Hacker News: massysett

New comment by massysett in "Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose. Who Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?"

massysett — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:09:22 +0000

As the saying goes, anyone can build a bridge that lasts forever. It takes an engineer to build one that lasts fifty years.

New comment by massysett in "Mythical Man Month"

massysett — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:21:54 +0000

Nine women can already have babies in parallel. That is, nine women cannot have a baby in one month, but nine women can have nine babies in nine months.

New comment by massysett in "I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook"

massysett — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:40:44 +0000

“Liquid Glass and Apple's software incompetence is absolutely universally hated,”

Author is in a bubble. I know many iPhone users and none complain about Liquid Glass. When it landed on my phone, I shrugged.

New comment by massysett in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

massysett — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:54:12 +0000

I sat in small claims court one day to watch.

A plaintiff won a judgment. He asked the judge: “what do I do now?” The judge replied: “well, if you’re reading the paper one day and see ‘defendant wins the Powerball,’ then you know exactly what to do.”

New comment by massysett in "The Joy of Folding Bikes"

massysett — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 01:51:33 +0000

The thing is, everyone can't have 4 empty seats to drive to work in New York City. There's only so much space on the streets and in the bridges and tunnels, and now there's a congestion charge on top of that.

New comment by massysett in "New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper"

massysett — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 11:55:47 +0000

Now I only buy USB cables if they are marked with their speed and wattage. If it’s not marked, I have to assume it carries little power and is glacially slow, which is fine to charge some Bluetooth headphones but is not usable to connect an SSD.

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_cable_log...

New comment by massysett in "Up to 8M Bees Are Living in an Underground Network Beneath This Cemetery"

massysett — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:05:29 +0000

The bees live alone and do not seem to socialize in any way, so this is not a “network” or “city”. The study says “aggregation” which is more appropriate.

New comment by massysett in "Modern Common Lisp with FSet"

massysett — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 15:32:57 +0000

This is how Texinfo (which this uses) works. It's the same if you navigate it with an Info reader: "n" goes to the "next" node, which behaves as you point out.

When I'm reading in an Info reader (almost always in GNU Emacs) I always hit the spacebar when reading. This scrolls down a page and, if it's at the end of a page and, if at the bottom, goes to the next subnode - in other words, what "makes sense." (Actually the binding for this is "Info-scroll-up".)

That doesn't help when you're on a website, but for me Texinfo websites have a distinctive look and when I see them, I immediately know what clicking "Next" will do, and I know to instead go to the bottom of the page and go to the subnodes if that's what I want, which it typically is.

I agree that it's weird...but maybe understanding the overall weirdness of Texinfo helps it all make sense?? A more coherent weirdness?

New comment by massysett in "Backblaze has stopped backing up your data"

massysett — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:14:13 +0000

I just looked in my Backblaze restore program, and all my .git folders are in there. I did have to go to the Settings menu and toggle an option to show hidden files. This is the Mac version.

New comment by massysett in "Backblaze has stopped backing up your data"

massysett — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 10:36:10 +0000

How is the performance? For me it takes Arq over an hour just to scan my files for changes.

New comment by massysett in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

massysett — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:31:48 +0000

Meet macOS System Integrity Protection. Even root can’t do some things. Some hate it, I love it and would never turn it off. I know some parts of my system haven’t been gunked up by random vendors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Integrity_Protection

New comment by massysett in "I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop"

massysett — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:54:53 +0000

These customers own expensive cars - or at least, cars that were expensive when they were new. The car might now be ten years old or more, and the owner bought it used. They want a prestige marque, but the customer does not have the money to buy a new prestige car. So they are looking to save on service.

All the time I see cars with expensive names - BMW, Mercedes Benz - broken down on the side of the road, while old Hondas and Toyotas keep cruising by. Those are the customers for this shop: they spent all their money buying an expensive used car, and now they can't afford to maintain it and fix looming problems; meanwhile the Toyota or Hyundai driver gets maintenance and maybe even takes it to the dealer for it.

A mechanic like this can't afford to hire someone to answer the phone. Such a person is expensive, and these customers want rock-bottom prices despite the car being expensive. So a chatbot is good enough and better than nothing.

New comment by massysett in "Common Lisp Development Tooling"

massysett — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 03:15:24 +0000

Ok, presume it is. Why is this a useful observation? The author still needed to poke and prod the LLM to produce useful information. She still needed to know what questions to ask and prompts to give, and hopefully steered it right when it made up falsehoods.

I’ve used CL for years and the layered model fits with my experience yet I never conceived of it exactly that way. It’s useful. So what if an LLM wrote it?

New comment by massysett in "HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)"

massysett — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:42:50 +0000

Yeah, but Baby Bell would dispatch a technician to your house if needed.

New comment by massysett in "Why I love FreeBSD"

massysett — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:15:26 +0000

What kind of Brother laser printer is this? If it’s Postscript or PCL or AirPrint you don’t need drivers.

New comment by massysett in "The Road Not Taken: A World Where IPv4 Evolved"

massysett — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:00:31 +0000

No. Which doesn’t prove the technology has not been adopted. The internet also consists of much more than public-facing websites. So what’s your point?

New comment by massysett in "The Road Not Taken: A World Where IPv4 Evolved"

massysett — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:17:40 +0000

“IPv6 is waiting for adoption”

A major website sees over 46 percent of its traffic over ipv6. A major mobile operator has a network that runs entirely over ipv6.

This is not “waiting for adoption” so I stopped reading there.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

https://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/2014/case-study-t-...

New comment by massysett in "SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]"

massysett — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:44:05 +0000

I don’t get it either. The CMUCL compiler is named Python, no relation to the prominent language. Not sure that’s what this was about though.

New comment by massysett in "Ask HN: Why there are no actual studies that show AI is more productive?"

massysett — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:29:04 +0000

Heh, I guess Apple needs to better use AI to review all the AI-written apps.

New comment by massysett in "MacBook Neo"

massysett — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:46:15 +0000

Easy: MacBook Air. The friend is asking this question, so that’s what they need. If they needed a MacBook Pro, they wouldn’t be asking this question. If they wanted to spend as little as possible, they would have already bought something cheap, like a PC or Chromebook or now this Neo, so they wouldn’t be asking this question.