Hacker News: elric

New comment by elric in "Supermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack"

elric — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 14:26:14 +0000

Not just that. But why the fuck is the control software so weak? Why does it allow remotely bumping temperatures to near boiling without any checks? Which idiot designed this system? Why aren't they out of business? Same with the people who installed these systems. Why on earth didn't they think to secure it?

New comment by elric in "UK to charge universities $1,200 per international student"

elric — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 06:27:25 +0000

Tuition fees for international students were already very expensive in the UK compared to most of the EU. Surely this will only make things worse? Is the goal to reduce the number of int'l students?

I couldn't afford full time tuition in the early 2000s, in spite of working a half time job while at uni.

New comment by elric in "Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers"

elric — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 21:16:49 +0000

I'm sure it won't work everywhere, but it's been pretty successful. I wish more people would start coops to tackle problems like this. Powering some 50k families is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but this started out as a grassroots thing with just a handful of people. Goes to show that you don't have to be stuck with a shitty power company.

New comment by elric in "Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers"

elric — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:25:35 +0000

My electricity is produced by a cooperative. The coop has some 60k participants. And over the year it's managed to build and operate a respectable amount of wind turbines and solar installations, and it's now expanding into district heating and battery storage.

They're producing some 100GWh/year. Which is not half bad, considering they're typically at or below market price and often pay a ~6% dividend.

New comment by elric in "Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case"

elric — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 07:57:20 +0000

At least in Volkswagen's "dieselgate", executives got prison sentences. No clue whether they ever served them, but still.

New comment by elric in "OpenBSD 8.0"

elric — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 08:45:17 +0000

The release song is a banger, as always.

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#80

New comment by elric in "The plight of the public potty"

elric — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 10:25:21 +0000

Do you not have a bladder? Do you never leave home for longer than a few hours? Are you aware that some people may have smaller bladders or produce more urine for various reasons?

If anything, toilets aren't discussed nearly enough. There is a huge lack of public toilets pretty much everywhere in the world.

New comment by elric in "Butlerian Jihad"

elric — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 10:29:40 +0000

That reminds me of a quote from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator:

> Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men. Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate. The unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

New comment by elric in "Delta’s Biscoff cookies were supposed to be temporary"

elric — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:41:17 +0000

This has been a Belgian children's breakfast staple for generations. Some dunk them in milk before putting them on bread. Those with a more sophisticated palate might use coffee or hot chocolate instead.

New comment by elric in "Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years"

elric — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 10:39:57 +0000

> Personally I've found satisfaction in going to meetups to find like minds

I enjoy meetups, but those have been pretty much nonexistent here since covid.

New comment by elric in "Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif and slab-serif, monospace font"

elric — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:32:37 +0000

So can you elaborate instead of just repeating what the other commenter said?

New comment by elric in "Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif and slab-serif monospace font"

elric — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:50:18 +0000

Can you elaborate? Are you saying iosevka is a PragmataPro ripoff?

New comment by elric in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

elric — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:45:49 +0000

> I find it exceedingly unlikely that massive amounts of people will simply accept this purported widespread unemployment without major political consequences.

Well supposedly some of the richer folks are busy building doomsday bunkers and whatnot, so I guess they aren't entirely blind to "political consequences"? Not sure what they hope accomplish there, unless they want to be king of some post-apocalyptic wasteland.

I for one am worried about our future, and have neither the money for a doomsday bunker nor the desire to live in the wasteland.

New comment by elric in "Passkeys are a trap"

elric — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:27:49 +0000

The attestion part only serves to strengthen to Google/Apple duopoly and it should be removed from the standard entirely.

There's also the fact that passkey storage is currently shit. Even the most expensive yubikeys can only store 100 passkeys. I currently have 700+ entries in my password store, and that's excluding the business stuff. Am I supposed to faf about with 8 yubikeys? Somehow labelling them so I know which 100 passkeys each one contains?

New comment by elric in "Fingerprints are the new cookies"

elric — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 05:43:12 +0000

It is illegal, if it's PII without explicit consent.

New comment by elric in "So you think you could be an electrician?"

elric — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 11:49:53 +0000

Not a trade, but I worked in a paint factory for a while in my teens, filling paint cans: loading a conveyor, putting cans in boxes, cleaning and prepping machines,.. It was hard work, and it was annoyingly repetitive but required attention to avoid accidents. The pay was very good. It wasn't until I'd been a software engineer for 4 years that I reached pay parity (and this is taking the tax benefits of student jobs into account).

New comment by elric in "Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes"

elric — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 11:07:02 +0000

I mean the result might look better with an overlocker, but you can just fold and stich the ends instead. I guess it depends on what you're after. There are maker spaces and other creative hubs where you can easily use sewing machines or overlockers.

Or you can buy one for like ~€350. It's not cheap, but also not insurmountable if you want to go down the route of making your own clothes.

New comment by elric in "Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes"

elric — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:51:11 +0000

You can also learn to make your own tshirts. Sewing is a useful skill in general, and tshirts are pretty easy. The neck band is a bit of a challenge, but other than that it's just cutting fabric to a template and sewing pieces together using a sewing machine.

New comment by elric in "Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes"

elric — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:46:19 +0000

Wear whatever the fuck you want, and don't judge people for what they wear. It's that simple (barring a few exceptions around safety and whatnot).

You can get clothes adjusted/altered, even cheap store bought ones. I often have to get new jeans altered because my legs are chonkier than their length justifies. Some stores still have people on site who can make alterations for you. Some don't, but it's easy (at least in my town) to find little shops that do alterations/mending.

> Everyone wears street/modern fashion, and I don’t want to really go to a friends house in suit and tie. It sucks but that is the way things are.

Just wear the suit and tie if you want to. This is such a non-issue.

New comment by elric in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

elric — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:04:01 +0000

Fiction: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I love it. Been reading the series out of order for some reason.

Non-fiction: Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser. It's fun. It looks at things like pushdown automata, Turing machines, decidability, ... Not reading it too rigorously, but more exploratively.