Hacker News: maccam94

New comment by maccam94 in "Starship's Twelfth Flight Test"

maccam94 — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:01:39 +0000

Dang, they aren't catching the booster this time, but I guess V3 is practically a new vehicle and validating the next Starship launch is probably too critical to risk damage to the launch site for now.

New comment by maccam94 in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

maccam94 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:55:21 +0000

In Zulip, if a thread meanders with messages about a tangent, the authors/mods can choose to move those messages to a new thread (and IIRC messages with links between the two threads are created so it's easy to jump back and forth for any missing context)

New comment by maccam94 in "FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices"

maccam94 — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 02:18:40 +0000

If you're laying a communications cable, you should just do fiber. It can carry any type of traffic at high data rates, and you can upgrade the speed over time by just replacing the optics at the ends rather than having to replace the whole cable. Fiber plans are only expensive if your service level is expensive, or if you have to pay to get the line run to your building

New comment by maccam94 in "Murder Mystery: GCC Builds Failing After Sbuild Refactoring"

maccam94 — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 17:51:41 +0000

Yeah, as far as I know the only way to be sure is by putting the parent process into a cgroup. Then to kill all of the child processes you have to freeze the cgroup, enumerate the pids, send sigterm/sigkill to all of them, before unfreezing again.

New comment by maccam94 in "Starlink Direct to Cell"

maccam94 — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 21:05:57 +0000

very slowly, with the radio at maximum power, and no obstructions

New comment by maccam94 in "Starlink Direct to Cell"

maccam94 — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 21:03:03 +0000

It uses a different transceiver on the satellite which is broadcasting a ~standard LTE signal, at a miniscule data rate

New comment by maccam94 in "Helium is essential but nonrenewable and difficult to recycle"

maccam94 — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 07:28:39 +0000

I looked around last week to see if they are on the market yet, and found that Philips already seems to have helium-free MRIs for sale. I'm not sure if they just sealed it better or switched to REBCO.

edit: nvm, finally found more info. it's just better sealed helium https://www.usa.philips.com/healthcare/resources/landing/the...

New comment by maccam94 in "Six Great Features with the Upcoming Linux 6.6 Kernel"

maccam94 — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 16:38:04 +0000

The Linux kernel doesn't have a stable ABI. Thus, if a kernel function signature changes, or a subsystem gets refactored, etc, drivers get updated as part of the process. If the drivers lived outside the kernel tree, they would have to be updated separately by their own maintainers. That's less efficient and prone to breakage, so generally driver modules are merged into the kernel tree. Often they can even share code with other hardware devices!

New comment by maccam94 in "Was Rust Worth It?"

maccam94 — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 07:25:11 +0000

Not sure what you mean by "userland" drivers here, but support for kernel modules written in rust is actively being developed. It's already being used for kernel drivers like the Asahi Linux GPU driver for M1 Macs.

New comment by maccam94 in "Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99"

maccam94 — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 07:02:57 +0000

Wait, Commonwealth Fusion Systems is already building 20T REBCO magnets, can't those meet the requirements for MRIs?

New comment by maccam94 in "Big leap for hard drive capacities: 32 TB HAMR drives due soon, 40tb on horizon"

maccam94 — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 07:28:41 +0000

Why would you use LVM with ZFS? ZFS should handle all of the features LVM has (as far as I can think of, at least).

New comment by maccam94 in "Mozilla sends popup ad overlay in Firefox"

maccam94 — Thu, 25 May 2023 17:35:14 +0000

I would have taken a full screenshot but I had my company's Gitlab open behind it.

Mozilla sends popup ad overlay in Firefox

maccam94 — Thu, 25 May 2023 17:34:11 +0000

Article URL: https://imgur.com/a/sses2D2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36073619

Points: 23

# Comments: 10

New comment by maccam94 in "Reddit has been down for more than an hour"

maccam94 — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 23:57:45 +0000

This is called dog whistling, and is frequently used to subtly spread racist and fascist views. If you're not doing that, arguing in bad faith is a waste of everyone's time and provides no value to the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_%28politics%29

New comment by maccam94 in "Getting Past “Ampersand-Driven Development” in Rust"

maccam94 — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 19:04:22 +0000

Rust references are basically pointers with extra rules, so using a different symbol is reasonable, and rust is immutable by default rather than opt-in (which is an important design decision) so you have to have syntax to mark things as mutable. auto is horribly uninformative for new coders, and var is too overloaded to expect newbies to only use it for mutable variables.

New comment by maccam94 in "Daily.place"

maccam94 — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 07:26:55 +0000

Back in my Windows XP days I had an app installed called Desktop Sidebar[1], which would be exactly the place I'd want all of this functionality today. Or in some kind of widget layer, like with MacOS. Hmm it's been a long time since I thought about desktop customization, maybe I should see if there is anything similar for GNOME these days.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20120527201322/http://desktopsid...

New comment by maccam94 in "Time to get the Posix elephant off our necks?"

maccam94 — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 09:12:16 +0000

Because usually they are implementing a subset of the network stack that meets their needs for communication within their internal network. Porting the entire kernel stack that actually handles all of the complexities and quirks of the open internet is a larger task than they needed to tackle.

New comment by maccam94 in "Time to get the Posix elephant off our necks?"

maccam94 — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 09:09:56 +0000

> no one ever bothered to put something together on UNIX-like systems that resembles any of those options.

What do you mean? io_uring is a Linux kernel interface, and there are several userspace projects that are building upon it.

New comment by maccam94 in "Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022"

maccam94 — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 18:20:34 +0000

If you didn't disable the write cache on those drives, flares could have caused bit flips in the cache memory before it was flushed to disk.

New comment by maccam94 in "Memory Safe Languages in Android 13"

maccam94 — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 19:36:27 +0000

Are you able to store that data in reference-counted RC/ARC types? Those can help you avoid dealing with lifetime issues, though you'll still have to think about mutability and concurrency.