Hacker News: jtickle

New comment by jtickle in "Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team"

jtickle — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:27:43 +0000

OpenBSD folks would consider the GPL to be less open due to the requirement to apply the GPL to any derivative works.

New comment by jtickle in "Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country?"

jtickle — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:52:09 +0000

I don't have you in my log! Southeast US here. What aspects of ham radio are you into? Any HF nets you frequent? To be honest, life keeps me away from radio most of the time so there is nothing "regular" that I participate in outside the two Field Days, but if things ever slow down I will have the license and the equipment for it. I got in due to a general interest in technology but I like contesting, the occasional net, and someday I would like to practice CW (have "learned it" twice now but have been unable to dedicate the time to practice). I like digital modes and am not anti-FT8 but I wish there was more use of the "conversational" modes like RTTY or others in fldigi.

New comment by jtickle in "Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country?"

jtickle — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:33:05 +0000

If you are interested, find and go to an amateur radio club meeting. The licensing test makes sure you know the regulations and some theory. It does not help introduce you to "ham culture" which is definitely a thing. I learned all the practical stuff from talking with local club members. They are usually overjoyed for new members; if not just go to the next club. Youtube and whatnot helps but it's better to be able to ask someone a stupid question, and believe me, if you want to be overwhelmed with information, ask a ham a question. In my experience there are some assholes but more genuinely kind people, mostly older folks who just want to connect with someone.

New comment by jtickle in "A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024)"

jtickle — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:54:05 +0000

This is amazing to see. I have some audio recordings, digitized from tapes recorded in the 1960s, of my great-grandfather who was raised on a farm in Iowa. He talks about his experiences in amateur radio in the early 1900s-1920s. He mentioned bringing telephones out into the field that could be clipped to the fence wire to make calls back to the house, which was not hooked up to an electric grid but had batteries. Sadly, he did not say how the batteries were re-charged.

New comment by jtickle in "BCacheFS is being disabled in the openSUSE kernels 6.17+"

jtickle — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 11:31:01 +0000

All of the "btrfs eats your data" bugs have been fixed and the people who constantly repeat them are people who relied on an experimental filesystem for files they cared not to lose. FUD all around. I have a btrfs on my home file server that's been running just fine for almost 10 years now and has survived the initial underlying hard drives mechanical death. Since then I have used it in plenty of production environments.

Don't do RAID 5. Just don't. That's not just a btrfs shortcoming. I lost a hardware RAID 5 due to "puncture" which would have been fascinating to learn about if it hadn't happened to a production database. It's an academically interesting concept but it is too dangerous especially with how large drives are now, if you're buying three, buy four instead. RAID 10 is much safer especially for software RAID.

Stop parroting lies about btrfs. Since it became marked stable, it has been a reliable, trustworthy, performant filesystem.

But as much as I trust it I also have backups because if you love your data, it's your own fault if you don't back it up and regularly verify the backups.

New comment by jtickle in "Over 80% of sunscreen performed below their labelled efficacy (2020)"

jtickle — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:32:28 +0000

I know ultraviolet CCD sensors exist and are probably expensive, specialty scientific equipment. I've kinda had this hope that one smartphone manufacturer (any of the big ones) would go to the trouble of including a UV camera and drive costs down. On the one hand you can market a unique and fun photography tool that lets you see the world in a different way. And then in the more serious part of the commercial, you show friends at the beach taking UV pictures of each other after applying sunscreen and one person says "You missed a spot right there, mate."

Plus I'd imagine you could immediately tell if your sunblock were BS and do an even better job of holding these folks accountable. You and buddy of similar skin tone both buy SPF 50 and apply it, take pictures, and see that one of you is not as well protected.

New comment by jtickle in "Claude Code Checkpoints"

jtickle — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 12:36:40 +0000

I recently started using Aider and had that thought about too many commits. What I realized though was: (1) if I'm going to contribute to a project, I should be working in a local branch and interactively rebasing to clean up my history anyway (and of course carefully reviewing Aider's work first) and (2) if I'm working on my own thing WITHOUT LLM, I tend to prefer to commit every dang little change anyway, I just don't remember to do it because I'm in the zone and then inevitably wish I had at some point.

New comment by jtickle in "Vanilla JavaScript support for Tailwind Plus"

jtickle — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 13:34:21 +0000

I have seen this sentiment on HN a lot recently. Any good resources for that? I was quite the accomplished web developer 15-20 years ago and want to catch up without having to learn a new library or framework every six months.