Hacker News: jfkw

New comment by jfkw in "Carice TC2 – A non-digital electric car"

jfkw — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:30:59 +0000

I would gladly pay extra (in terms of OEM's profit margin) for a de-contented EV that aims to stay reliable, offline, and be easier to field-repair and upgrade as components improve. Our phones are better than any infotainment system. Batteries and motors will get better in time.

https://www.slate.auto 's pickup seems to be heading in this direction, and now Carice enters in a higher-end market segment. If someone does a minivan or other people-hauler configuration similarly, I'd be first in line.

New comment by jfkw in "Elon Musk's robotaxi fantasy is starting to unravel"

jfkw — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 01:12:15 +0000

The idea never made sense to me, the car couldn't earn enough money to overcome the hassle and risk. I would never let random strangers ride in a car I owned without supervision. There would be a daily mess to clean up, often damage. What happens when a passenger does something that gets the car and owner caught up in civil forfeiture laws?

New comment by jfkw in "Show HN: Sonatino – small audio dev board based on ESP32-S3"

jfkw — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 06:11:46 +0000

Can the developer or any Rust users comment on using Sonatino with the Rust ESP32-S3 toolchain?

Is there an SVD file defining the Sonatino's specialized peripherals so one can use rust2svd to create a Peripheral Access Crate (PAC) specific to the Sonatino? I'm interested in the other ergonomic Rust HAL representations as well.

https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-pacs/tree/main/esp32s3

https://github.com/rust-embedded/svd2rust

https://github.com/rust-embedded/awesome-embedded-rust?tab=r...

New comment by jfkw in "Ask HN: Create audio software akin to physics engines?"

jfkw — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 19:54:55 +0000

Engine Simulator is an interesting example of this type of work: https://www.youtube.com/@AngeTheGreat

New comment by jfkw in "Google releases smart watch for kids"

jfkw — Wed, 29 May 2024 19:22:48 +0000

I was hopeful this would be minimalist, secured contacts version of general purpose OS used in more powerful smartwatches. Regular phone and message apps, parent-limited contacts, communications logged where the parent can review/block it.

We are currently sharing a Verizon Gizmo 3 among multiple children. The GizmoHub app is not bad but its mandatory use is frustrating. Friends need substantial parental help to start communicating with the Gizmo user (account creation with Verizon). Forcing all communications through a dedicated and clunky app is a non-starter.

Battery life is the other challenge. Kids don't heed advice to conserve the less than all day battery life. Later when communications for pick-up are most needed, the watch is often low on power.

New comment by jfkw in "Goal: Pass all 4259065 tests in sqllogictest in 1 week"

jfkw — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 19:09:45 +0000

I couldn't figure out what software is being developed to pass the sqllogittest suite here. Will this be a SQLite-like database or SQL parser implemented Zig?

New comment by jfkw in "Ask HN: Any open source stack exchange clone"

jfkw — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 14:58:56 +0000

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

"... Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse."

New comment by jfkw in "Restic 0.14.0 Released (with highly anticipated feature – compression)"

jfkw — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 22:39:05 +0000

Compression method appears to be zstandard and uses https://github.com/klauspost/compress, for those wondering like I was.

New comment by jfkw in "Chess.com vs. Lichess"

jfkw — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 23:51:08 +0000

Glad to see Lichess mentioned here. I have been trying without success to log in or password reset using a Gmail account. Messages from Lichess never seem to be delivered to Gmail, even to the Spam folder. Short of creating a throwaway account to access the forums, is there any alternate way to contact Lichess admins to ask if this is a known issue?

New comment by jfkw in "Joy: Web framework with Clojure syntax, fast startup and low memory usage"

jfkw — Sat, 02 May 2020 05:29:24 +0000

Does jpm have an option install packages to a local environment (virtualenv)?

New comment by jfkw in "What happened to Mint?"

jfkw — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 17:19:33 +0000

I've never understood what motivated financial institutions to grant Mint access to account transactions and balances? Did pre-acquisition Mint somehow reach a tipping point in active users where financial institutions decided their customers would choose other banks if theirs wasn't accessible through Mint?

