Hacker News: chris_j

New comment by chris_j in "Answering "why do you want to relocate?" during interviews"

chris_j — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:58:46 +0000

I take a different view. For a lot of candidates that I've interviewed in recent years, they made the decision to move to London, and _then_ decided to apply to us. Some of the best engineers that I've worked with have joined that way, and many of them stuck around for a long time. Of course the candidate should show an interest in the company. But frankly, if you're an employer in a place that people want to move to, that's something that you should be taking advantage of, not complaining when the candidate is honest about it.

Mythos Discovered a CVE in Its Training Data – and That's Still Worrying

chris_j — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:03:18 +0000

Article URL: https://rival.security/posts/mythos-discovered-a-cve-already-in-its-training-data---and-thats-still-worrying

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091882

Points: 14

# Comments: 0

New comment by chris_j in "What British people mean when they say 'sorry'"

chris_j — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:12:14 +0000

Indeed. I've lived in the UK my entire life, and I've only ever heard "sorry" used to mean "excuse me, can I get past please?" in and around London. It still sounds weird to me. Where I come from (further from London), you'd just say "excuse me".

New comment by chris_j in "Using fewer syllables to express numbers"

chris_j — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 11:35:24 +0000

In my father's accent/dialect (South Wales), the number seven is monosyllabic: it sounds more like "sevn" (with the v pronounced quite softly). The number "eleven" is similarly monosyllabic, and sounds more like "levn". I often use this when counting to a rhythm. Shame the numbers from thirteen onwards do have more than one syllable.

New comment by chris_j in "Make the most of compiled C loops on the 68000"

chris_j — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 18:59:21 +0000

One thing that I heard from folks who do development for retro Atari platforms is that the 68k support in GCC has been getting worse as time has gone on, and it's very difficult to get the maintainers to accept patches to improve it, since 68k is not exactly widely used at this point.

Specifically, I heard that the 68k backend keeps getting worse, whilst the front-end keeps getting better. So choosing a GCC version is a case of examining the tradeoffs between getting better AST-level optimisations from a newer version, or more optimised assembly language output from an earlier version.

I imagine GCC 6.5 probably has a backend that makes better use of the 68k chip than the GCC 11.4 that ngdevkit uses (such as knowing when to use dbra) but is probably worse in other ways due to an older and less capable frontend.

New comment by chris_j in "What went wrong for Yahoo"

chris_j — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 21:16:14 +0000

What happened? Did they stop using FreeBSD? Did they continue to use it but jsut stop contributing?

New comment by chris_j in "UK investigation says Apple and Google are 'holding back' mobile browsers"

chris_j — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 14:53:15 +0000

I'm not familiar with the iOS 20. What is meant by "non-notarized websites" and what did Apple do?

New comment by chris_j in "Use YouTube to improve your English pronunciation"

chris_j — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 19:56:43 +0000

My favourite example of this sort of redundancy is the fact that there are numerous rivers in England called the River Avon. Avon is believed to come from the Proto-Brythonic word "aβon" [0], meaning "river".

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Brythoni...

New comment by chris_j in "Cortex X2: ARM aims high"

chris_j — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 20:38:17 +0000

What differences do you think you'd see if ARM directly sold a silicon product?

New comment by chris_j in "The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed the way we use language"

chris_j — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 16:40:50 +0000

What does "AEism" mean in this context?

New comment by chris_j in "The Ur-Quan Masters: Open-source remake of Star Control II"

chris_j — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 18:43:45 +0000

I played Ur-Quan Masters for the first time earlier this year. Despite its age, I found it to be one of the finest games that I'd ever played. The story, in particular, is just perfect, and has just the right mixture of seriousness and comedy, very much in the same style as another (even older) classic, Starflight. Being able to build the game from source and read through the code was a nice bonus.

I highly recommend checking it out; if you can get over the rather dated graphics and gameplay mechanics then you'll find this to be a real gem.

New comment by chris_j in "A history of Ireland in 100 goodbyes"

chris_j — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 10:06:26 +0000

> I look at welsh and still go wtf lol

Ironically, Welsh is a much simpler language than Irish, and easier to learn for an English speaker. Almost completely regular orthography, much simpler grammar (with no grammatical cases). But, simple or not, the grammar and orthography are very different to English.

Do you mind if I ask how you learned Irish? It's a language that I would like to learn a little of at some point, but so far I've been too daunted to attempt it.

New comment by chris_j in "Testing PCIe on the Raspberry Pi 5"

chris_j — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 12:58:31 +0000

What is it that makes USB perfectly fine for spinning rust but not quite ideal for SSDs?

I've been booting a couple of Pi 4s from USB SSDs for a while, in order to avoid relying on SD cards, but I'm not really familiar with what all of the implications of this are.

New comment by chris_j in "Is Venus in some way tidally locked to Earth? (2020)"

chris_j — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 10:38:55 +0000

What is it that would make big moons of terrestrial inner planets vanishingly rare?

And how likely is it that a planet without a large moon would fail to retain a short day? Mars has a day of similar length to that of Earth (though no magnetic field worth speaking of...).

New comment by chris_j in "British Gas starts to turn off Hive smart home devices forever"

chris_j — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:58:14 +0000

What is meant by 'a bit "FC"' in this context?

New comment by chris_j in "Cool, but obscure X11 tools (2019)"

chris_j — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 03:15:33 +0000

Many thanks. I did use gedit for a while, though I confess I never became as fond of it as I had been of NEdit. It does tick the "uncomplicated text editor" box though.

New comment by chris_j in "Cool, but obscure X11 tools (2019)"

chris_j — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 20:06:52 +0000

NEdit was my main editor for a few years after I started using UNIX in the late 90s but couldn't get the hang of vi and emacs. I have fond memories of using it and I'm pretty sad that it was so tied to Motif that it never developed further. I used it on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and even Windows (via Cygwin). I kind of miss using an editor so uncomplicated.

New comment by chris_j in "Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company"

chris_j — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 17:18:21 +0000

Many thanks, makes sense now.

New comment by chris_j in "Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company"

chris_j — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 15:16:36 +0000

What does SSBC mean in this context?

New comment by chris_j in "Ask HN: What to do when feeling low-energy/tired during the day?"

chris_j — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 07:49:54 +0000

What does "T levels" mean in this context?