Hacker News: jamessb

New comment by jamessb in "Canonical/Ubuntu have been under DDoS"

jamessb — Fri, 01 May 2026 12:04:24 +0000

Yes, but I can currently only load the page about them via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20260430191621/https://ubuntu.co...

New comment by jamessb in "What Claude Code chooses"

jamessb — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:59:02 +0000

Apparently the "API Layer" is "competitive", with TanStack Query and FastAPI as the leading options [1]. These are not at all alternatives to each other.

[1]: https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/decision-support-tool...

New comment by jamessb in "MapLibre Tile: a modern and efficient vector tile format"

jamessb — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:02:45 +0000

PMtiles is often used with MVT tiles, but it can encapsulate a variety of tile types: the current spec [1] has defined tile types for MVT, PNG, JPEG, WebP and AVIF (plus "Unknown/Other").

[1]: https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/blob/main/spec/v3/spec....

New comment by jamessb in "Harvard legal scholars debate the state of the U.S. constitution (2025)"

jamessb — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:04:21 +0000

> I think this phrasing alone says a lot more about you than anything you typed.

I'm not sure it says anything about them: "inferior court" is the term of art for any court whose decisions can be appealed to a higher court [1]. It's not a derogatory term; 'inferior' is just the Latin for 'lower'.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_court

New comment by jamessb in "ISBN Visualization"

jamessb — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 11:55:07 +0000

The blog post announcing the winners of the ISBN visualization bounty was posted previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838

And a blog post describing the creation of this visualization was posted too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897120

New comment by jamessb in "Ask HN: Can someone explain why OpenAI credits expire?"

jamessb — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 11:18:33 +0000

> - Skirts credit speculation and arbitrage

> - Provides stable pricing in shorter term while accommodating price changes over longer term

How? If you pre-pay $5, your account is credited by $5, and when you make an API request you get charged at whatever the rate is for the model you called at the time you used it. You aren't buying some virtual currency or locking in a specific price.

> - Excites engagement

More accurately, irritates customers by keeping their money without providing any service in return.

New comment by jamessb in "Show HN: Onlyrecipe 2.0 – I added all features HN requested – 4 years later"

jamessb — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:23:39 +0000

> why when you're measuring really small things and want to be precise, you usually have a little glass/plastic cube around the entire thing too.

These weighing instruments with draft shields are usually called analytical balances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_balance

New comment by jamessb in "The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain"

jamessb — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 11:57:04 +0000

The comments I've seen from police are normally specific suggestions that designs be amended to follow the Secured by Design [1] guidelines, rather than blanket objections to building something.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secured_by_Design

New comment by jamessb in "How can England possibly be running out of water?"

jamessb — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 13:10:23 +0000

The Oxford Clarion has had several posts about the proposed Abingdon damn:

https://oxfordclarion.uk/water-why-abingdons-mega-reservoir-...

https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-is-there-an-alte...

https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-what-are-the-ris...

https://oxfordclarion.uk/abingdon-reservoir-how-much-will-it...

New comment by jamessb in "Ask HN: I can't remember the name of a AI CLI tool I saw a few weeks ago"

jamessb — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:09:55 +0000

I think they mean Octofriend (https://github.com/synthetic-lab/octofriend) from Syntethci Lab (https://synthetic.new/landing/home).

New comment by jamessb in "Wild pigs' flesh turning neon blue in California"

jamessb — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 09:08:47 +0000

> there is no blue food

Have you eveer seen a blueberry? Or a Concord grape? Or a damson plum?

New comment by jamessb in "3-JSON"

jamessb — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:57:10 +0000

Nor have I; I think it is just what the developer of tree has chosen to call file descriptor 3, rather than being a wider convention or standard thing provided by the environment.

> As of version 2.0.0, in Linux, tree will attempt to automatically output a compact JSON tree on file descriptor 3 (what I call stddata,) if present

https://github.com/Old-Man-Programmer/tree/blob/d501b58ff9cb...

New comment by jamessb in "Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org"

jamessb — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:23:10 +0000

That depends what you mean by needing a database. MBtiles files are SQLite database files, so you need a SQLite process running somewhere to extract the requested tiles.

New comment by jamessb in "Visual History of the Latin Alphabet"

jamessb — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 13:33:32 +0000

Looking at the page source shows that it is vanilla JS [1] with a few libraries:

* https://anseki.github.io/leader-line/

* https://barba.js.org/docs/getstarted/intro/

* https://swiperjs.com/

[1]: https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/arete/assets/js/application.js

New comment by jamessb in "Material 3 Expressive"

jamessb — Fri, 16 May 2025 12:17:18 +0000

> Not the same email.

I'm not even sure they're both emails. The first looks like a fairly conventional mobile email app; the second looks like a messaging app.

Not only does it not have a 'from' and 'to' field, it also doesn't have a 'subject' field.

New comment by jamessb in "Show HN: I made an open-source laptop from scratch"

jamessb — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 22:16:49 +0000

> Established in 1781, it is America's sixth-oldest boarding school

>...

> Exeter is one of the nation's wealthiest boarding schools, with a financial endowment of $1.6 billion as of June 2024, and houses the world's largest high school library.

>...

>Its list of notable alumni includes U.S. President Franklin Pierce, U.S. Senator Daniel Webster, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and three winners of the Nobel Prize.

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

New comment by jamessb in "How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear"

jamessb — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 12:40:27 +0000

Apaprently there's an "Office Furniture in London" that might be it: https://www.officefurnitureinlondon.co.uk/product-category/s...

Their online listings for Aeron chairs are for more like £400, but that's still less than a third of the price when new.

New comment by jamessb in "Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need"

jamessb — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 10:53:57 +0000

"Abuse of notation" is a commonly used term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuse_of_notation

New comment by jamessb in "The XOR Texture (2004)"

jamessb — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:55:52 +0000

I think you probably meant to post this on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42447762

New comment by jamessb in "New physical AWS Data Transfer Terminals let you upload to the cloud faster"

jamessb — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 11:08:43 +0000

> I wonder how this process worked in practice. Do you simply send your only one set of hard disks and hope for the best?

No, you don't put your own disks in the Snowmobile/Snowball/Snowclone. It contains disks, so when it arrives you connect it to your network and copy data onto it, and then it is driven to an Amazon datacentre.

See, e.g. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/...

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...