Hacker News: mdtancsa

New comment by mdtancsa in "I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor"

mdtancsa — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:00:09 +0000

After a long injury, I got back to slowly running on the treadmill/bike/elliptical at the gym. IIRC, my garmin qualified its VO2Max results by saying I needed to run out side for some period of time to get a more accurate measurement. I guess there is something about the running metrics it collects that has a smaller error range.

New comment by mdtancsa in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

mdtancsa — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:01:03 +0000

Hopefully something as optimistic as this and not the Quiz Broadcast :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22mt0cVyW5c

New comment by mdtancsa in "Is DWPD Still a Useful SSD Spec?"

mdtancsa — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 13:45:47 +0000

dropping off the bus is the best case fail really. Its more annoying when writes become slower than the other disks often causing confusing performance profiles of the overall array. Having good metrics for each disk (we use telegraf) will help flag it early. On my zfs pools, monitoring disk io for each disk, smartmon metrics help tease that out. For SSDs probably the worst is when there is some firmware bug that triggers on all disks at the same time. e.g. the infamous HP SSD Failure at 32,768 Hours of Use. Yikes!

New comment by mdtancsa in "New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair"

mdtancsa — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:21:32 +0000

exact same reaction. I remember hearing about "regrowing teeth through sound waves"... in 2006. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/dentist-engineer-team-up-to-... Can't say I have heard it offered anywhere yet....

New comment by mdtancsa in "Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds"

mdtancsa — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 19:20:20 +0000

For me, when I first started running, I thought going on a 5k run burnt scads of energy. At 100KG I was looking at about 400-500 cals-- Thats a fancy muffin basically. But when you start hitting 50k a week, you do have to start thinking about how to eat enough and enough of the right foods.

New comment by mdtancsa in "Commodore 64 Ultimate"

mdtancsa — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 15:23:19 +0000

Its so funny you mention the color. Looking at the image on the website, I was struck by the fact that beige could strike a visceral exciting nostalgia reaction in me. I mean, its beige FFS, the ultimate "boring" color :) I went from a totally disengaged / disinterested teen in school to paying out of my own pocket (I think $50 at the time) to take a course taught be Steve Punter in the basement of a library on the other side of Toronto on 6502 assembler -- in the summer!

New comment by mdtancsa in "Delphi Is 30"

mdtancsa — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 20:01:18 +0000

Happy memories. I discovered it around Delphi 2.0 when I was using Visual Objects in school. As soon as I starting playing with Delphi, it was an immediate realization, "Oh, this is what VO aspired to be"... It was such a great IDE and tool for developing small "event driven" apps back in the day.

New comment by mdtancsa in "ChatGPT Pro"

mdtancsa — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 20:46:58 +0000

I am in a similar same boat. Its way more correct than not for the tasks I give it. For simple queries about, say, CLI tools I dont use that often, or regex formulations, I find it handy as when it gives the answer Its easy to test if its right or not. If it gets it wrong, I work with Claude to get to the right answer.

New comment by mdtancsa in "US house prices in 1950 vs. 2024, accounting for inflation"

mdtancsa — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 23:54:42 +0000

I think quality is something at least there is choice on. But even then, the lowest quality of materials now seems way above anything my 1940s war-time-four that I grew up in in Willowdale. It was just tarpaper "brick" over the frame. We didnt feel "poor" or anything as thats what all the houses were. I was lucky to buy my first house in 97 at the bottom of the market in Waterloo. An 1890s house on a 133x66 lot. House was absolute mishmash of "left over parts" as one contractor friend of mine described it. My wife and I saved up and did a full teardown in 2016 (again as luck would have it) at a low point in construction costs. My general contractor said it would now be 3x to do the same project due to labour and material costs. But, going through the process I could do anything I wanted. Fresh timber, or timber that was properly aged. Steel beams, or wood. You can choose "quality" it just is gonna cost. But that 3x jump (not even taking into account land costs) pre-covid vs post covid is.... eye popping.

New comment by mdtancsa in "US house prices in 1950 vs. 2024, accounting for inflation"

mdtancsa — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 20:02:54 +0000

Would be useful to see the cost of just the land as well if thats possible. As others have pointed out, the size and feature expectation inflation has to be factored in here. The little "wartime 4" I grew up in north of Toronto was smaller than a lot of "garage-ma-halls" these days and didn't really have insulation. It was a regular feature in winters to get ice on the living room window. My "modest" (by today's standards) house would be a rich persons place in the 70s.

New comment by mdtancsa in "AI Makes Tech Debt More Expensive"

mdtancsa — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:13:33 +0000

similar experience with perl scripts being re-written into golang. Crazy good experience with Claude

New comment by mdtancsa in "How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design"

mdtancsa — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 17:19:30 +0000

haha, same!

New comment by mdtancsa in "Some thoughts on OpenSSH 9.8's PerSourcePenalties feature"

mdtancsa — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 17:09:50 +0000

I suspect the distributed cracking will move to the same pattern as the SMTP/pop3 brute force guys did and use one IP per x+1 seconds where x=the ssh penalty window. We have seen this on our customer facing smtp server where we have hundreds of remote compromised IPs trying each one password per 30-60min. Still, I welcome this change as there are enough single prick attackers out there where this will help cut down on the size of the logs to process / digest.

New comment by mdtancsa in "Critical OpenVPN Zero-Day Flaws"

mdtancsa — Sat, 04 May 2024 13:22:56 +0000

These were from a while ago but the article implied they were new which they are not. Details at https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/blob/v2.6.10/Changes.rst

New comment by mdtancsa in "Critical OpenVPN Zero-Day Flaws"

mdtancsa — Fri, 03 May 2024 23:19:58 +0000

these were from March ?!? https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/blob/v2.6.10/Changes.rst

New comment by mdtancsa in "Critical OpenVPN Zero-Day Flaws"

mdtancsa — Fri, 03 May 2024 20:26:24 +0000

Any discussion around this with more details ? I was surprised nothing mentioned on the OpenVPN list

New comment by mdtancsa in "Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll"

mdtancsa — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 14:40:58 +0000

It says, its says.... "Drink Ovalteenus"

In all seriousness though, I find this such an amazing project to follow regardless of the outcome(s)

New comment by mdtancsa in "Early computer art by Barbara Nessim (1984)"

mdtancsa — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 01:00:49 +0000

Love it! I feverishly consumed every computer mag I could get my hands on back then, and there is something about those images that still capture my imagination and wonder today. I guess thats a testament to the artist!

New comment by mdtancsa in "Zrepl – ZFS replication"

mdtancsa — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 13:57:21 +0000

really excellent software I have been using for a long time to manage snapshots!

New comment by mdtancsa in "Commodore PET Keys – Series 2001 Edition"

mdtancsa — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 16:31:09 +0000

From what I remember, he was a really good teacher too!