Hacker News: mkjs

New comment by mkjs in "Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code"

mkjs — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 16:21:53 +0000

I'm probably not describing the scale of the issue adequately. Lots of these bugs only show up when you have a specific bit of hardware on a specific version of code, and it's connected to another specific bit of hardware running another specific version of code.

Lots of this stuff should work in theory, you only find out that it doesn't in practice when you try it on real hardware. And there are thousands of bits of hardware.

New comment by mkjs in "Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code"

mkjs — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 15:45:36 +0000

It's way more complicated than that. Bear in mind many of the network protocols in use today are decades old and have been constantly evolving, but there has generally been a consideration to maintain interoperability.

Then consider that not all vendors implement the standards identically, because the standards can be a bit woolly and in some cases followed rather than lead live implementations.

There will be a bunch of code that looks useless, but is actually there because of specific interoperability scenarios.

New comment by mkjs in "Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com"

mkjs — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:07:13 +0000

You equally don't teach them responsibility by always being there as the backstop though. I think missing a couple of homeworks is quite a low-stakes thing that can teach them a lot about responsibility, failure, and how to recover from it.

A lot of kids now seem to go into adulthood having never been allowed to fail, and it can really mess them up the first time it inevitably happens.

New comment by mkjs in "Dad’s Custom Atari Peripherals"

mkjs — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 18:37:59 +0000

I've got an arcade stick that only works on Xbox if you daisy-chain an official controller to it. There is some kind of authentication passthrough required.

New comment by mkjs in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

mkjs — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:01:25 +0000

Do you think the hardware will still be worth $25k once it is five years old?

New comment by mkjs in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

mkjs — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:44:42 +0000

The best way I can explain it is that the old web was like going to thousands of individual boutiques, and the new web is like going to a dozen or so big supermarkets. Even if the boutiques were sometimes bad, at least they were unique and you could feel there was a real person behind each of them. The supermarkets sell everything, but they feel sterile and bland.

Yes you can still find roughly all the same stuff. No it's not the same.

New comment by mkjs in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

mkjs — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:16:12 +0000

There's more to this story, you've forgotten your password or something. Hotmail accounts moved to outlook.com, just reset it on a PC.

New comment by mkjs in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

mkjs — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:27:28 +0000

Nice to see people discovering these games. I wouldn't really say it was niche until BG3 though, there were plenty of highly acclaimed games long before that.

You might like this blog, the author plays through CRPGs in chronological order. Currently they're at the mid 90s. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/

New comment by mkjs in "Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986"

mkjs — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:10:46 +0000

The vast, vast majority of people are never going to play the game. For most of us this write up is the closest we will ever get to the work you've done. Under that lens, the writeup is strangely more important than the work.

New comment by mkjs in "London's most controversial cyclist"

mkjs — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:30:58 +0000

What do you suggest, he tries to get alongside moving vehicles with drivers that aren't paying attention?

Using your phone at all while driving in the UK is illegal, stopped or otherwise.

New comment by mkjs in "X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok"

mkjs — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 12:53:25 +0000

How is that relevant? Are you implying that being a US military contractor should make you immune to the laws of other countries that you operate in?

The onus is on the contractor to make sure any classified information is kept securely. If by raiding an office in France a bunch of US military secrets are found, it would suggest the company is not fit to have those kind of contracts.

New comment by mkjs in "Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU"

mkjs — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:01:02 +0000

The UK has "enforced savings" in the form of auto-enrollment pensions for over 10 years. Looks like Ireland is just starting to do it too.

New comment by mkjs in "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off"

mkjs — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 06:44:12 +0000

At that point it isn't a $10k card anymore, it's a $5k card. And possibly not a $5k card for very long in the scenario that the market has been flooded with them.

New comment by mkjs in "I don’t need a Steam Machine"

mkjs — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 11:49:09 +0000

It's not a console you can use as a PC, it's a PC you can use as a PC.

If you want a console you can use as a PC, the next Xbox is rumoured to be along those lines. It will run Windows so you can play Steam, GOG etc but will also run the existing Xbox library natively.

The 70% figure needs to be taken in context, tons of people have Steam installed on old computers that they use for old games. I currently have it installed on three devices, and yes two of them are worse specs than this. But I don't have any intention of upgrading them either, they are just old machines I have hanging around. They do the job if I'm travelling.