Hacker News: chihuahua

New comment by chihuahua in "Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)"

chihuahua — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:03:42 +0000

It would also be interesting why it was open-sourced now. I assume if they had done the same last year, the resulting loss of revenue would not have destroyed the plucky little $3T upstart.

New comment by chihuahua in "Don't Roll Your Own"

chihuahua — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:00:10 +0000

Totally agree. What do engineers or designers think they're trying to accomplish when they mess with the scroll bar? Or the password field? "We are so sophisticated, the built in behavior is simply not good enough for us!"

Congratulations, now your website is a shitty experience for your users. Well done.

New comment by chihuahua in "Why is Inkwell stuck in review"

chihuahua — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:54:53 +0000

The Monster example is funny. An attorney friend of mine had a job that required him to go after everyone in the world who used the word "Monster", because their client, Monster Cable, thought they owned the word in every sense and context.

I wonder if there was ever an epic Monster sugarwater vs Monster Cable showndown.

New comment by chihuahua in "The AI Backlash Could Get Ugly"

chihuahua — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:46:51 +0000

Almost, but also don't forget the part where "you vill eat ze bugs."

New comment by chihuahua in "Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15"

chihuahua — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:34:57 +0000

I remember working on the Windows Update back-end at Microsoft around 2005, and we had a problem where it would freeze up periodically, and not surprisingly that turned out to be caused by GC. But we noticed it before shipping, and we just tweaked some GC parameters.

So I think it was not a big problem for .Net because it gave you enough control over GC, and because people tested their code before putting it in production.

New comment by chihuahua in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

chihuahua — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:19:33 +0000

That's funny, because half of what I remember reading about Linux is people writing "Forget all these other distros, just go with Ubuntu, it just works!"

New comment by chihuahua in "Why most product tours get skipped"

chihuahua — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:41:53 +0000

Every time some software tool displays one of those "helpful" messages - "We've reshuffled these features, so now they're hidden over here!" I get angry and dismiss the popups as quickly as possible.

I've got a task to accomplish, I wasn't just sitting around with nothing to do.

Imagine you get in your car to drive to work, and the dashboard displays a pop-up that tries to show you the latest feature. No!

New comment by chihuahua in "The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility"

chihuahua — Mon, 04 May 2026 02:05:39 +0000

In fact, just about everything in Windows (not apps, since those can be created by 3rd party developers who may or may not care, but the OS) can be operated by keyboard: login, start menu, settings, even ancient tools like Event Viewer.

New comment by chihuahua in "Southwest Headquarters Tour"

chihuahua — Mon, 04 May 2026 01:51:29 +0000

There's a place in Hamburg called "Chocoversum" that offers a good tour, explaining and demonstrating the whole chocolate making process.

New comment by chihuahua in "Southwest Headquarters Tour"

chihuahua — Mon, 04 May 2026 01:44:07 +0000

I went on the factory tour at the Airbus factory in Hamburg Germany. It's quite well done, very long (2+ hours), and does a good job of explaining why they're flying giant airplane parts from around Europe for assembly, and what goes on inside all those huge buildings. Among other things, you get to go inside the building where they used to assemble the A380, and now there's 4 smaller planes being worked on in the same space that used to fit one A380.

New comment by chihuahua in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

chihuahua — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:58:09 +0000

I've been watching Linux from a safe distance for 25+ years. The one thing that remains constant over the decades is that whenever someone says "You're having this problem? Well what did you expect, you're using X distro. Obviously you should use Y distro, then all your problems will be solved" and then another person comes along and says "No, you idiot, Y distro is completely broken, any sane person would use Z distro!" And if you play that game long enough, you eventually complete the circle.

New comment by chihuahua in "Waymo Drives Off with South Bay Man's Luggage"

chihuahua — Sun, 03 May 2026 02:00:53 +0000

Imagine if the company had self-driving cars, they wouldn't even need "someone", they could just send one of those self-driving cars!

New comment by chihuahua in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

chihuahua — Sat, 02 May 2026 02:11:32 +0000

That requires the ProMax subscription at $2500/month.

New comment by chihuahua in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

chihuahua — Sat, 02 May 2026 02:02:52 +0000

Today, Tesla's so-called full self-driving system is legally classified as SAE Level 2 driver assistance [1]. The human driver must continuously monitor the system, be ready to take over instantly at any time, and is legally responsible for the the car. Tesla is careful to avoid any liability for this by stating this somewhere, perhaps in a 3-point font.

Even if techbros loudly insist that they can take a nap in the back seat, that doesn't change the legal facts. Just like a drunk driver confidently shouting that he's totally fine to drive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot

New comment by chihuahua in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

chihuahua — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:15:53 +0000

A friend who works at Amazon made the same point: "We don't really need robots in the FCs urgently [other than the Kivas], because it turns out you can just pay people $17/hour"

New comment by chihuahua in "Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga"

chihuahua — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:46:01 +0000

That depends on whether Spain is interested in being a serious country with perhaps some technology jobs, or a clown show where the highest priority is Sportsball.

New comment by chihuahua in "Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer 2024"

chihuahua — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:33:45 +0000

I was not as surprised as the author that a 1980s printer doesn't support Unicode. Possibly because I owned a Star SG-10 around 1985 or 86.

New comment by chihuahua in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

chihuahua — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 02:08:04 +0000

None of the app store rules are used as guiding principles for ensuring some higher goal. It's just a bunch of random rules that allow them to ban anything they don't like at any moment in time. Sometimes it's because of the whims of a particular app store reviewer, and sometimes it's to get rid of apps that compete with something Apple wants to do.

New comment by chihuahua in "Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day"

chihuahua — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:01:58 +0000

Not only that, but the milk man also acts like he did them a huge favor. And hides his huge fortune in a tax haven, while relentlessly campaigning for the government to increase the tax burden on those who actually pay taxes.

New comment by chihuahua in "MEMS Array Chip Can Project Video the Size of a Grain of Sand"

chihuahua — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:32:10 +0000

It has to be at least 3 times bigger than this!