Hacker News: neilalexander

New comment by neilalexander in "Your Phone Is About to Stop Being Yours: 70 Days Until Lockdown"

neilalexander — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:10:08 +0000

Users don’t read warnings. Most scams capitalise on urgency. When given more time to stop and think something through, it often becomes obvious what’s happening.

New comment by neilalexander in "Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in UK"

neilalexander — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:56:53 +0000

Many new public charging sites are being built in the UK too, yes. Several thousand rapid charging points in the last year alone.

New comment by neilalexander in "Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in UK"

neilalexander — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:51:09 +0000

Yes, I responded to your other comment about that. Charging at home is very cheap though and it's estimated that roughly half of housing in the UK has a driveway. Some more creativity is going to be required to address it for everyone else indeed, for example kerb or lamp-post chargers, or in flat building car parks etc.

New comment by neilalexander in "Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in UK"

neilalexander — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:46:07 +0000

I think "nobody wants a used EV" will change, there is already a growing amount of evidence that battery deterioration is nowhere near as bad as feared on average. ICE vehicles also tend to get less efficient over time as well due to wear and tear, build-up, degrading sensors etc, it's just that nobody talks about that.

New comment by neilalexander in "Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in UK"

neilalexander — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:40:14 +0000

The cost of public charging is still one of the biggest problems. I'm currently on a night-time charging tariff at home at 4p/kWh. It will go up to 8p/kWh in October but that's still pretty good considering it's not uncommon for public rapid charging to be 10x that.

Of all the rapid charging networks, I find Tesla are often the cheapest, there are Tesla 250kW charging stations near me that are 33p/kWh during quieter hours.

New comment by neilalexander in "Analysis: EVs are now nine times cheaper than petrol or diesel to drive in UK"

neilalexander — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:31:47 +0000

There are over 120,000 public charging points across the UK, with over 25,000 of them being 50kW+ DC. That's averaging more than one charger per square mile of the mainland UK (density distribution of course varies).

New comment by neilalexander in "Tell HN: iOS 27 does not allow Apple Intelligence to be disabled"

neilalexander — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:26:02 +0000

There is a “Turn off Siri” option. Apple Intelligence & Siri are now effectively one.

New comment by neilalexander in "Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction?"

neilalexander — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:15:47 +0000

My attempts to use XMPP mostly start and end very quickly with the fact that there isn't a single good native XMPP client for Mac or iOS. None of Monal, Siskin or Beagle are a good experience, ChatSecure appears to be abandonware and Prose is Yet Another Web App.

New comment by neilalexander in "Copying login keychains between Macs fails on Secure Enclave Macs with Tahoe"

neilalexander — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:24:09 +0000

Documentation explaining the Keychain security model: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secb0694df1a/...

New comment by neilalexander in "iPhone Duo"

neilalexander — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:24:49 +0000

I would think it has far more to do with content consumption than it does eyesight.

New comment by neilalexander in "iPhone Duo"

neilalexander — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:20:50 +0000

“Useful computer” is subjective. It seems to be difficult for HN users to imagine a device that doesn’t have a terminal for example, but the overwhelming majority of users simply do not care. Many of them manage just fine with a smartphone as their primary (if not their only) computer, so clearly they are useful enough.

New comment by neilalexander in "KDE's new Photos app offers a sleek alternative to Gwenview"

neilalexander — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:02:59 +0000

It's not about fighting over the "one and only", it's about sane human-friendly defaults. A desktop environment can and should express opinions over those defaults, because they are what make or break the experience for a new or novice user. If a power user wants to swap things out, rename/disambiguate them or whatever then ultimately nothing stops them.

The subtitles are a user interface bandaid that has to exist because the naming is bad. With discoverable naming, the bandaid would not be needed. When you keep compounding bandaids, user experience breaks down.

New comment by neilalexander in "KDE's new Photos app offers a sleek alternative to Gwenview"

neilalexander — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:44:08 +0000

Naming should be general. Ask a new user whether names like Dolphin, Okular, Kdenlive, Kate, Gwenview and Dragon are even remotely discoverable.

KDE application naming is so consistently terrible that their default application launcher has to subtitle them with descriptions.

New comment by neilalexander in "Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one"

neilalexander — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:06:22 +0000

Regarding 2, use the File menu in the menubar.

New comment by neilalexander in "Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence"

neilalexander — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:20:43 +0000

XMPP leans heavily on capability negotiation and service discovery which makes it straightforward to degrade gracefully when feature mismatches occur. Matrix is significantly lacking in this regard.

New comment by neilalexander in "Omacom Foundation funding hits $10M"

neilalexander — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:17:51 +0000

> audacious mission to make Linux on the desktop happen

On the one hand, I'm supportive of people trying to make Linux on the desktop happen. On the other hand, a distribution aimed squarely and solely at developers doesn't seem like it's faithfully achieving that goal whatsoever, given that developers are the one group of people today that don't generally have a problem running Linux on the desktop. I would be far more excited to see this kind of money being poured into building a desktop for everyone else.

New comment by neilalexander in "How Go detects struct copies with sync.noCopy"

neilalexander — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:10:41 +0000

It's not really a hack. It's a hint to a static analyser, that's all.

New comment by neilalexander in "Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network"

neilalexander — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:03:45 +0000

For anyone who missed the reference: https://xkcd.com/927/

New comment by neilalexander in "Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network"

neilalexander — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:01:07 +0000

In the same way that you can hack apart a loaf of bread with a spoon, yes, but they are very different things with different goals.

New comment by neilalexander in "Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network"

neilalexander — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:00:32 +0000

Different animal altogether.

Rayfish, Tailscale, ZeroTier, Netbird etc are a different category of tool, designed to facilitate connectivity between you and your own pool of machines. They don't generally do much in the way of multi-hop routing, but rather they orchestrate VPN tunnels on top of another routed network (like the internet).

Reticulum would be better compared to Yggdrasil, cjdns etc as routing schemes for larger networks or true meshes, which can work independently of (and have no dependency upon) the internet.