Hacker News: hvs

New comment by hvs in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

hvs — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:32:12 +0000

The Patriot Act is perfect example of the adage, "Never let a crisis go to waste."

New comment by hvs in "How the Fifth Lateran Council unlocked financial theory"

hvs — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 22:04:11 +0000

"Usury" is still a word in use but now, for legal purposes, it means "interest that a lender charges a borrower at a rate above the lawful ceiling on such charges" rather than just any interest at all.

New comment by hvs in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

hvs — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:11:28 +0000

My wife, who honestly tries to avoid technology at all costs, was working on her business site and said, "It's almost impossible to find any good stock photos with all the AI slop out there."

AI, among non-tech people means two things: slop and shitty customer service bots.

New comment by hvs in "Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B"

hvs — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:34:03 +0000

As someone with extreme phone anxiety to begin with, long waits on phones are deal breakers for me. If you are a company that answers your phone quickly by a real person you've earned yourself a lifelong customer.

New comment by hvs in "Fox to buy Roku"

hvs — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:09:23 +0000

I used Rokus for years (happily) but they slowly began to degrade the experience with ads on their home screen (that were often not appropriate for children). Due to an unrelated project that required me to purchase an AppleTV I was quickly amazed at how much better their product was. Fast and clean. Never going back.

New comment by hvs in "Discovery of Cold War-era rare Eastern Bloc computers in a German hangar"

hvs — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:13:25 +0000

I know that as technologists we tend to think of this as "treasure" but most other people think of it as "large metal objects that are expensive to store or landfill." Maintaining, storing, and restoring them on top of that is also very expensive. Usually they'll give them to anyone willing to take them off their hands. We only need to look at the closure of the Living Computers Museum closing [1] to see that most people do not see the value in the history of computing. That's why the CHM is doing such is important work.

[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-muse...

New comment by hvs in "A Forth-inspired language for writing websites"

hvs — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:29:02 +0000

HN Hug of Death: https://web.archive.org/web/20260522134016/https://robida.ne...

New comment by hvs in "I designed a nibble-oriented CPU in Verilog to build a scientific calculator"

hvs — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:41:59 +0000

A byte is always 8 bits. The word you're looking for is `word-size` which, in this case would be 4 bits.

New comment by hvs in "Tesla is recalling its cheaper Cybertruck because the wheels might fall off"

hvs — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:24:59 +0000

In Minnesota they tend to be (or were) owned by companies in the construction / maintenance industry and plastered with full body advertisements for said services (not actually used by construction workers).

New comment by hvs in "Welcome to Gas City"

hvs — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:10:13 +0000

Came here to say that a lot of these LLM posts make me feel like I was hit by a hammer and I can't understand the world anymore. Thankfully, the HN comments confirm that this is as insane as I thought it was.

New comment by hvs in "All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)"

hvs — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:49:11 +0000

If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars, I recommend A City on Mars: https://www.acityonmars.com/

It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/

New comment by hvs in "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'"

hvs — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 04:29:04 +0000

It's not that they made more money from merchandise, it's that they sold more t-shirts than albums. Implying that more people were interested in the "image" of punk rock than the music.

New comment by hvs in "Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native"

hvs — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:33:02 +0000

Because Worse is Better. /s

It's the incentives and everything is a trade off. Time to market, performance, features: none of these choices are made in a vacuum. Oh, and people like to go home and see their families once in a while.

As a developer of over 35 years, I feel like I hear the same arguments over and over again. "Programmers used to care about performance!" No they didn't, they just had no choice because computers sucked and you had to work on performance or your application would barely run. "Progammers used to care about the quality of their code!" Really. You apparently never worked on legacy systems with years of hacks and spaghetti code that took an afternoon to trace through just to figure out what it was doing.

People haven't changed. Kids aren't lazier these days. The incentives are always just to ship as fast as possible. Performance will be dealt with when and if it is so bad that the customer complains and not a moment sooner.

When I was much younger I fancied myself a "craftsman" of software. But any "craft" I was able to bestow on my software was in spite of the surrounding incentives not because of them. Software is closer to assembly line work than craftsmanship and LLMs are just driving that point home faster and harder than ever.

I still love software development after all these years but it's entirely because I love solving problems and computers still fascinate me the same as they did when I got my first TRS-80 Color Computer at age seven. Nobody that's not a programmer cares as long as the software does what they need it to and does fast enough that they don't start wonder why they have to use this piece of crap software in the first place.

New comment by hvs in "The Sharp PC-2000 Computer Boombox from 1979"

hvs — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:08:04 +0000

Everyone made personal computers in the late 70's and early 80's. It was the latest corporate fad.

New comment by hvs in "Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)"

hvs — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:54:03 +0000

"Animal Farm" is a satire of the Russian Revolution.

New comment by hvs in "Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product"

hvs — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:15:42 +0000

* ANY consumer-grade home appliances.

New comment by hvs in "RCS for Business"

hvs — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:28:15 +0000

I'm so old and out-of-touch that all I could imagine this was about was an ancient version control system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_Control_System

New comment by hvs in "Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see"

hvs — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 20:50:45 +0000

And also why a large percentage of the "content" on YouTube is YouTubers reactions to other YouTubers.

New comment by hvs in "Lock-Picking Robot"

hvs — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:03:32 +0000

I'm a strong supporter of the "I did it because I wanted to see if I could do it" ethos. So this isn't a criticism of the project itself, but I'm pretty sure a snap gun will beat this almost every time.

New comment by hvs in "Beating the Tutorial"

hvs — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:16:55 +0000

Hug of death? https://web.archive.org/web/20260110140341/https://elliotmor...