Hacker News: bruckie

New comment by bruckie in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

bruckie — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:17:41 +0000

It helps a bit more than you imply, though: if you can launch from a higher altitude, you have less atmosphere to plow through. That lets you use more of your propellant to speed up instead of to push air out of the way.

New comment by bruckie in "Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?"

bruckie — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:42:25 +0000

I think the hard part for me about doing something like that is not forgoing those things, it's figuring out what to eat instead. Any tips?

New comment by bruckie in "Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'"

bruckie — Sat, 16 May 2026 13:34:56 +0000

Less of a possibility than in a similar combustion vehicle, though, since EVs tend to be heavier.

New comment by bruckie in "A History of IDEs at Google"

bruckie — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:12:53 +0000

The first version was part of Code Search proper, and wasn't super useful for much more than just typo fixes, since it was essentially just a textarea edit box. That was eventually deprecated and replaced with a button that did the same thing, but opened in Cider instead.

New comment by bruckie in "Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight"

bruckie — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:46:49 +0000

Very true. It was still hundreds of millions of lines of first party code a decade ago, and could easily be over a billion at this point.

New comment by bruckie in "Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight"

bruckie — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:34:36 +0000

Only 25 million? :) Google had billions a decade ago...

https://research.google/pubs/why-google-stores-billions-of-l...

New comment by bruckie in "Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)"

bruckie — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:53:59 +0000

I'm curious: have you done a (single or double) blind test where you prepare dishes (selected at random) with or without MSG/aspartame/yeast extract and record the effects?

To be clear: not saying you should, just wondering how you came the conclusion that those ingredients are the trigger.

New comment by bruckie in "Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023)"

bruckie — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 01:52:08 +0000

A recent Atlantic article [1] by someone involved in the Mississippi reforms gives a good outline of what they did/are doing. It includes science-based reading curriculum and holding kids back (as you mentioned). It also includes other forms of accountability, including parental notification and empowering the state to force recalcitrant districts to improve. One notable quote:

"The law allowed the state to abolish these districts’ local school board and remove the local superintendent in favor of a state appointee who would report directly to the state board of education. A later amendment provided that removed local-school-board members would be barred from serving in that capacity again."

Politically unpopular in some cases (which local jurisdiction wants the state coming in and replacing your local school board?), but seems to be pretty effective.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/mississippi-educat... (gift link)

New comment by bruckie in "Open Source Isn't Dead"

bruckie — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:13:14 +0000

AI makes a great scapegoat. Need to lay off people? "AI." Need to switch to closed source? "AI."

New comment by bruckie in "Elevated errors on Claude.ai, API, Claude Code"

bruckie — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:08:16 +0000

Are you sure it was fake scarcity for Gmail? IIRC they did it because they were worried about systems falling over if it grew too fast, and discovered the marketing benefits as a side effect.

New comment by bruckie in "Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them"

bruckie — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:44:01 +0000

> Do we, really?

Yes, or pretty close to it. What we don't know how to do (AFAIK) is do it at a cost that would be acceptable for most software. So yes, it mostly gets done for (components of) planes, spacecraft, medical devices, etc.

Totally agreed that most software is a morass of bugs. But giving examples of buggy software doesn't provide any information about whether we know how to make non-buggy software. It only provides information about whether we know how to make buggy software—spoiler alert: we do :)

New comment by bruckie in "Lunar Flyby"

bruckie — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:27:50 +0000

Same thing (for now, at least). The U.S. has only defaulted a handful of times, none that I'm aware of since 1971.

New comment by bruckie in "France pulls last gold held in US"

bruckie — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:19:48 +0000

The Hope diamond was famously transported by... USPS.

"The postage cost him $2.44, plus $142.85 for $1 million worth of insurance." —https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/hope-diamon...

New comment by bruckie in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

bruckie — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:48:08 +0000

OnShape is pretty approachable, and has lots of good tutorial videos. They offer free accounts for non-commercial use with the caveat that all of your documents must be public.

If you haven't tried FreeCAD recently, it's gotten a lot better in the past couple of years. It seems to have hit escape velocity, so to speak, and is improving rapidly in a way it hadn't for a long time.

New comment by bruckie in "Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)"

bruckie — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:43:07 +0000

My kids do this all the time. They also use the touchscreen in conventional laptop configuration (not folded-flat tablet mode) on their Chromebooks all the time. It's bizarre to me. I'm always trying to get them to use the keyboard, but they don't care. Example: enter password on the keyboard, then tap the log in button on the screen with their finger, rather than just pressing enter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New comment by bruckie in "AirPods Max 2"

bruckie — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:43:11 +0000

AirPods Pro 2 and 3 can amplify ambient sound. Sinus/ear infections cause one of my kids to temporarily not be able to hear well due to fluid in the ear, and AirPods help.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/120992

New comment by bruckie in "$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor"

bruckie — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:26:06 +0000

The funny thing is, at least as I understand it, ITAR only applies to things produced in the United States. As example, you can't buy very good FLIR IR cameras in the United States without a lot of paperwork, but you can trivially buy much better (higher resolution, faster frame rate) and cheaper IR cameras that are produced in China.

New comment by bruckie in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."

bruckie — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:26:20 +0000

From his description, it sounded like this was more of #1. He cared a lot about the topic he was writing about, and has high standards for himself, so it's very likely that he would have considered and rejected poor suggestions.

I have mixed feeling about it. On the one hand, you're right: carefully considering suggestions can be a learning opportunity. On the other hand, approval is easier than generation, and I suspect that without flexing the "come up with it from scratch" muscle frequently, that his mind won't develop as much.

New comment by bruckie in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

bruckie — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:35:48 +0000

My elementary school kid came home yesterday and showed me a piece of writing that he was really proud of. It seemed more sophisticated than his typical writing (like, for example, it used the word "sophisticated"). He can be precocious and reads a ton, though, so it was still plausible that he wrote it. I asked him some questions about the writing process to try to tease out what happened, and he said (seemingly credibly) that he hadn't copied it from anywhere or referenced anything. He also said he didn't use any AI tools. After further discussion, I found out that Google Docs Smart Compose (suggested-next-few-words feature) is enabled by default on his school-issued Chromebook, and he had been using it. The structure of the writing was all his, but he said he sometimes used the Smart Compose suggestions (and sometimes didn't). He liked a lot of the suggestions and pressed tab to accept them, which probably bumped up the word choice by several grade levels in some places.

So yeah, it can change the character of your writing, even if it's just relatively subtle nudges here or there.

edit: we suggested that he disable that feature to help him learn to write independently, and he happily agreed.

New comment by bruckie in "The Hydrogen Truck Problem Isn't the Truck"

bruckie — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:03:56 +0000

The current market price is based on current supply and demand. Splitting water to create enough hydrogen for non-trivial fraction of the transportation sector would generate an enormous amount of oxygen. The price of oxygen would likely tank in that situation.