Hacker News: mrec

New comment by mrec in "Euro-Office: First version of the open-source web office is here"

mrec — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:37:15 +0000

Hard disagree. The war has been at least tacitly supported by the majority of the Russian public (via enlistment, taxation or just acquiescence) and it's very explicitly being waged against the Ukrainian public (via killing, occupation, expropriation etc).

"Define who we work with" is basically the point of sanctions. Unless you think they're too robust too, and we should limit ourselves to strongly worded postcards?

New comment by mrec in "Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)"

mrec — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:15:40 +0000

He's very proud of having been rejected by a Russian publisher for being "too dark".

New comment by mrec in "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building"

mrec — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:56:45 +0000

Luxury. I'm still using a 1650 Super with 4GB VRAM and it's basically fine. Holding off on a few newer titles, but I'm old and my eyesight is going so 1080 resolution is plenty for me.

New comment by mrec in "DIY Bipedal Robot Used Pneumatic "Air-Muscles" Instead of Motors"

mrec — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:58:52 +0000

A noble principle, albeit not without its lamentable failures.

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

New comment by mrec in "The Genius of the Barn Owl's Feathers"

mrec — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:58:06 +0000

But in that case this bit of TFA feels a bit out of place:

> To eliminate the possibility that the owl was [...] detecting heat from the body of the mouse (for instance, by sensing infrared light emitted by a warm body), the experiment is repeated with a mouse-sized wad of paper dragged through the leaves

New comment by mrec in "The Genius of the Barn Owl's Feathers"

mrec — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:27:06 +0000

> Over the next few days, the owl makes 16 more strikes at mice, missing only four times, each time by less than two inches.

How did the experimenter measure miss distance in pitch darkness? IR illumination is presumably out in case the owl was able to see it, and I didn't think thermal imaging was a thing yet in the late '50s.

New comment by mrec in "The Steinwinter Supercargo"

mrec — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:25:01 +0000

That one's explicitly mentioned at the end of TFA itself, though.

New comment by mrec in "The Steinwinter Supercargo"

mrec — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:05:47 +0000

I wondered if this might have been the basis, either physically or at least aesthetically for the Aliens APC. Apparently not; while very similar in low-slung form factor, that was a Hunslet ATT77 air towing tractor: https://www.hooniverse.com/movie-cars-aliens-armored-personn...

New comment by mrec in "C constructs that still don't work in C++"

mrec — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:01:24 +0000

`export template` was included in the C++98 standard without any experience, experimental or otherwise. The first implementation was achieved by EDG after enormous pain in the early 2000s, and their advice for any others attempting it was "don't". I'm not aware of anything else quite that egregious, though.

https://www.open-std.org/Jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2003/n14...

New comment by mrec in "The Eternal Sloptember"

mrec — Mon, 25 May 2026 05:19:28 +0000

I read it as "agents can't program, and with each new generation of agents it's taking longer and longer to realize that that specific iteration can't". Maybe taking the Principle of Charity too far, I dunno.

New comment by mrec in "Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens"

mrec — Sun, 24 May 2026 20:04:44 +0000

Agreed. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn: there's a reason it's a classic.

New comment by mrec in "Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers"

mrec — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:05:07 +0000

And meanwhile the webapp's library UI doesn't even let you filter by read status.

New comment by mrec in "Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers"

mrec — Sun, 24 May 2026 03:23:58 +0000

Ooh, I honestly hadn't considered that; thanks for the tip. The waterproof seal around the screen has degraded too, but I very rarely read in the rain these days.

New comment by mrec in "Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers"

mrec — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:38:36 +0000

Already do. I hate to think what it would be like now otherwise.

New comment by mrec in "Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers"

mrec — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:34:56 +0000

I was about to complain that my Paperwhite only lasts a couple of days between charges (it shuts down when battery drops to ~50%) but then realized that I've had it 7-8 years. No Indian heat here though, I'm in the UK.

New comment by mrec in "Archaeologists find Egyptian mummy buried with the 'Iliad'"

mrec — Thu, 21 May 2026 03:00:48 +0000

Not 100% sure whether you're being sarcastic but... yes? IMO more misses than hits, and the misses tend to miss by more than the hits hit.

New comment by mrec in "Starship's Twelfth Flight Test"

mrec — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:11:20 +0000

HN only allows editing for a fairly short period after a comment is posted.

New comment by mrec in "Google changes its search box"

mrec — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:49:31 +0000

> very few people will pay to advertize on them

That sounds like an unalloyed plus. The perverse incentives caused by advertising have been the biggest driver of the web's decline, IMO.

New comment by mrec in "WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward"

mrec — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:37:50 +0000

What kind of thing do you write? I'm still amazed at how much functionality is packed into tiny binaries like the sysinternals tools, and depressed at how acceptable 50MB todo apps have become.

New comment by mrec in "Making the news available at no cost is a victory"

mrec — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:45:42 +0000

When I lived there (late 90s) you weren't obligated to pay that tax if you declared that you were an atheist.