Hacker News: mcculley

New comment by mcculley in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

mcculley — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:18:24 +0000

The web needs a HIG.

All of these people who keep saying that webapps can replace desktop applications were simply never desktop power users. They don’t know what they don’t know.

New comment by mcculley in "The best seat in town"

mcculley — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:24:00 +0000

The existence of well maintained and clean public restrooms and hooligans is a shibboleth for culture. Some cultures are simply superior.

New comment by mcculley in "Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead"

mcculley — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:16:56 +0000

> You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license".

You do not "own" the movie. You still only have the right to view your personal copies. You cannot broadcast it. You cannot charge others to watch it.

New comment by mcculley in "A macOS bug that causes TCP networking to stop working after 49.7 days"

mcculley — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:36:47 +0000

Yes. I do mean designing software to make it testable.

The code that uses that value can be run in an environment where that value can be controlled.

I have written code that does this same thing and built a test harness for it.

New comment by mcculley in "A macOS bug that causes TCP networking to stop working after 49.7 days"

mcculley — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:11:54 +0000

> It will not be caught in development testing — who runs a test for 50 days?

You don't have to run the system for 50 days. You can simulate the environment and tick the clock faster. Many high reliability systems are tested this way.

New comment by mcculley in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

mcculley — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:10:14 +0000

If the U.S. implements a draft, would we first implement exit visas?

New comment by mcculley in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

mcculley — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:13:44 +0000

I never said that AI should replace all teachers. AI can help provide more teaching labor (more teaching capacity). Every child can have a personalized tutor in addition to human teachers.

See Bloom's 2 sigma problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

New comment by mcculley in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

mcculley — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:23:27 +0000

An idea I have been thinking about: Increasingly powerful chatbots provide more teaching capacity. I think this will lead to counterintuitive outcomes like teaching environments where the human student is not allowed to use any device but is being taught and tested by a synthetic intelligence.

New comment by mcculley in "'Your Frustration Is the Product'"

mcculley — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:08:35 +0000

What paid subscriptions respect the readers? I would love to pay for news from organizations that only get money from readers. For example, I have been paying for The Economist for decades and still see advertisements.

New comment by mcculley in "An old photo of a large BBS (2022)"

mcculley — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:01:35 +0000

I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?

New comment by mcculley in "Building SQLite with a small swarm"

mcculley — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:28:36 +0000

You think an implementation of SQLite in another language, with more memory safety, has no value?

I agree that this current implementation is not very useful. I would not trust it where I trust SQLite.

Regardless, the potential for having agents build clean room implementations of existing systems from existing tests has value.

New comment by mcculley in "Building SQLite with a small swarm"

mcculley — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:15:35 +0000

My interpretation of the GP comment is that you are saying the same thing. Linux will return a pointer that is valid for your address space mappings, but might not be safe to actually use, because of VM overcommit. Unixes in general have no way to tell the process how much heap can be safely allocated.

New comment by mcculley in "Evolution of car door handles over the decades"

mcculley — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:34:22 +0000

I am bemused every time I use Uber and the car has some flush-mounted door handle that I have to figure out. When exiting the car and closing the door, I end up leaving fingerprints I would not have left if the handle had been designed by someone who had been in a car before.

New comment by mcculley in "Apple Platform Security (Jan 2026) [pdf]"

mcculley — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 20:32:43 +0000

> Whole disk encryption is pretty fast today, but probably is a bit slower than unencrypted.

Isn’t whole disk encryption nowadays done in hardware on the storage controller?

New comment by mcculley in "Mobile carriers can get your GPS location"

mcculley — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 20:07:54 +0000

I am not sure that we are in the same conversation. I misinterpreted your reply to my comment as having something to do with it.

New comment by mcculley in "Mobile carriers can get your GPS location"

mcculley — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:00:13 +0000

I did not argue for or against collection of GPS data.

New comment by mcculley in "Mobile carriers can get your GPS location"

mcculley — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:59:10 +0000

What magical technology do you think would beat GPS?

New comment by mcculley in "Mobile carriers can get your GPS location"

mcculley — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:07:41 +0000

Cell tower triangulation does not provide the same precision as GPS.

New comment by mcculley in "Mobile carriers can get your GPS location"

mcculley — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:07:11 +0000

Cell tower triangulation does not provide the same precision as GPS.

New comment by mcculley in "A list of fun destinations for telnet"

mcculley — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:19:34 +0000

How was a noise other than ASCII BEL sent over telnet?