Hacker News: hanche

New comment by hanche in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

hanche — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:42:16 +0000

NTSB is the relevant institution, not FAA.

New comment by hanche in "LaTeX Coffee Stains (2021) [pdf]"

hanche — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:18:53 +0000

There’s an old story about that. Possibly apocryphal, but here goes:

IBM mainframes used to come with documentation in ring binders. Some pages might indeed be marked “This page intentionally blank”. And they would from time to time send out update packages to their customers, with instructions to replace pages so-and-so with the included replacements. On the replacement pages, text that had been altered would be marked with a change bar in the margin.

Lo and behold, one day an update package was received, replacing one completely blank page with one bearing the text “This page intentionally blank”. Complete with a change bar in the margin.

New comment by hanche in "The most famous transcendental numbers"

hanche — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:05:53 +0000

You can't know. However, it is a consequence of the axiom of choice (AC). You can't know if AC is true either; but mathematics without it is really really hard, so it usually assumed.

New comment by hanche in "CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally"

hanche — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 08:19:43 +0000

Heh. To borrow an idea from xkcd (measuring gas consumption as area): The kWh measures energy, right? And energy is force times distance. So energy divided by distance is force! Let’s all start measuring EV consumption in newtons, folks. It even makes intuitive sense: It correlates well with how hard you need to push the car to get it going at the usual travel speed. But it sucks if you need to figure out how far you can travel on a given charge.

New comment by hanche in "Never write your own date parsing library"

hanche — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 18:56:20 +0000

Even worse with just two digits for the year! 01/02/03 could be 1 Feb 2003, or 2 Jan 2003, or 3 Feb 2001. Let’s just be thankful no one ever uses any of remaining three permutations.

New comment by hanche in "Why email startups fail"

hanche — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 19:10:44 +0000

> Runbox.com is a one person operation.

Small team yes, but one person? https://runbox.com/about/runbox-team/ indicates otherwise. (I am a happy customer.)

New comment by hanche in "Ask HN: To anyone who cares to read this. How old are you roughly?"

hanche — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 14:20:08 +0000

71. So far, the oldest to respond. Only a tiny minority of readers are likely to respond, though. And all you will learn from the responses is the age disribition of that tiny minority! Who knows how well that correlates with the totality of HN users?

New comment by hanche in "NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall" at the Edge of Solar System"

hanche — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:53:53 +0000

Good point about pluralization. I tend to be confused about that because we don't pluralize units in Norwegian (except the equivalent of degrees). But confusingly, in English, you sometimes see people trying to pluralize the abbreviations, such as kgs for kilograms. Or (even worse) ms for meters. That way madness lies.

New comment by hanche in "NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin "Wall" at the Edge of Solar System"

hanche — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:47:01 +0000

If you’ll excuse a bit of trivia: SI units named after people are not capitalized. So we have newton, joule, weber, kelvin, named after Newton, Joule, Weber, and Kelvin. (But their abbreviations are capitalized: N, J, Wb, K.)

New comment by hanche in "No Hello"

hanche — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 21:35:38 +0000

I could have sworn it was Asimov, but now I’m not so sure. As I remember it, the problem was communication with astronauts in the outer reaches of the solar system.

New comment by hanche in "Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard"

hanche — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 22:27:20 +0000

That makes no sense, and is not consistent with video evidence. Max flaps (40 degrees or so) are typically used only for landing. That is very obvious when you see it! Usual flap setting for takeoff is on the order of 5–15 degrees.

New comment by hanche in "Air India flight to London crashes in Ahmedabad with more than 240 onboard"

hanche — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 22:20:40 +0000

They have a RAT (ram air turbine) that deploys automatically under specific conditions. It’s basically a turbine providing electric and hydraulic power. It was almost certainly deployed on the accident flight. It will only power the most critical equipment, though. Possibly, that does not include the ADS-B transmitter (which broadcasts position and related data).

New comment by hanche in "You might want to stop running atop"

hanche — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 19:46:43 +0000

Rachel has posted a follow-up:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/03/26/atop/

> user1 does something... and gets user2 to blow up. If you can make that do something useful, then you get user2 to run stuff on your behalf.

Standards for ANSI Escape Codes

hanche — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 20:49:09 +0000

Article URL: https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/03/07/escape-code-standards/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43294471

Points: 13

# Comments: 1

New comment by hanche in "macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)"

hanche — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 19:24:13 +0000

With the Alt key, that adjusts the width of all columns.

New comment by hanche in "Plane crashes, overturns during landing at Toronto airport"

hanche — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:05:03 +0000

Too late to edit further, but I should add that there could be many reasons for the apparent failure to flare. I did not intend to speculate that the pilot is to blame. That is for the crash investigators to figure out.

New comment by hanche in "When Not to Obey Orders (2019)"

hanche — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 06:56:45 +0000

A properly scathing resignation letter catches media attention better than anything you say after being fired, which would be interpreted by many as whining.

New comment by hanche in "Plane crashes, overturns during landing at Toronto airport"

hanche — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 06:50:05 +0000

Indeed. Likely a wing tip strike, the right wing was ripped off, then the left wing is of course still flying so its lifting force rolls the plane over until that wing hits the ground. I think it stayed attached, so after that, the plane just slid to a stop. Edit: Saw a video, looks like the pilot flying failed to flare so they just hit the ground really hard but wings level, probably the landing gear collapsed. Not clear what caused the right wing to be removed. In any case, the plane left the frame so you couldn’t see what happened next.

New comment by hanche in "Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History"

hanche — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 22:37:45 +0000

I guess if we all add our favourite papers, we’ll end up with a very long list indeed. My own additions: As we may think by Vannevar Bush, and then something on Project Xanadu. There doesn’t seem to be any foundational paper on the latter, but there is Ted Nelson’s book Literary Machines.

New comment by hanche in "A Tesla Cybertruck 'blew up' outside Trump's hotel in Las Vegas"

hanche — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 07:50:57 +0000

They can, but they need to learn the proper techniques. In a country like Norway with a high proportion of electric cars, I think all fire departments know the drill by now – even if they never had to do it themselves. Most important: Don’t stop fighting the fire the moment it’s out, or it will reignite. You need to keep cooling the battery pack a long time.