Hacker News: couchand

New comment by couchand in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

couchand — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:20:14 +0000

I can tell you as a resident of New York City that the negative effect of the automobile on the built environment is very much present here as well.

New comment by couchand in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

couchand — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:57:42 +0000

If your implication is that stencil art does not take effort then perhaps you may not fully appreciate Banksy. Works like Gaza Kitty or Flower Thrower don’t just appear haphazardly without effort.

CBP Facility Codes Sure Seem to Have Leaked via Online Flashcards

couchand — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:13:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-facility-codes-sure-seem-to-have-leaked-via-online-flashcards/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634073

Points: 12

# Comments: 1

New comment by couchand in "Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm"

couchand — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:49:31 +0000

Fortunately they do, and in fact the article makes that clear. +1 for reading to the end of the paragraph that was quoted.

New comment by couchand in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

couchand — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:58:06 +0000

I think camp 1 would rather see ten useless things than one useful thing.

New comment by couchand in "Ghost artists on Spotify"

couchand — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 15:05:57 +0000

Interesting that your first counterexample is Charlie Parker. I've been listening to a lot of Phil Schaap's Bird Flight recently (https://www.philschaapjazz.com/sections/bird-flight). It's funny to see how many of the episodes are Phil describing a recording session more or less like this:

"The Bird showed up two hours late to a three and a half hour recording session. They recorded one take each of six tracks, but the recording engineer was surprised when they started so he missed the first half of the first track. And that's how we got the five tracks on ."

New comment by couchand in "Traits are a local maximum"

couchand — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 05:55:18 +0000

FWIW It's not at all clear to me how this requirement would be implemented in practice: "This syntax would explicitly be limited to orphan implementations."

New comment by couchand in "Avremu: An 8-Bit AVR Microcontroller Simulator Written in LaTeX"

couchand — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:39:16 +0000

The classic AVR instruction set does not include multiplication, you have to be targeting a device that supports AVRe+, such as an ATmega rather than an ATtiny. Try adding -mmcu=avr5 and it will show up pretty quick. Example: https://godbolt.org/z/x951M8fn8

Edit: nice work author, I love it!

New comment by couchand in "Excerpts from a conversation about personal information management"

couchand — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:03:31 +0000

What an incredibly on-the-nose anecdote, I love it!

The term of art for this strategy is "size to the horizon". Imagine you're looking across an open plain. The trees and rocks closer to you are bigger and you can make out more detail. The ones further away are still abstract.

You have to know exactly what to do with the things right in front of you, but you have to keep only a general awareness of that which is distant.

New comment by couchand in "Translation of Rust's core and alloc crates to Coq for formal verification"

couchand — Wed, 15 May 2024 15:18:38 +0000

I apologize if my comment came off as snark. Your comment was nothing but pasted text which ommitted relevant detail, so it was not clear what the intent was. In context, to me, it did not seem to be illuminating. It actually seemed to be introducing confusion where there previously was none.

Data races are not possible in safe Rust. Race conditions are. The distinction is made clear in the Nomicon article, but commenters here are really muddying the waters...

New comment by couchand in "Translation of Rust's core and alloc crates to Coq for formal verification"

couchand — Wed, 15 May 2024 15:14:52 +0000

That's decidedly not a data race, however.

New comment by couchand in "Translation of Rust's core and alloc crates to Coq for formal verification"

couchand — Wed, 15 May 2024 13:11:55 +0000

On the one hand, we like to encourage learning here. On the other, we prefer not to copy-paste a bunch of possibly-irrelevant content. Well, forgive me for pasting in a StackOverflow answer that may be relevant here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11276259/are-data-races-...

> Are "data races" and "race condition" actually the same thing in context of concurrent programming

> No, they are not the same thing. They are not a subset of one another. They are also neither the necessary, nor the sufficient condition for one another.

The really curious thing here is that the Nomicon page also describes this distinction in great detail.

New comment by couchand in "Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?"

couchand — Mon, 13 May 2024 11:35:55 +0000

Test code is code. It's as much of a burden as every other piece of code you are troubled with, so you must make it count. If you're finding it repetitive and formulaic, take that opportunity to identify the next refactoring.

Just churning out more near copies is not a good answer.

New comment by couchand in "Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?"

couchand — Mon, 13 May 2024 11:33:09 +0000

This. The right way to structure database access is a result type per tuple, not an object type per table.

New comment by couchand in "Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?"

couchand — Mon, 13 May 2024 11:28:12 +0000

Wouldn't standard ANSI SQL's information_schema be sufficient to build such an interface? I'm struggling to see how an ORM is necessary.

New comment by couchand in "Serial to Parallel Port Converter"

couchand — Fri, 10 May 2024 21:57:23 +0000

Curious, MIDI is a decidedly digital protocol...

New comment by couchand in "ESP32 Drum Synth Machine"

couchand — Fri, 10 May 2024 13:19:19 +0000

Lots of folks are doing front panels in PCB these days. They're precision and sturdy and you already have the workflow set up.

New comment by couchand in "Ointers: A library for representing pointers where bits have been stolen (2021)"

couchand — Wed, 08 May 2024 21:42:46 +0000

My guideline with pointer tricks is: if you're not just masking bits it's too complicated for real use.

New comment by couchand in "Ointers: A library for representing pointers where bits have been stolen (2021)"

couchand — Wed, 08 May 2024 12:38:54 +0000

Oh that's frightening they shift the entire pointer by the alignment

New comment by couchand in "Ointers: A library for representing pointers where bits have been stolen (2021)"

couchand — Wed, 08 May 2024 11:45:24 +0000

I see that in the readme but I don't see where that's handled in the bitmasking. It appears to be universally masking high-order bits here: https://github.com/irrustible/ointers/blob/1961f75bbb9818d72...