Hacker News: kbutler

New comment by kbutler in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

kbutler — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:46:28 +0000

Closing the strait for 1 week is 1.9% of annual traffic if equally distributed, so it is very similar.

New comment by kbutler in "The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House"

kbutler — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:28:43 +0000

Refactoring w/o removing all dead code.

New comment by kbutler in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened"

kbutler — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:23:41 +0000

I finally subscribed to Dr. Dobbs for the Michael Abrash graphics articles, about a month before he ended them.

New comment by kbutler in "Apple I Advertisement (1976)"

kbutler — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 03:18:32 +0000

I doubt anyone thought the sticker made it actually legal.

More along the lines of "65 miles an hour? I was only out for 30 minutes..."

New comment by kbutler in "Heathrow scraps liquid container limit"

kbutler — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 03:58:23 +0000

When gate-checking carryon bags, staff told passengers to take batteries out of the carryons.

It seems like something that is high risk during flight shouldn't be left to passenger compliance with spoken instructions.

New comment by kbutler in "Replace the Retiring Windows XP with Linux (2014)"

kbutler — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 17:27:45 +0000

More current discussion:

I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574707

One of these years is going to be the year of the Linux desktop!

Hmm: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Linux+desktop&...

New comment by kbutler in "I changed my personality in six weeks"

kbutler — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:27:57 +0000

I think there's some truth to this - you may still have the tendencies to be introverted, neurotic, disagreeable, etc., but you can choose how much you let those tendencies drive your behavior.

You have a choice of how to respond to your feelings - if you feel introverted, so you never talk to people, it dominates your life and personality. If you feel introverted, but you frequently talk to people anyway, you can make friends, participate in activities, and reduce the impact of those feelings on your life.

"I have a tendency (diagnosis), therefore I'm excused" or "I have a tendency, so I've created habits to create good results in spite of it."

And with practice, it gets easier, though it may always take work, and much more effort than for people to whom it comes naturally.

Maybe this doesn't change your personality to "I naturally socialize with others", but maybe it lets you change to "I can enjoy socializing with others".

New comment by kbutler in "Linux is good now"

kbutler — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 05:55:37 +0000

You may be thinking DVI, which is a subset of HDMI, and lacks audio, and can have a passive DVI->HDMI connection.

New comment by kbutler in "Maybe the default settings are too high"

kbutler — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 21:48:57 +0000

We had tried video in the car for our teens, but found that audio books worked a lot better - shared experience, nobody has a bad angle/line of sight, can still see the scenery and engage in the travel, less looking down prompting motion sickness, etc.

Though now that everybody has a device, we have to intentionally opt for a shared experience, rather than 1:1 devices.

New comment by kbutler in "You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving"

kbutler — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 04:45:24 +0000

Wow, politics seems the opposite to me. It has the morbid fascination of a train wreck. You can't stop it, you know it's going badly, yet you can't look away.

Family and building things are much more positive sources of energy to me.

New comment by kbutler in "Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away"

kbutler — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 15:32:57 +0000

Looks like others have reported similar issues. Entering a navigation route may help?

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/map-location-and-rou...

New comment by kbutler in "Racket v9.0"

kbutler — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:21:53 +0000

To be fair, "write an interpreter for a subset of scheme" is a core use case for lisp-family languages.

If it had been,"write a real-time driver for a memory-limited piece of hardware", you may have had a different preference.

New comment by kbutler in "Ultima VII Revisited"

kbutler — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 16:41:04 +0000

The recent Wizardry remaster encouraged me to go back and play other nostalgic games - finished Ultima I and II, but the nostalgia wasn't strong enough to keep going through the busywork and UI impedance of others.

I'll keep this one on my list for when nostalgia strikes again...

New comment by kbutler in "The pivot"

kbutler — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 13:14:11 +0000

Also from that article:

"while China was responsible for more than 60% of global increase in overall oil demand between 2013 and 2023, it represented less than 20% of last year’s rise, largely as a result of its slowdown in fuel use."

New comment by kbutler in "Titanic's sister, Britannic, sank in 1916. Divers have recovered artifacts"

kbutler — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 17:28:12 +0000

Yes, looks like ground control points for photogrammetry. https://www.pix4d.com/blog/diving-into-underwater-photogramm...

New comment by kbutler in "Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug"

kbutler — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 18:49:31 +0000

The article was published in 2016, and the authors extrapolated from 7 data points (!) over about 7 years of progress in the world record. This is obviously insufficient to project 30 years into the future.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27446911/#&gid=article-figur...

That record progressed

  2008 18.58
  2015 15.71

2.87 seconds over 7 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenichi_Ito_(athlete)

If we check in on more recent progress since then, we find the current record is 15.66 set in 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20241222175947/https://www.guinn...

Another 7 years, for an improvement of 0.05 seconds, or about 850 years of linear improvement to reach Bolt's 9.58 seconds.

Anyone wanting to bet on beating Bolt by 2048?

New comment by kbutler in "Eastern Baltic cod grow much smaller than they did due to overfishing"

kbutler — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:48:06 +0000

...less fit for their environment excluding human fishing pressure.

New comment by kbutler in "Eastern Baltic cod grow much smaller than they did due to overfishing"

kbutler — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:47:01 +0000

...haven't /INTENTIONALLY/ discriminated by size...

The article says smaller fish could more easily escape the nets. Though it doesn't cite studies documenting that, it does seem reasonable.

New comment by kbutler in "Where in the world are babies at the lowest risk of dying?"

kbutler — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 20:36:07 +0000

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/infant_mortality_r...

I wonder how the consistent gestational period adjustments would affect the statistics for the various states.

New comment by kbutler in "Show HN: BetterFriend – a CRM just to be a better friend"

kbutler — Sun, 25 May 2025 18:13:04 +0000

Like eating a vegetables and proteins is just more of the same fats and sugars?

I live a long distance from my parents and siblings - technology helps me retain some closeness with them that would not otherwise be possible.

I live close to my children. Technology could be a barrier to closeness with them.