Hacker News: gmac

New comment by gmac in "Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug"

gmac — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:57:16 +0000

Yes — configuring strongSwan as a bog-standard VPN server was so hard to fathom I made GitHub repo for it [1]. To be fair, some of the complexity comes from OS support that seems specifically designed to make secure setups difficult, presumably at the behest of various Three Letter Agencies.

I have now mostly switched to Wireguard for this, which is much more sane [2].

[1] https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup [2] https://github.com/jawj/wireguard-setup

New comment by gmac in "How the words we teach English language learners changed"

gmac — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:48:00 +0000

These are called phrasal verbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbs

New comment by gmac in "Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol on an NP-Hard Problem: Does /goal help?"

gmac — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:29:47 +0000

I've found Opus 4.8 pretty amazing, and Codex a bit meh. YMMV?

New comment by gmac in "Cloudflare Drop"

gmac — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:15:13 +0000

I mean, that's fair. To an extent it depends how high the stakes are and whether there are realistic alternatives to a service.

New comment by gmac in "Cloudflare Drop"

gmac — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:08:26 +0000

I have plenty of ability to read, but I never read these T&Cs because they’re usually dozens of pages long and life’s too short (or, if you prefer, the cost/benefit doesn’t support it). For consumers in Europe, at least, it’s usually safe to assume that anything too shitty is unenforceable, which helps.

New comment by gmac in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

gmac — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:55:07 +0000

(It's a double-press, which I think of as one action but I guess it's technically two button presses, because I believe the EU mandates that)

New comment by gmac in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

gmac — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:24:02 +0000

Renault have nailed this. In their latest cars (the EVs, at least) you set up which features you do and don’t want, then a single button press when you get in the car makes it so.

Some of their implementations, such as lane keeping, are good enough to keep. Others, such as speed limit detection, aren’t (though it’s much better at French speed limits than UK ones, which I suppose makes sense).

New comment by gmac in "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)"

gmac — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:36:54 +0000

There's a middle ground between ORMs and raw SQL, especially if you're using a strongly typed language. My library Zapatos[1] is one example among several.

[1] https://jawj.github.io/zapatos/

New comment by gmac in "VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO"

gmac — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:20:14 +0000

Basically: you can't teach people to think without giving them some facts and ideas to think with. It's like trying to teach woodworking without giving the students any wood.

New comment by gmac in "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"

gmac — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:49:38 +0000

Which is generally slower than Googling, because it's paged content in a terminal which can search only for literal strings?

New comment by gmac in "Electric motors with no rare earths"

gmac — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:46:34 +0000

Practically speaking, yes: I have a Renault EV and the battery % goes up on long descents.

New comment by gmac in "Electric motors with no rare earths"

gmac — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:45:49 +0000

It’s interesting that EESMs can be more efficient at high/highway speeds, and it’s something I had read before. This seems to me to be a key advantage of EESMs, because when people worry about EV range, they worry mainly about range on long-distance, high-speed journeys.

(I have a Renault EV and it’s excellent. Aside from the motor technology, it’s relatively light, has a heat pump as standard, and a good-sized battery).

Leaker says new MacBook '100% confirmed' to get touchscreen

gmac — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:59:00 +0000

Article URL: https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/11/leaker-says-new-macbook-is-100-confirmed-to-get-touchscreen/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490454

Points: 5

# Comments: 4

New comment by gmac in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

gmac — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:39:20 +0000

No, it's an immigration restriction. There's no way it applies if the Swiss start having 5 kids each.

New comment by gmac in "Having your insulin pump die while you're on vacation"

gmac — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:12:56 +0000

Are you trying to claim that American private healthcare is anything other than a giant shitshow of inefficiency, profiteering and death?

New comment by gmac in "Reviving old scanners with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP"

gmac — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:54:01 +0000

My monetization idea doesn't involve charging users, and it's more on the printing side (but most of the source is shared with scanning).

New comment by gmac in "Reviving old scanners with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP"

gmac — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:52:09 +0000

That is super helpful (I may well use it myself). But I guess a web app probably reaches some non-technical users that CLI tools don't.

India to monitor Boeing fuel-switch test tied to Air India London incident

gmac — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:13:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-monitor-boeing-fuel-switch-test-tied-air-india-london-incident-documents-2026-05-19/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221395

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by gmac in "Reviving old scanners with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP"

gmac — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:51:04 +0000

There’s separately a /credits page where I’ve done that, linked from the footer. Perhaps I should link it from the apology too. Tell me if you think I’ve not shared what I have to.

New comment by gmac in "Reviving old scanners with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP"

gmac — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:48:51 +0000

If you think I’ve done something wrong according to the licences involved here, please do clarify. I had understood that open-sourcing the Linux stuff (as branches of a fork of v86, linked from the /credits page) met all relevant legal obligations, which I absolutely intend to do.

More broadly, it’s unusual for me not to make everything open, and I do feel bad/conflicted about it. But, unusually, I feel like I have identified a possible route to monetising this, and I think open-sourcing all of it risks making that harder.