Hacker News: hwc

New comment by hwc in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

hwc — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:36:48 +0000

Please note that the US Congress has not approved the existence of a "Department of War" this century. Calling it the Department of Defense is the only legally correct way to refer to it.

New comment by hwc in "A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors"

hwc — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 21:34:24 +0000

Now make it do a perceptually uniform color space.

New comment by hwc in "Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study"

hwc — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 19:42:21 +0000

Yep, I can't quite get as much power out of the panels on my roof as I use on average, but that's okay because I am reducing the cost of transmission by a significant amount.

New comment by hwc in "Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study"

hwc — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 19:34:48 +0000

Probably not orders of magnitude cheaper than today. But energy prices will become very stable.

New comment by hwc in "Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image"

hwc — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 23:12:39 +0000

How did they make any money at all without ads?

New comment by hwc in "Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?"

hwc — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:57:19 +0000

Yeah, if you can't send robots to the surface to mine necessary minerals, don't bother building floating cities.

New comment by hwc in "Is a movie prop the ultimate laptop bag?"

hwc — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 20:39:33 +0000

> and padded

I prefer to use a laptop sleeve, and then it doesn't matter if it is padded or not.

New comment by hwc in "Should we drain the Everglades?"

hwc — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:13:11 +0000

Also, you need a place to build the dike. Look at a map of Miami, for example, and tell me where you want to build a dike. In front of Miami Beach? And how far does it go? All the way up the coast? There's 120 miles of continuous city on the Atlantic Coast. Also, the land is all very porous sand on top of porous coral. Even if you build a dike out of clay and concrete, water will still seep in from below. This is already happening at high tide.

New comment by hwc in "Should we drain the Everglades?"

hwc — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:07:13 +0000

My parents bought a house 11 feet above sea level. The right combination of high tides and storm surge could easily flood that any time. It hasn't happened yet, but the sea level could rise a foot or so in the next generation, making flooding more likely every year.

New comment by hwc in "Should we drain the Everglades?"

hwc — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 23:45:05 +0000

I used to live in this part of the country. There's an insane amount of disregard for the environment and climate. Yes, new buildings have to be reinforced against hurricanes. But they are still building new houses only a few meters above sea level, as if sea level rise wasn't already unavoidable.

And on the largest scale, there is a limit to the amount of fresh groundwater that wells along the South Florida coast can get. Once they exceed that amount, they'll be pumping brackish water seeping in from the ocean. Then they have to desalinate the brackish water.

But the last time I was there, they were still building new houses.

New comment by hwc in "Nintendo locked down the Switch 2's USB-C port and broke third-party docking"

hwc — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 15:59:29 +0000

the new dock is huge and has a fan. We won't be able to find a more compact alternative.

New comment by hwc in "Android 16 is here"

hwc — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 15:55:48 +0000

I already can run vim on my phone. That's enough for me.

New comment by hwc in "Android 16 is here"

hwc — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 21:30:49 +0000

It almost works. But the monitor just mirrors the phone, including its weird aspect ratio and font size.

It's almost usable for playing movies on a TV, but that's about it.

New comment by hwc in "Android 16 is here"

hwc — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 20:27:12 +0000

If Android is getting desktop windowing, how long until I can just plug my phone into a monitor and keyboard and have a usable computer?

New comment by hwc in "MacBook Air M4"

hwc — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 14:52:31 +0000

I care more about total mass than thinness. But those things tend to be correlated.

New comment by hwc in "MacBook Air M4"

hwc — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 14:51:29 +0000

Is the Pro fan cooled? I have never heard a fan on my M2 Pro.

New comment by hwc in "MacBook Air M4"

hwc — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 14:50:05 +0000

I still love my M2 MacBook. I can't see any reason at all to upgrade.

But I am glad that they continue to refine the technology.

New comment by hwc in "MacBook Air M4"

hwc — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 14:39:07 +0000

Other than battery mass and screen size, is there a significant difference between the new Macbook Air and the low-end Macbook Pro?

New comment by hwc in "Making memcpy(NULL, NULL, 0) well-defined"

hwc — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 15:08:36 +0000

> internal function

every time you introduce something nonstandard, you add one little hardship to anyone trying to read or modify your code.

if a programmer is familiar with the language, it's standard library, and the normal idioms, then they should be able to just jump in.

New comment by hwc in "Making memcpy(NULL, NULL, 0) well-defined"

hwc — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 15:05:41 +0000

Well, that seems like something that should have been there from the beginning .