Hacker News: marssaxman

New comment by marssaxman in "European civil servants are being forced off WhatsApp"

marssaxman — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:31:48 +0000

Digital sovereignty would always have been a good idea, regardless of the present insanity.

New comment by marssaxman in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"

marssaxman — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:52:53 +0000

I used vLLM and qwen3-coder-next to batch-process a couple million documents recently. No token quota, no rate limits, just 100% GPU utilization until the job was done.

New comment by marssaxman in "The Rise of the Em-Dash in Hacker News Comments"

marssaxman — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:43:20 +0000

The option-key layout system was easier to memorize than the compose-key patterns, which I struggle to recall. I couldn't tell you why, I just felt like I got the hang of it easily, while using the compose key system has always been slow and clunky.

I've never heard of a "level 3 shift key"; I'll have to look that up.

New comment by marssaxman in "The Rise of the Em-Dash in Hacker News Comments"

marssaxman — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:18:06 +0000

Difficult and inconvenient compared to what, I wonder? I've always really liked the Mac OS option-key system, which I found convenient and easy to understand; I sometimes wish I could type that way in linux instead of using compose keys.

New comment by marssaxman in "In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue"

marssaxman — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:11:17 +0000

A mix of renewables definitely seems like the way to go, but I also wonder whether we might start to see some seasonal industry based on power prices - bitcoin mines, or even aluminum smelters, which only run during summertime? Though I suppose less capital-intensive processes would make more sense.

New comment by marssaxman in "In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue"

marssaxman — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:53:34 +0000

Whether you store it or not, getting free energy from the sun for half the year is better than getting no energy from the sun. Every marginal reduction in fossil fuel usage helps.

New comment by marssaxman in "No one owes you supply-chain security"

marssaxman — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:02:55 +0000

> The moment a group says “use our stuff for critical projects” they take on some baseline level of responsibility for making things secure

Every popular open-source license explicitly states that exactly the opposite is true:

Apache license: "Licensor provides the Work (and each Contributor provides its Contributions) on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND"

GPL v2: "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND"

Mozilla license: "Under no circumstances and under no legal theory, whether tort (including negligence), contract, or otherwise, shall any Contributor, or anyone who distributes Covered Software as permitted above, be liable to You for any direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages of any character"

BSD license (both 2 and 3 clause versions): "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES"

MIT license: "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND"

You are and have always been on your own when using open-source software. Nobody owes you anything.

New comment by marssaxman in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

marssaxman — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:19:33 +0000

How could a comparison between such dissimilar programs ever be meaningful? NASA flew 135 Shuttle missions over the course of 30 years; Orion will be doing well to approach a tenth of that number.

New comment by marssaxman in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

marssaxman — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:30:09 +0000

That looks genuinely useful - I could see positioning a monitor like that on either side of my main monitor, at an angle, and using them for docs, reference material, slack, calendars, etc. All the screen space of a dual-monitor setup, without the separation right in the center! Ah well, shame they're no longer made.

New comment by marssaxman in "Top laptops to use with FreeBSD"

marssaxman — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:17:50 +0000

By that logic, every piece of software ever made can be said to work perfectly in every situation, because there is always some amount of additional work which could be done to make up for its native deficiencies.

New comment by marssaxman in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

marssaxman — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:41:39 +0000

They're presumably referring to the Harry Frankfurt definition of bullshit: "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care whether what they say is true or false."

New comment by marssaxman in "All Nations, World Bodies 'Must Urgently Intervene' to Stop Trump from Wiping"

marssaxman — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:21:40 +0000

I don't see the Iranian government threatening anyone with genocide, nor having anything close to the capacity for it. If you're going to rid the world of evil by overthrowing other people's governments, do us all a favor and start with the Trump regime.

New comment by marssaxman in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

marssaxman — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:54:07 +0000

I have not done much with concrete, but I have made lots of things out of many other materials over the years, and in general I have found that making things - and making them come out the way you want them - is never as simple as it looks. "Reality has a surprising amount of detail", it was once wisely written:

http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

This project is not to my personal taste but I respect the work which went in to it, and I'm glad its creator got what he wanted.

New comment by marssaxman in "Eighteen Years of Greytrapping – Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off?"

marssaxman — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:06:05 +0000

The linked article up top makes much more sense after reading the one you've linked! I had felt like I was getting a fascinating peek into a strange little corner of the internet I did not understand, but now I think I understand what the author was getting at.

New comment by marssaxman in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

marssaxman — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:51:29 +0000

It's not so hilarious, really; there's nothing like a stint in the sausage factory to put one off one's taste for sausage.

New comment by marssaxman in "Bazel is not scary anymore"

marssaxman — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:59:28 +0000

I had not been aware that bazel was scary, or that consultancies for setting up a bazel environment were even a thing that existed, but the idea of using an LLM to set up the basic system is a clever one.

New comment by marssaxman in "Show HN: Contrapunk – Real-time counterpoint harmony from guitar input"

marssaxman — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:34:39 +0000

I had not noticed that the screenshot was actually a video, so I hadn't listened - thanks for the hint.

New comment by marssaxman in "Show HN: Contrapunk – Real-time counterpoint harmony from guitar input, in Rust"

marssaxman — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:23:44 +0000

What a cool idea. I don't have a music setup capable of running this right now - perhaps in a couple of months - but if you were to post some sample recordings, I'd gladly listen to them.

How do you generate velocity values for the accompaniment notes?

Given that you already have a pitch tracker, it could be interesting to add key detection; just start playing, instead of telling the machine what key you're in, and it starts following along as soon as it catches on.

New comment by marssaxman in "What changes when you turn a Linux box into a router"

marssaxman — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:07:32 +0000

Thank you for informing me that a novel definition of the term "router" has come along since the last time I turned a Linux box into a router. The world changes in strange ways sometimes!

New comment by marssaxman in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

marssaxman — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:42:39 +0000

I'm not using Markdown; I'm using plain text, along with a handful of well-understood formatting conventions which go back decades. "Markdown" is just a prettier means of displaying such text.

HTML is not a markup language anymore; it has become a lunatic application platform, and the last thing I want when trying to read some text is the intrusion of some lunatic's application.