Hacker News: kennethrc

New comment by kennethrc in "SpaceX S-1"

kennethrc — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:32:23 +0000

> COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177

It may be sick, but someone's got a sense of humor over there :)

New comment by kennethrc in "Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin"

kennethrc — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:34:37 +0000

Ditto for me on every one of the ~20 places I've logged in starting in ~2017

New comment by kennethrc in "Amazon won't release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore"

kennethrc — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:35:07 +0000

Pressure from rights holders or law enforcement?

Amazon has sold ~250M Fire Sticks; there's just no way most of 'em aren't used by regular people as vanilla FSs

New comment by kennethrc in "Amazon won't release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore"

kennethrc — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:05:09 +0000

"Basically the main reason"?

I can count among my friends and family some 50 Fire Sticks, and we're all happy with them, as they do what they say on the box. We Tech folks (and some more than others) live in a bubble, but the other 99% of the users couldn't care less about this.

New comment by kennethrc in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

kennethrc — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:27:35 +0000

> You really only need dirty_ratio/bytes and dirty_background_ratio/bytes set to something lower than default.

The vm.swappiness=1 was very necessary for me as well, and made as much difference as the dirties you'd mentioned.

I usually run Linus' master kernels (as I look for regressions in certain subsystems) and I know there's been some recent changes to the MM subsystem so this may explain some of the necessity for me.

New comment by kennethrc in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

kennethrc — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:04:14 +0000

> Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine.

This may not be KDE's fault; I tracked these kinds of issues down to some bad tunable defaults.

I came up with this:

    ----
    cat /etc/sysctl.d/50-usb-responsiveness.conf
    #
    # Attempt to keep large USB transfers from locking the system (kswapd0)
    #
    vm.swappiness = 1
    vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
    vm.dirty_ratio = 5
    vm.extfrag_threshold = 1000
    vm.compaction_proactiveness = 0
    vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 200
    # FIXME? 64K too big?
    vm.page-cluster = 16
    ----

I have fast everything, NVMe SSD onboard and others in Thunderbolt 4 enclosures and 32GB of RAM on my 12th-Gen i7 with 20 (6+14) cores; there should have been no reason for any stuttering and/or Alt-Tab slowness while doing large file copies and finally got fed up, did some research and experimentation and use the above and it's not happened since.

YMMV, but it's worth a try.

(Oh, and on-topic, I've had to try Wayland (vs. X11) on my KDE desktop 'cause it seems to handle switching monitors when I go from home to work better; jury's still out if I'm keeping it)

New comment by kennethrc in "How vibe coding is killing open source"

kennethrc — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 23:02:58 +0000

Couldn't care less, honestly. That being said, I don't use any LLM for coding and it'll be a long time before I do.

New comment by kennethrc in "Amazon Discontinuing One Palm?"

kennethrc — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:44:43 +0000

I love(d) it and used it every time I'd go to WF, but TBF I heard about it by "accident" (some small ad somewhere, or maybe it was in the Amazon app?) ... I got the impression Amazon just didn't want to push it much.

New comment by kennethrc in "Amazon Discontinuing One Palm?"

kennethrc — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 05:05:54 +0000

Aw ... it was really nice at Whole Paycheck, I'm going to miss it.

Any guesses as to why? Unlike Google Maps Timeline data being subpoenaed, I can't see what LE could use with this (since they have other ways to determine you were at a store), so that can't(?) be the reason why.

Oh wait- was this available in the EU?

New comment by kennethrc in "Locating a Photo of a Vehicle in 30 Seconds with GeoSpy"

kennethrc — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 20:00:52 +0000

> I grew up drinking the 'American culture ...'

> misspells "Kool-Aid"

New comment by kennethrc in "A spider web unlike any seen before"

kennethrc — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 08:01:48 +0000

... excuse me while I Nope! TF out

New comment by kennethrc in "Netflix kills casting from its mobile app to most modern TVs"

kennethrc — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:34:32 +0000

> in the era of the most cutting edge breakthroughs in video

... and what are those?

New comment by kennethrc in "Loose wire leads to blackout, contact with Francis Scott Key bridge"

kennethrc — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 21:38:33 +0000

Likewise with decorative hedges and other gardenwork; your post brought to mind this one hotel I stay regularly where a hedge is high enough and close enough to the exit that you have to nearly pull into the street to see if there's oncoming cars. I've mentioned to the FD that it's gonna get someone hurt one day, yet they've done nothing about it for years now.

New comment by kennethrc in "Canadian bill would strip internet access from 'specified persons', no warrant"

kennethrc — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:47:04 +0000

> IF they're proven to be dangerous to others if they access the internet

... which means what? They espouse ideas "you" don't like?

New comment by kennethrc in "Our data shows San Francisco tech workers are working Saturdays"

kennethrc — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 20:15:40 +0000

This. Don't get your downvotes, either. Sometimes you just wanna get something done, and hell, it's usually quiet AF on the weekends in-office, too.

New comment by kennethrc in "Here be dragons: Preventing static damage, latchup, and metastability in the 386"

kennethrc — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 21:09:50 +0000

> Has anybody ever actually destroyed a chip with static electricity?

Piling on, but yes, you very well may have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcRqj9FhgcE

New comment by kennethrc in "Why is there a date of 1968 in the Intel Chipset Device Software Utility?"

kennethrc — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 20:45:05 +0000

RTFA

New comment by kennethrc in "A Typology of Canadianisms"

kennethrc — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:41:35 +0000

"Fuck you, Shoresy!"

New comment by kennethrc in "Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170"

kennethrc — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 18:26:44 +0000

I have Wireguard (and OpenVPN off TCP/UDP 443 as backup) on a router connected to residential symmetric 1G fiber. Among the many uses for that means I can watch the NFL (et al.) when abroad just as if I were home; there's WG/OPVN clients for the FireSticks I carry when travelling.

New comment by kennethrc in "Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170"

kennethrc — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 18:19:31 +0000

It seems as it would average out, but I wonder if the equation between " ~2500 people for a 7-14 days" vs. " ~175 people for 2-5 hours" incurs more "costs" for the former?