Hacker News: eddieh

New comment by eddieh in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

eddieh — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:23:00 +0000

Not really, if you're entering Iranian airspace from the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, or Europe, you're flying over either the Zagros Mountains or the Alborz Mountains. Unless you crash/eject in a city, you're almost certainly going to be in the mountains. Look at a map.

New comment by eddieh in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

eddieh — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:26:40 +0000

Iran isn't just central Tehran. Look up the Zagros Mountains and the Alborz Mountains. Or just look at a picture of the northern Tehran skyline, it is at the foot of the Alborz, a huge mountain range. There's plenty of woodlands and forest too. Some parts of the Hyrcanian forests get over 50 inches of annual rainfall, which isn't Forks, WA, but it is substantial.

New comment by eddieh in "A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)"

eddieh — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:35:20 +0000

error: invalid digit '9' in octal constant

New comment by eddieh in ""Special register groups" invaded computer dictionaries for decades (2019)"

eddieh — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 06:46:48 +0000

Percival Lowell misunderstanding the Italian word “canali”[1] should rank pretty high in terms of similar phenomena and is probably the most impactful example.

1. https://lowell.edu/percival-lowells-search-for-life-on-mars/

New comment by eddieh in "Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress"

eddieh — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 05:55:37 +0000

From the Microsoft LTSC info:

> If you fail to activate this evaluation after installation, or if your evaluation period expires, the desktop background will turn black, you will see a persistent desktop notification indicating that the system is not genuine, and the PC will shut down every hour.

I was ready to grab a ISO, but this sounds pretty user hostile to me.

New comment by eddieh in "Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions"

eddieh — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 07:03:37 +0000

Touché.

New comment by eddieh in "Asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions"

eddieh — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 05:37:58 +0000

Looks cool, but produce GIFs? Asciinema is text based IIRC.

The name is the downside of Asciinema IMO. Can’t help but read it as ASCII enema, which is funny, but not what I want think about. Just call it tty-player or something…

New comment by eddieh in "Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)"

eddieh — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 14:13:12 +0000

Basically, writing a CS paper in LaTeX using the "alg*" packages (algorithm2e, algorithmicx, algorithms, algpseudocode, algxpar, algpseudocodex, etc.) is living in the ALGO 60 / ALGO 68 world. For the most part, nobody uses anything from the standards that would require superfluous explanations in a paper.

New comment by eddieh in "Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding"

eddieh — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 21:58:11 +0000

The Cray machines looked more like an airport seating area. Or with later models, obstacles in a laser tag arena. While the Thinking Machines with the moving LEDs looked alive, almost like it was designed to be a character in a movie, which they became.

New comment by eddieh in "Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding"

eddieh — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 17:43:51 +0000

Yet the Jurassic Park franchise is just as strong as ever.

Thinking Machines CM-5 in Jurassic Park (1993):

https://www.starringthecomputer.com/appearance.html?f=11&c=1...

Jurassic World Rebirth passes $500 M in revenue:

https://www.koimoi.com/box-office/jurassic-world-rebirth-wor...

New comment by eddieh in "My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server"

eddieh — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 03:48:25 +0000

The iPhone 8 was peak iPhone. I’m on my second iPhone 8 and am posting from it now.

I did also like the original iPhone SE mostly because of the size, but the haptics make the the iPhone 8, along with having a bezel, square screen, and home button.

New comment by eddieh in "You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown"

eddieh — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:29:41 +0000

You can be a great X and be completely unknown

Where X is any vocation, skill, talent, etc…

New comment by eddieh in "Native frame transposition coming to Emacs 31"

eddieh — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 11:53:29 +0000

I’m confused, is this operating on Emacs’ frames or windows.

** For those here that are not Emacs users these terms mean the opposite of what you’re likely used to.

New comment by eddieh in "TinyX: Small Featured X Server"

eddieh — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 20:12:30 +0000

Actually, you don’t have that right. Most cities ban public nuisance noises such as blasting air horns.

You’re mostly free to do things that do not harm others. If you don’t like my speaking you can and should just move along. Blasting an air horn is not only harming me it harms everyone around you. Whereby you are interfering with everyone else’s right to not have public nuisances.

It isn’t remotely similar to what I’m saying anyway.

The free software foundation has brainwashed y’all to think less freedom is more freedom. And yes, I will die on this hill.

It isn’t my fault if you have an issue with objective reality.

New comment by eddieh in "TinyX: Small Featured X Server"

eddieh — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:17:22 +0000

There’s no argument for the change in the general case. There’s rationalizations, sure.

But no euphemisms like “public”, “free software”, “copyleft”, make the change anything less than taking away a freedom and calling it “free as in speech”.

New comment by eddieh in "String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'"

eddieh — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 06:04:34 +0000

WARNING: The Post Millennial is an extremist website.

I can’t believe that getting “news” about an extremist group from another extremist organization is a productive way to make sense of the world.

Honestly, read whatever you want but just be aware that radical extremist exist and commit horrific crimes and other radical extremist will exploit that.

It is radical extremism that’s dangerous in and of itself—not just a particular brand of radical extremism.

Carry on.

New comment by eddieh in "Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy"

eddieh — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 04:04:30 +0000

Basically the same odds of dying in a car crash over your lifetime. So unless you give up on driving or being a passenger of a car—this is a meaningless risk, and besides that, it is even less likely to hit land, let alone a populated area. The chance that this will impact you is unbelievably low.

This is so below the threshold of worry, I’m shocked by the points and comments.

Schedule a colonoscopy, quit drinking, resign from your high stress job, drive less, get your moles checked; all better mitigation for prolonging you life than worrying about this.

New comment by eddieh in "LLMs Demonstrate Behavioral Self-Awareness [pdf]"

eddieh — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 20:49:15 +0000

HN link is not the paper’s title. Also doesn’t seem to be peer reviewed and isn’t even uploaded to a pre-print server like arXiv—literally hosted on GitHub.

New comment by eddieh in "IsMyXFeedFucked – Analyze How Your X Feed's Impacting You"

eddieh — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 11:17:10 +0000

Yes. Negatively.

Not sure analysis is needed. Algorithmic feeds are fucked and impact you negatively. All of them!

You have no real control over what you see, they're ephemeral, nobody has a shared experience, and that's _only a few_ things that are fucked.

New comment by eddieh in "Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C"

eddieh — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 14:48:57 +0000

Too bad the first program in the article leaks its file descriptor.

Memory is but one resource you need to manage. File descriptors are the first oft overlooked resource in a long list of neglected finite resources.