Hacker News: dachris

New comment by dachris in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

dachris — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 05:24:17 +0000

For me that was already with the original DALL-e. It was utterly mindblowing, I was like "oh shit, AI is here".

"Draw a picture of a unicorn on the moon". And it did that. The model really "understood" what you told it.

After that, it was "oh, AI improved, again".

The farewell to Stack Overflow is not welcome. So many kind people shared their knowledge there. I answered a few questions as well, so not just a lurker.

It's a prelude of what's has already begun - the collapse of human-to-human communication.

New comment by dachris in "Hong Kong police can now demand phone passwords under new security rules"

dachris — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:04:42 +0000

Veracrypt e.g. has had this for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability

New comment by dachris in "Daily Driving GrapheneOS"

dachris — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:45:07 +0000

I'm considering using a second phone for increased security. As you say, only put banking apps on them, leave it at home.

The larger population is getting pushed towards banking on the phone, and on top of that, many people don't own a PC/Laptop anymore.

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

dachris — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 05:50:19 +0000

In Western Europe this is also quite pronounced.

In Białystok, Poland, solar noon is at 11:39. In Vigo, Spain, it's at 13:46, .

Being in favor of all-year DST (more sun in the evening is just nice), nice to see that those lucky Spaniards already have it and then some.

Whatever the preference for the permanent time, abandoning the switching should be advocated by the software industry. I've yet to work at a company where there are no bugs related to switching the clock. Those bugs have ranged from harmless to pretty severe.

New comment by dachris in "Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser"

dachris — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 06:17:01 +0000

Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked.

So simple, so easy. Those were the days.

New comment by dachris in "Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]"

dachris — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:02:35 +0000

It looks like the difference between the Boston Dynamics robots 2016 vs 2021

The Spot dog (which inspired the Black Mirror "Metalhead" episode) in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng

Atlas doing backflips in 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FByY3tSx2Ak

So 5 years of progress within a year.

New comment by dachris in "Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?"

dachris — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 08:01:23 +0000

The good thing is, with AI scraping everything today, it will be incorporated into the AI - so your content will continue to exist in the weights.

In that way, your thoughts will live on ...

New comment by dachris in "Shipmap.org"

dachris — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:48:07 +0000

My favorite: near the Bering strait you can see the distortion of the map - obviously ships go in straight lines on a sphere but in a curve on the map.

New comment by dachris in "Eat Real Food"

dachris — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:35:31 +0000

As you say, in moderation. That also applies to red meat, considering the adverse effects listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat

New comment by dachris in "Show HN: Minimalist editor that lives in browser, stores everything in the URL"

dachris — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 10:48:10 +0000

The compression is nice, you can fit very long (low-entropy ;-) messages in there - this one is 9k characters:

https://textarea.my/#7cGBAAAAAMMgzfmTHORVAQAAAAAAAADAuwE=

New comment by dachris in "Tell HN: Merry Christmas"

dachris — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 08:18:51 +0000

Very nice, the introduction to recursion in university (which was around that time of the year) was drawing a fractal Christmas tree

New comment by dachris in "I'm returning my Framework 16"

dachris — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 05:41:25 +0000

Writing this on a first-gen 13 DIY, so it's already a bit dated. I've already added additional RAM and swapped in a much bigger SSD (really underestimated how much space you need if you heavily use docker and VMs).

The 1st year was a bit bumpy with 4k monitors over a USB-C hub being somewhat flaky. Ever since a clean Ubuntu reinstall, I'm very happy, no complaints whatsoever.

Sure, it costs more, but the combo of perfectly running Linux, giving me the piece of mind of repairability and easy upgrades for me justifies a higher price.

On the other hand, I'm not willing to pay the kind of premium you have with Apple products, where for incremental steps in more RAM or SSD you pay a multiple of the off-the-shelf price of the added space.

New comment by dachris in "YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same"

dachris — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:26:11 +0000

Lots of normal people don't think it's fine.

Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).

Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.

New comment by dachris in "Koralm Railway"

dachris — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:06:43 +0000

Its sister tunnel - the Semmering Base Tunnel [0] - is scheduled to be completed in 2030. These two combined greatly reduce the travel time from Vienna to Graz and Klagenfurt (combined 1h 15m time saving).

You don't hear that much about great engineering projects today, yet it's still an incredible feat to build those.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel

New comment by dachris in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

dachris — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:37:10 +0000

Good to see that there's new episodes and they've still got their mojo - putting it on my list.

New comment by dachris in "Using LLMs at Oxide"

dachris — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 05:40:15 +0000

For the other non-native speakers wondering, "fly" means your trouser zipper.

He surely has his fly closed when cutting through the hype with reflection and pragmatism (without the extreme positions on both sides often seen).

New comment by dachris in "Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected"

dachris — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 06:36:26 +0000

You'd be surprised how many people run 'npm i' in their CI. I've seen this on multiple occasions.

'npm ci' is some mitigation, but doesn't protect against getting hit when running 'npm i(nstall)' during development.

New comment by dachris in "Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data"

dachris — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 06:31:06 +0000

Would an airtight container and liberal addition of dessicants help?

New comment by dachris in "First kiss dates back 21M years"

dachris — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 15:11:05 +0000

Really funny on a farm when you see young calves "kissing" i.e. stick their noses/mouths together and lick each other's noses.

New comment by dachris in "Metabolic and cellular differences between sedentary and active individuals"

dachris — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 07:22:29 +0000

The manual for a human body says several hours of exercise per day.

Children try to follow it, but it's being made hard for them, and by the time you're an adult most have learned to forget the natural instincts for movement and how much fun you can have doing physical exercise.