Hacker News: eichin

New comment by eichin in "DARPA Heavy Life Challenge"

eichin — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:00:57 +0000

I saw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tohImHa4f5U (Hoarder Sam, "I'm building a drone for the DARPA lift challenge") the other day and it was a pretty good discussion of the "shape of the envelope" of the problem (and what kind of lift ratios actually exist in modern air vehicles), and particularly how they've set up the constraints to eliminate a bunch of "easy" approaches.

It also reminded me that for the first round of the self-driving grand challenge, none of the vehicles even completed the course :-) They really are trying to encourage "out of the box", or at least "not in the obvious box", designs...

New comment by eichin in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

eichin — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 06:02:20 +0000

2016 - so, generic upsides of global capitalism, but nothing specific to the AI bubble?

New comment by eichin in "Your ePub Is fine"

eichin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 02:29:21 +0000

wasn't some of that smoothness because it ran at a 100hz tick without any way of adapting it (and still running existing code)? That was the complaint I kept hearing from people attempting to make flash on phones viable (this led to ludicrous battery consumption)

New comment by eichin in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

eichin — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:16:59 +0000

A long time ago I was doing some on-site programming at a swiss bank, and the only available editors were vi on a Sun, or EDIT on a VMS machine (the project involved both.) I learned rudimentary vi on the fly while waiting for ftp-by-mail-over-uucp to deliver GNU emacs sources :-)

New comment by eichin in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

eichin — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:34:21 +0000

also, not instead of.

New comment by eichin in "Love systemd timers"

eichin — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 19:50:34 +0000

Arguably they (we :-) were right at the time. Around Ubuntu 16.04, the journal was Hot Garbage - to keep a production system working (as in, "didn't randomly stop logging, didn't regularly corrupt logs, didn't uncontrollably fill the disk because none of the limit options actually worked") we eventually backported about 30 fixes from newer versions - by 22.04 or so it was "fit for purpose" out of the box, but earlier than that it earned every bit of hatred it got.

New comment by eichin in "Love systemd timers"

eichin — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 19:37:39 +0000

hmm, when did that get added? Last time I checked, the only timezone you could specify was UTC (which was one more than cron supported, but still insufficient.)

New comment by eichin in "Cheese Paper: a text editor specifically designed for writing"

eichin — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:23:30 +0000

"We do not want your data. Please keep it to yourself."

(I find that a refreshing perspective.)

New comment by eichin in "Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team"

eichin — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:19:37 +0000

it's tridge rsync; samba is another project by the same guy. (rsync was originally a PhD thesis...)

New comment by eichin in "Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team"

eichin — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:07:52 +0000

It's a big source of confusion with cp. One of the UI reasons to use rsync (for mundane non-remote copying) is that it doesn't do different things based on what's present on the target.

New comment by eichin in "Show HN: Open-source private home security camera system (end-to-end encryption)"

eichin — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:25:25 +0000

Ah, the name is a near-miss vs https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/english/105.php (the SECurity USability SOciety research group at Karlsruhe) that makes the "Privacy Friendly Apps" suite for Android. (I don't think there's any actual confusion, it was just a "why did that sound familiar" reflex :-)

New comment by eichin in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

eichin — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:42:50 +0000

We formalized that as "if you didn't find a kernel bug yesterday, you didn't find one today either" (while implicitly glaring at the java developer who kept blaming everything but his own code.) The funny thing is that we actually had one guy who found two kernel bugs (spread over a couple of years, but still) while hunting down weird product issues - we didn't think the kernel was perfect, just that "you need to have exhausted the possibilities in your code before considering blaming the kernel" was well supported by evidence...

New comment by eichin in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

eichin — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:05:39 +0000

or that the comments themselves are AI/bots? (not meant as a criticism, other than of youtube itself)

New comment by eichin in "A portentous reunion"

eichin — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:03:25 +0000

I read the point as: if it's an existential threat that you've got principled objections to - why would it even matter that it's useful?

New comment by eichin in "Time to talk about my writerdeck"

eichin — Sun, 24 May 2026 01:10:47 +0000

In the associated video, she explains exactly that - a Debian Trixie VM specifically for screenshotting https://youtu.be/E7vFdy4BEAY?si=WVBxmCPLVEdRBbtU&t=114

New comment by eichin in "Electrobun 2.0 will be decoupled from Bun due to the Rust rewrite"

eichin — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:50:31 +0000

I'd suggest reading the Connie Willis novel by that name - no idea if it will actually help, it's just really good writing :-)

New comment by eichin in "Time to talk about my writerdeck"

eichin — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:33:10 +0000

yeah, part of my current writing push was made more successful by two things:

* I am not allowed to use a blogging system I wrote. (Really, I've written three or four at this point and need to stop, and there are plenty of existing systems that still align with my idiosyncratic constraints.)

* The blog must not have any meta content about blog tooling.

(I cheated a little on the latter by having an extra "site" blog for that - which lets me get the words out but doesn't "count" for the writing goal. A useful outlet, but it meant an extra month or so before "real writing" outnumbered meta writing :-)

New comment by eichin in "A Markdown-based test suite"

eichin — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:56:11 +0000

Anybody remember "cram"? From about 10 years ago, https://bitheap.org/cram/ basically a markdown syntax (making heavy use of code-blocks) for documenting and writing tests as "shell commands and expected output" (with a bunch of the sharp edges filed off, like line endings and partial matches.) Was particularly good for easy-to-write, easy-to-review tests of unix utilities. (It's the kind of thing that you only stumble on if you've been working with doctests but they don't really fit well for shell/unix stuff...)

New comment by eichin in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

eichin — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:41:33 +0000

That's not the same thing - with a pty in line mode, you get one line that you can edit, and when you hit enter, it gets sent. With Domain/OS, you still get to edit your last line until you hit enter... but if the process is otherwise blocked and doesn't consume it immediately, you can up-arrow and continue editing the earlier bits too. (Pretty sure it didn't work with telnet in particular, the common cases I remember were issuing a foo;bar;baz commandline and "working on" the input to baz while foo and bar were still running.)

New comment by eichin in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

eichin — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:29:41 +0000

pipes buffer, and you don't know when the child is actually reading? (Maybe you could cook something up with ptrace, since it would be a blocking read in this case...)