Are there other competing tools that have similar reach connecting to financial institution accounts?

New comment by jfkw in "Google Kills Cloud Print"

jfkw — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 22:20:34 +0000

Of all the free services to kill, this one really hurts. I just got my parents migrated to using Cloud Print with their Chromebooks and iStuff. As I am providing the usual family-plan IT advice from several timezones away, Cloud Print solved the biggest headache of getting their current project printed to their house or office from wherever they are (or me, if I am helping them). Supporting local printers was a time sink, and remote printing is the logical complement to cloud applications. It seems shortsighted to give it up when there is no real competition in this space AFAICT.

New comment by jfkw in "Update on free software and telemetry"

jfkw — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 00:05:44 +0000

From the article "... To make GitLab better faster, we need more data on how users are using GitLab. SaaS telemetry products, which provide analytics on user behavior inside web-based applications, have come a long way in the past few years. They are an important tool for rapidly improving user experiences because you can understand what users are doing (or not doing) in the app. GitLab has a lot of features, and a lot of users, and it is time that we use telemetry to get the data we need for our product managers to improve the experience."

This doesn't seem like a sufficiently good justification add telemetry features which some users may find objectionable.

Perhaps those resources would be better spent on a feature that let the user who is annoyed by a slow operation to:

- Begin recording user interaction telemetry locally - Perform the slow or buggy operation - Stop recording, generating a data bundle file. - Allow the user to review the data bundle in human-readable format - Optionally take the data bundle to a less secured system as needed - Submit the data bundle to GitLab engineering as a well-filed issue

Done that way, I think most users would welcome the interaction with Gitlab. For telemetry, not so much.

New comment by jfkw in "PyPy's New JSON Parser"

jfkw — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 15:04:12 +0000

while reading that bug, I am reminded how amazed I am that the Roundup issue tracker [1] has continued to serve Python development after all this time and through transitions in hosting and workflow. Roundup is neat, and I'm glad it exists.

[1] http://roundup.sourceforge.net/

New comment by jfkw in "Ask HN: BugsEverywhere was a great idea – why didn't it catch on?"

jfkw — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 18:12:59 +0000

I also favor issue tracking integrated with the source code and experimented with most of these systems. The first roadblock I noticed to using distributed issue trackers was that the client programs need to be extremely convenient to install on the personal OS and mobile device of everyone involved in the project, something which is very difficult to deliver. A web interface with editing capability could cover some cases, but then you're obliged to host it on a server somewhere.

New comment by jfkw in "Spilld Email Server"

jfkw — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 05:00:10 +0000

There is an active lamson fork https://github.com/moggers87/salmon that retains the original GPL license and supports current Python 2.x and 3.x versions.

New comment by jfkw in "Associations of Cognitive Function with Carbon Dioxide and Ventilation (2016)"

jfkw — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 04:53:44 +0000

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/23/carbon-dioxide-an-open...

New comment by jfkw in "Ask HN: Kibana like data explorer UI for PostgreSQL?"

jfkw — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 12:57:36 +0000

Grafana recently announced Loki: https://grafana.com/blog/2018/12/12/loki-prometheus-inspired...

New comment by jfkw in "OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world"

jfkw — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 16:08:11 +0000

Indeed. I have three XO-1 from the original G1G1 program, and my small kids love them. They are at this point a little difficult for the kids to use due to slow UI response, degraded touchpad accuracy, lack of limits on objects created in the physics program, text to speech program, etc.

I have been looking for and would eagerly buy a Rasberry PI retrofit kit if someone makes one.

New comment by jfkw in "Using gpg-agent Effectively"

jfkw — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 21:47:11 +0000

This is very informative, thanks.

While I haven't investigated the additional benefits of running gpg-agent as a service as you've shown here, I did want to mention Keychain [0] which has been great for managing ssh-agent and gpg-agent for console use.

[0] https://www.funtoo.org/Keychain