Hacker News: jnellis

New comment by jnellis in "I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)"

jnellis — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:14:15 +0000

As an ex-Navy Seal, and JAG officer who retired for the slow life of owning a hardware store in a sleepy small town, only to accidentally uncover a international multi-million dollar conspiracy with help from the voluptuous town sheriff twenty years my junior... this math all adds up nicely.

New comment by jnellis in "Cooling copper plates could slash data center energy use by 90%"

jnellis — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:15:23 +0000

I heard copper is better an transferring heat but aluminum is better at RELEASING heat via airflow. Hence you see copper tubes on cpu coolers that terminate in aluminum fins.

New comment by jnellis in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

jnellis — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:34:07 +0000

Was this not lampooned directly in "40 Year Old Virgin" where a young Jonah Hill tries to buy some disco boots at an ebay store but can't because you have to go through the website.

New comment by jnellis in "SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit [pdf] (2017)"

jnellis — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 15:22:40 +0000

When I did commercial fishing in Alaska, often the boats just had two speakers, one in the wheel house and one on the deck (long liner). You just talked into/toward the speaker.

New comment by jnellis in "The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew"

jnellis — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:55:27 +0000

When I was in cooking school there was a brief lesson in photo presentation. For something like a burger you would skew from front to back, going upward to the top bun to show the layers better but it wasn't visually noticeable that it was skewed on the photo. This seems like the same thing except the ai has chosen the side view instead of the frontal view, thus making the skew very noticeable.

New comment by jnellis in "Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)"

jnellis — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 03:06:00 +0000

The 68 Ford Thunderbird (w/ suicide doors.) Mustangs also came in this color. https://imgur.com/a/BbzHVMn

New comment by jnellis in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

jnellis — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 03:32:33 +0000

This was a design choice by AMD at the time for their Athlon Slot A cpus. Use the same slot A board which you could set the cpu speed by bridging a connections. Since the Slot A came in a package, you couldn't see the actual cpu etching. So shady cpu sellers would pull the cover off high speed cpus, and put them on slow speed cpus after overclocking them to unstable levels.

New comment by jnellis in "Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died"

jnellis — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:46:16 +0000

The library wait list for Hyperion was months. I'm in the middle of Fall of Hyperion right now. Great writing.

New comment by jnellis in "What Happened to Fry's Electronics"

jnellis — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:07:25 +0000

You could watch people return items, them tossing them into a bin, and then some employee later taking that bins straight back out to floor to restock. No shrink wrapping needed. Learning how to detect refried parts was crucial to shopping there. In SoCal, Frys was just a place to get a part quick. Reliable or quality parts required going to a place like MWave or wait for newegg to ship.

New comment by jnellis in "Gamedate – A site to revive dead multiplayer games"

jnellis — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 16:21:37 +0000

Is this restricted to only games that use steam Master Server Query Protocol?

New comment by jnellis in "14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight"

jnellis — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 22:32:42 +0000

That the construction method of most hollow-core doors in your house.

New comment by jnellis in "Booting from a vinyl record (2020)"

jnellis — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:21:34 +0000

They would come in computer mags. Byte, Compute, Creative Computing. Hobbyist magazines. You had to record them to your cassette drive first.

New comment by jnellis in "Swapping two blocks of memory inside a larger block, in constant memory"

jnellis — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:54:32 +0000

Java chooses to use the cycle method mostly. They also reference Bentley.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/f1e0e0c25ec62a543b9cbfab...

New comment by jnellis in "Floor796"

jnellis — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 17:19:06 +0000

just win10 and firefox. It wanted to run workers in firefox, locked up firefox, then somehow taskmanager was locked up and things went downhill from there.

New comment by jnellis in "Floor796"

jnellis — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 16:31:43 +0000

Nice, this just crashed my entire desktop.

New comment by jnellis in "A study reveals that deciduous trees' roots remain active in winter"

jnellis — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 15:11:10 +0000

The bulk of roto-rooter calls to clear home sewer lines of tree roots happens during winter.

New comment by jnellis in "Magnesium Self-Experiments"

jnellis — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 19:00:52 +0000

I find this to be true as well. I have nerve damage/pressure from bad back. If I miss a dose before bed, I almost invariably get a calf cramp in the early morning hours before waking. Very annoying, only way to get rid of it is get out of bed and stand up on it. I think flooding the body with the magnesium before bed, before it has a chance to maybe get rid of excess perhaps, because taking it too far from bedtime I'll still have twitches and cramps.

New comment by jnellis in "WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)"

jnellis — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 17:06:20 +0000

I ran across this theory years ago about a piece of legislation in late 1970 allowed lobbyists into previously closed door committee meetings, thus allowing lobbyists to assert direct pressure on congressional members. The second video is from the same guy but is rather long and goes into this idea that transparency in congressional committees is a counter-intuitively bad idea because it allows lobbyists to proactively apply pressure before anything ever gets to a floor vote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgqhywW9Cto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY

New comment by jnellis in "Thunderbird Turns 20 Years Old"

jnellis — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 17:26:29 +0000

I just installed it. If you've already been a desktop user, they've made importing accounts pretty painless by having the phone app take pictures of qr code on your desktop. The UI is definitely less polished than K-9 on first impression but I suspect it will get better.

It would be great if it can sync junk training settings between the two.

New comment by jnellis in "1JPM: A Maven/Gradle alternative in a single Java file"

jnellis — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 02:24:55 +0000

I believe you can use shebang since java 11 but you can't have the filename extension be .java.