to get out as much as often during the day in the Winter as I am sure I am starved for the Sun in the Winter. Was much tougher in Calgary

New comment by billnad in "Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026"

billnad — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:38:11 +0000

Back when I was first learning about Tech (early 2000's), I installed a mail server at home and configured it all wrong so I gave up on it. A few days later I noticed that my drive was getting full and didn't know why. This is how I learned about a honeypot, I had left it running, someone had used it for sending spam but since I screwed up the setup all the spam was stuck on my computer with nowhere to route out.

Last time I setup a mail server

New comment by billnad in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

billnad — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:04:41 +0000

Gemini 3 Flash gave me a fun answer!

Since your goal is to wash the car, you should definitely drive it there.

As an IT guy, you can think of it like this: walking to the car wash is like remoting into a server to run a script, but forgetting to include the actual data payload. You'll arrive at the destination, but you won't have the "hardware" present to perform the intended task!

Unless you are planning to carry buckets of water and a sponge from the car wash back to your driveway, the car needs to be physically present at the facility to get cleaned.

Drive the 50 meters—it'll be the shortest commute of your day!

New comment by billnad in "Nuclear elements detected in West Philippine Sea"

billnad — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 14:28:40 +0000

The part of the article that caught me was that European Companies used to just drain nuclear waste (not sure what type), into the rivers in China and they would eventually flow into the sea

New comment by billnad in "X5.1 solar flare, G4 geomagnetic storm watch"

billnad — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:20:47 +0000

I also use https://spaceweathernews.com/ Lots of data in there for us to see the sources and effects

New comment by billnad in "Live Stream from the Namib Desert"

billnad — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 16:53:45 +0000

Reminds me of Africam. Back in the day my kids were very young and we would check it out every morning to see if we could see animals live at the watering holes, probably back around 2005-2008 or so?

New comment by billnad in "The Dire Wolf Is Back"

billnad — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:44:06 +0000

So disappointed that this isn't an article about the Grateful Dead

New comment by billnad in "Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles"

billnad — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 17:30:31 +0000

This makes me think of people that change two lanes very quickly to be able to turn at that next corner. We all see them, they piss us off through their bad planning but in the end I don't think an autonomous vehicle would ever try this, depending on programming of course.

Would also be nice to see all incidents, not just injury incidents to see what kind of unexpected "mistakes" these cars are making

New comment by billnad in "The teenager who lives like it's the 1940s"

billnad — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 23:01:18 +0000

I do remember having a Blackberry and my IT Manager at the time thought it was crazy to have to reply to emails after work. So I guess there is quite a bit of freedom lost