Hacker News: mook

New comment by mook in "Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M"

mook — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:40:08 +0000

The funny thing about patent licensing alliances is that there's no guarantee that nobody else outside of the bloc will pop up and start suing people.

Basically, you can consider AOM to be a licensing alliances, where the fee is zero.

New comment by mook in "TDF ejects its core developers"

mook — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:37:06 +0000

I believe OpenOffice is so dead that the name is available again? That would be kind of hilarious, though probably untenable.

New comment by mook in "Anthropic: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'"

mook — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:46:15 +0000

That is a summary and a picture of https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7mkn3/psa_claud... it looks like?

New comment by mook in "Honda is killing its EVs"

mook — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:27:54 +0000

> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.

Experience with boxed versus updatable software, particularly video games, says otherwise. When it costs a lot for the manufacturer to fix defects, they put more emphasis on not having them in the first place. Otherwise we just just a parade of defects all the time. Even if it's minor things and never fixed, the user can adapt; that's not possible in the face of continuous updates.

New comment by mook in "US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February"

mook — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:55:56 +0000

In Vancouver specifically, they'd have issues distinguishing your car from any others on the road, because there's lots of foreign (US/Alberta) plates there for some reason (I understand it's some insurance thing). At least, that seemed to be the case when I was there recently.

New comment by mook in "RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs"

mook — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 04:45:29 +0000

Weren't the Google TPU stuff that already? Wikipedia says that's from a decade ago.

New comment by mook in "Turn Dependabot off"

mook — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:56:09 +0000

Too bad dependabot cooldowns are brain-dead. If you set a cooldown for one week, and your dependency can't get their act together and makes a release daily, it'll start making PRs for the first (oldest) release in the series after a week even though there's nothing cool about the release cadence.

New comment by mook in "Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links"

mook — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 20:08:36 +0000

Wouldn't it be precisely because archives are important that using something known to modify the contents would be avoided?

New comment by mook in "Notes on Clarifying Man Pages"

mook — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:40:08 +0000

I use it in particular for bash, mostly because it has better expositions for parameter expansions. To the point that I know searching for "%%" in particular will get me to the correct section.

For everything else… I think it's also necessary for GNU find expressions?

New comment by mook in "GitHub Agentic Workflows"

mook — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:21:45 +0000

Unfortunately only the first one (arborist) actually links to something that the workflow outputs (a created issue), so it's hard to see actual examples of what those things do. Some of the earlier comments said they output giant workflow files, but there weren't really any examples either.

Basically it feels like a long article that says "we have this new thing that does cool things", but never gives enough concrete details. It probably worked great for you, but it needs to communicate to random people off the street what the win is.

New comment by mook in "Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems"

mook — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:06:22 +0000

> unlike anything we've seen before

They probably haven't seen (to pull a number out of a hat) negative three billion percent growth before either…

New comment by mook in "Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems"

mook — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:02:02 +0000

Didn't Nadella come from the Azure side? In that sense it'd make sense that what they were doing would spread to the rest of the company.

New comment by mook in "Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features"

mook — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 04:37:15 +0000

If anything, it might unbreak things.

I have my browser set to request, in order, English, a different English, then a non-English language. Some sites (Android docs, Gitlab, F-Droid) will send me the non-English content; Google even preferentially does their AI translation thing instead of the original English.

New comment by mook in "Nvidia-smi hangs indefinitely after ~66 days"

mook — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:56:32 +0000

Isn't 32bit counter 49 days? Assuming that one was counting milliseconds, at least.

Only remember that because that's the limit for Windows 95…

New comment by mook in "Germany Forces Lexus to Remotely Kill Car Heating in Dead of Winter"

mook — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 05:48:48 +0000

Specifically, it's disabling remote start, rather than the actual heating.

New comment by mook in "GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source"

mook — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 01:02:37 +0000

It's quite possible to be creative while not contributing to society or whatnot.

A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.

New comment by mook in "Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids"

mook — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:03:26 +0000

That's only if you want to watch specific things; some people just turn it on for entertainment, and change channels to have a spin at the roulette wheel for something better.

New comment by mook in "Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux"

mook — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:14:48 +0000

Unfortunately you can't really statically link a GUI app.

Also, if you happened to have linked that image to a.out it wouldn't work if you're using a kernel from this year, but that's probably not the case ;)

New comment by mook in "Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out"

mook — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 18:09:26 +0000

Is there a reason the users must see all of the historic data too? Why not just have a post-commit hook render the current HEAD to static files, into something like GitHub Pages?

That can be moved elsewhere / mirrored later if needed, of course. And the underlying data is still in git, just not actively used for the API calls.

It might also be interesting to look at what Linux distros do, like Debian (salsa), Fedora (Pagure), and openSUSE (OBS). They're good for this because their historic model is free mirrors hosted by unpaid people, so they don't have the compute resources.

New comment by mook in "Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)"

mook — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:04:32 +0000

That makes the mistake of thinking they'll care. Most likely they'll just keep downloading the encrypted garbage and never notice.