Hacker News: doublesocket

New comment by doublesocket in "Playa Phone"

doublesocket — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 19:10:32 +0000

I always wanted to build a local mesh network of pay phones on the playa and call it Black Rock Telecom. Maybe 12 or more phones set on plazas. Geographically not being located in the US made this project tricky to realise.

New comment by doublesocket in "Auburn California Flock Surveillance Cameras Stolen and Dumped in a Canal"

doublesocket — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:37:17 +0000

Shouldn't a sufficiently powerful laser be able to cook the sensor quickly and easily?

New comment by doublesocket in "VoIP brings back old-fashioned pay phones to rural Vermont (2025)"

doublesocket — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:04:11 +0000

I had an idea years ago to hook up a bunch of old payphones on the playa at burning man. Solar powered and connected over VoIP on a mesh network. Sadly never got to make it happen but would have been a fun art project.

New comment by doublesocket in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

doublesocket — Tue, 12 May 2026 06:27:55 +0000

Maybe we can skip the compiler...

New comment by doublesocket in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

doublesocket — Tue, 12 May 2026 06:24:41 +0000

Why stop at getting AI to write Rust? If everything is vibe coded and code is no longer reviewed, get an LLM to devise its own ultra terse, super dense language intended solely for minimal token use and speed.

/s... sort of

New comment by doublesocket in "Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far"

doublesocket — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:20:18 +0000

GDS was a national level effort and they certainly did a better, albeit not perfect, job than the myriad of private solutions councils use. There just doesn't appear to be the capability to properly specify and source IT at a council level.

New comment by doublesocket in "Scraping 241 UK council planning portals – 2.6M decisions so far"

doublesocket — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:15:08 +0000

It's the most ridiculous situation with council technology that they all use different providers for what are fundamentally the same functions. It's the same for council tax and a host of other services as it is for planning. Consequently, at least from the various portals I've used, they all do it badly. This absolutely could and should be done by a single, well funded central team.

New comment by doublesocket in "Claude Design"

doublesocket — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:49:34 +0000

Am I alone in not wanting banal homogeneity even on a work trip?

New comment by doublesocket in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

doublesocket — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:28:32 +0000

Which Claude literally uses.

New comment by doublesocket in "Identify a London Underground Line just by listening to it"

doublesocket — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:18:39 +0000

Given their username I would raise you that they're on the victoria line :-)

New comment by doublesocket in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

doublesocket — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:22:32 +0000

This was many moons ago, written in perl. From memory we used Regexp::Trie - https://metacpan.org/release/DANKOGAI/Regexp-Trie-0.02/view/...

We used it to tokenize search input and combined it with a solr backend. Worked really remarkably well.

New comment by doublesocket in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

doublesocket — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:51:29 +0000

Supporting 10 different languages in regex is a drop in the ocean. The regex can be generated programmatically and you can compress regexes easily. We used to have a compressed regex that could match any placename or street name in the UK in a few MB of RAM. It was silly quick.

New comment by doublesocket in "Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust"

doublesocket — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:51:59 +0000

Agree with this. Mismatching types are generally an indicator of an underlying issue with the code, not the language itself. These are areas AI can be helpful flagging potential problems.

New comment by doublesocket in "Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'"

doublesocket — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:39:32 +0000

Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.

New comment by doublesocket in "From stealth blackout to whitelisting: Inside the Iranian shutdown"

doublesocket — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:48:46 +0000

I don't think OP was implying punishing voters.

New comment by doublesocket in "TeraWave Satellite Communications Network"

doublesocket — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:50:22 +0000

That is ... an oddly specific reference?

New comment by doublesocket in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

doublesocket — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:38:45 +0000

Never understood why the yanks don't like vans? Pickups are much less popular here in the UK, many more people use vans. A crew cab van with removable seats is infinitely more flexible than a pickup, other than long stuff which you chuck on a roof rack.

New comment by doublesocket in "Firefox extension to redirect x.com to xcancel.com"

doublesocket — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:39:51 +0000

I don't use it but I did still have an account which is now deleted. Thanks for the reminder.

New comment by doublesocket in "The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café"

doublesocket — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 11:27:48 +0000

My ADHD brain recoils at the thought of this, which probably means I would benefit even more from doing so.

New comment by doublesocket in "Mermaid Gantt diagrams for displaying distributed traces in Markdown (2023)"

doublesocket — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 16:33:47 +0000

FWIW I gave up trying to render SVG for our project and switched to using fabric.js (and node-canvas for server side rendering). For us it was mostly because it had far better text support.