Hacker News: niccl

New comment by niccl in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

niccl — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:52:13 +0000

In some book by P G Wodehouse (inventor of Jeeves the butler), one character says (out of nowhere) that all the humans on the planet could fit in a cubic hole 1/2 mile on each side. It took me a little while to convince myself that was true. It still is, apparently

New comment by niccl in "When did Google get so weird?"

niccl — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:47:52 +0000

and the luxury to laugh when it's completely off the rails

New comment by niccl in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

niccl — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 01:44:09 +0000

FWIW Pangram [0] "We believe that this entire text is human-written."

I've only just discovered pangram, but I've seen it referred to a few times in HN recently wit nothing obviously pejorative about it. Take it with all required grains of salt, though

0: https://www.pangram.com/dashboard

New comment by niccl in "Show HN: Share your AI Setup, Learn from others"

niccl — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:27:40 +0000

I'd love to see some sort of histogram of different styles of AI usage for coding: how many people just use Chat v Claude v something fancy that I don't know about v something even fancier that I don't know about v ...

And if there were a dimension of day-job v personal use, I'd be even happier

Does anyone know if such a thing exists

New comment by niccl in "Julia 1.13 highlights"

niccl — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 01:26:59 +0000

> Over the last three years I have been doing a focussed investigation of a lot of different programming languages and styles

I don't know what your invesitgation covers, but a long time ago (2009) someone [0] did an interesting visual comparison of languages. sadly now it seems it's only available at archive.org [1], but I've often gone back to it, partly because it's such an elegant way of looking at some aspects of different languages.

0: http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20100412073334/http://blog.gmarc...

New comment by niccl in "Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables"

niccl — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 23:55:43 +0000

There is a problem with the over-under method use for long cables. If you then grab the wrong end through the centre hole you end up with a cable with a bunch of overhand knots in, which I find much more tedious to deal with than just using normal looping of cables and making sure to add the twist each time.

Back many years when I was touring with bands, at the end of the night you'd see all the lighting crew walking around the stage coiling the long cables, with one end trailing after them, to make sure the twists were correct. That was much more useful than generic over-under for all cables.

over-under has its place, but I don't use it everywhere.

New comment by niccl in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

niccl — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:48:21 +0000

any specifics on what you did?

New comment by niccl in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

niccl — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:16:54 +0000

I find them almost unintelligible. I'm a native English speaker. I read a lot, so I think my comprehension should be at least OK. I'm not even particularly stupid. Yet when faced with things like below (a direct copy/paste from a handoff document in a long running vibe-coding session), I have no real idea of what it's trying to tell me. Is it important? Do I need to do anything?

I think that spending all day trying to parse stuff like this is why a long session is so exhausting

> Worth stating because four documents now assert it. The console freeze was recorded in exactly one place with exactly one justification — a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back — and handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording is that 4.4's review page "could not break the console, but the downside of being wrong is that half day". No second reason. Checked, not recalled.

New comment by niccl in "Accidental Aesthetics and Romance of Power Wires"

niccl — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:34:22 +0000

This recalls a time I was driving the Desert Road in Aotearoa/NZ at dawn. As I got to the top of the hill the sun came up in line with all the power lines and they glowed like golden spider webs off into the distance. I'd never thought that power lines could ever be breathtakingly lovely. This was one time they managed it

New comment by niccl in "Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive"

niccl — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 03:22:08 +0000

nit pick: _So Long_ and thanks for all the fish

I'm really sorry about that, but it jarred my ASD-ness

New comment by niccl in "Rules of good social skills (2025)"

niccl — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:13:24 +0000

They mention 'breaking rapport' a few times. I'd really appreciate if someone could explain to an ASD person what that looks like. Genuine question

New comment by niccl in "The Amazon tax"

niccl — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 05:15:32 +0000

IIRC, at one time, in Aotearoa/New Zealand at least, Coca Cola Amatil (or whoever it is) had trademarked 'Always'. It may have been some other word, but it was definitely a common word. And it wasn't the particular branding, just the word

New comment by niccl in "Beware Management Consultants"

niccl — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:27:13 +0000

It seems that management in most organisations can't believe something unless they've paid vast sums for it. So they can't believe their own staff if they say X, even if it's right, because they haven't paid enough for it. Then the consultant comes along, interviews the staff, finds they say X, tell the client, charge buckets for it, and are believed. Weird human behaviour...

disclaimer: ex management consultant

New comment by niccl in "Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)"

niccl — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:18:42 +0000

> For instance, Shakespeare’s characters call one another “cuz,”

Calling someone 'cuz' is quite common in Aotearoa/NZ.

New comment by niccl in "Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word"

niccl — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:40:10 +0000

No. I got from the article that he's saying that the purchase is sunk cost, so any sale is 100% profit. So it's correct

New comment by niccl in "Why Are There Statues of Beavers on Top of This Oxford Street Shop?"

niccl — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:40:28 +0000

> Factory workers soaked the skins in a orange-coloured solution containing mercuric nitrate; a process called 'carroting'. Vapours from the mercury poisoned the workers' nervous systems, making them prone to tremors, irritability, depression, paranoia, dementia and worse.

This is where the Mad Hatter in Alice Through the Looking-Glass comes from.

New comment by niccl in "Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude"

niccl — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:50:10 +0000

I agree with this in general but I think there's a nuance. 'dumb' prompts can get the result, but require more back-and-forth with the model and more token usage when compared to a crafted prompt

New comment by niccl in "HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router"

niccl — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:37:20 +0000

and reader-mode doesn't show the text

New comment by niccl in "Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms"

niccl — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 01:35:51 +0000

yes. TLA and XTLA overloading is a real problem, particularly when going cross domain.

Maybe we should insist on some standardised expansion of TLAs and XTLAs so you know unambiguously what any particular Three Letter Acronym or eXtended Three Letter Acronym means. I wish I could think of a way of doing that...

New comment by niccl in "24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)"

niccl — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:29:38 +0000

Thank you for posting this. I thought I knew a bit about what was going on with audio sampling and reproduction, but I learned a surprising amount from this well presented introduction