Hacker News: niccl

New comment by niccl in "An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight"

niccl — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:16:55 +0000

Darwin Award recipients!

New comment by niccl in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

niccl — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:20:00 +0000

until quite recently I dealt with a machine that had uptime in excess of 16,000 days. Before anyone panics, it was on a closed network. It was a second hand machine and we were very worried that if it was shut down the disk wouldn't recover, hence just not touching it. It was in a hut in the back of beyond so exceedingly tedious to replace if we needed to.

New comment by niccl in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

niccl — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:13:21 +0000

and the comment there about using emacs for the different shells in different modes possibly explains the un-resolved nit in TFA about proportional and monospaced fonts in different areas

New comment by niccl in "Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis"

niccl — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:30:34 +0000

I think it's more like the old adage 'the first 50% of the job takes the first 90% of the time, and the other 50% of the job takes the other 90%'.

Except that with vibe-coded AI stuff it's more like there's yet another 50% of the job to deal with the edge cases that takes yet another 90% of the time

New comment by niccl in "A self-powered computer in actual credit-card size (~1mm thick)"

niccl — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:07:53 +0000

There's much more information in the linked github repo at https://github.com/krauseler/muxcard

It even includes an eInk display as well as the battery.Insane, but really impressive.

New comment by niccl in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

niccl — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:50:10 +0000

Having associations with Aotearoa/NZ, I read it as w-eh-roh, which is part of the traditional Maori greeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wero_(M%C4%81ori)

New comment by niccl in "Brain scans reveal 3 ADHD subtypes"

niccl — Sun, 03 May 2026 21:36:45 +0000

That wouldn't work (for me, at least). As soon as I figured out the pattern, I'd know I had a week after the 'deadline' and then the pressure is off until that week is passed/nearly up

New comment by niccl in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

niccl — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:03:28 +0000

How about Bill Gates as US's Benevolent Dictator For Life?

New comment by niccl in "Laws of Software Engineering"

niccl — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:33:03 +0000

Sturgeon's Law (2026): 99% of everything is crap or slop

New comment by niccl in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

niccl — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:22:35 +0000

Another anecdatum: it definitely seems better to me in the last few days.

Thanks again to you and tomhow for all your stellar work on keeping the site as close to its original intent as practical these days

New comment by niccl in "Model collapse is already happening"

niccl — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:22:02 +0000

you've got me. What's the typo?

New comment by niccl in "Waymo Safety Impact"

niccl — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:17:31 +0000

And then there's trucks flashing an indicator to say it's safe to overtake if you're behind them. In the UK it's the nearside indicator, which makes sense: it's a bit like the truck is pulling over to let you pass. In Aotearo, it's often the off-side indicator, so you think the truck is going to pull out in front of you. I've never understood what the Aotearoa drivers are thinking there

New comment by niccl in "AI coding is gambling"

niccl — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:34:48 +0000

thank you. I knew there was something I was missing

New comment by niccl in "The 49MB web page"

niccl — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:59:42 +0000

Sadly, I think the only answer is some other form of payment than ad clicks. I've no idea what that could be, though.

New comment by niccl in "Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase"

niccl — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:31:19 +0000

All. The. Time. And I hate it. Imagine giving a customer a rebate based on buggy code. You fix a bug, the customer comes back and wants to check that the rebate was correct that last time. Now you have to somehow hard-code the rebate they did get so that your (slightly less buggy) code gives the same result. But hard-coding has the risk of introducing other errors on its own. Oh yes, and you've never enough time to do things properly because Customers (or maybe Management). A tangled mess of soul destroying lifeblood-sucking code and pressures ensues.

New comment by niccl in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

niccl — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:18:59 +0000

But at least they're taking _some_ stance. Yes, it could be higher, but it's better than nothing, and requires courage

New comment by niccl in "Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums"

niccl — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 21:03:08 +0000

I invoke Hanlon's Razor [0]. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

New comment by niccl in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

niccl — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:22:18 +0000

back working on my lighting desk, after a couple of years of hating it because the communications bus between the many different modules was flakey and so the whole thing wasn't fun to use. I bit the bullet last year and re-implemented everything with CAN-bus communications and it's actually fun to use now.

Current work has been improving boot time. Was nearly two minutes because of one board, and that's a long time for the lights to be out if you have to reboot during a show. I'd wanted to use buildroot to get a custom kernel that should boot much more quickly, but the buildroot learning curve was steep for me, particularly as I've no expectation of ever needing the knowledge again.

Independently but concurrently I decided I really ought to understand what all this AI stuff was about, for fear of getting left behind. That coincided with the release of opus 4.5, and holy heck has it made a difference! With a little guidance from me Claude got the buildroot environment working and the boot time down to less than 10 seconds. I've been _really_ impressed. I've had Claude write a few boring utilities that I could easily have done but Claude managed much faster and with less boredom on my part. Fortunately for my AI revolution I think I'm a better Business Analyst/writer than I am a coder, so it fits with my temperament.

New comment by niccl in "A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times"

niccl — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 20:23:34 +0000

obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/882/

New comment by niccl in "Maybe the default settings are too high"

niccl — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 03:56:27 +0000

This is one of the things I actually remember my mother saying. Festina lente [0]: Make haste slowly. I've always tried to stick to it because when I have I've found more to appreciate in whatever I'm doing (as TFA says)

Sadly, for some reason I now can't read slowly, which pisses me off. I and my partner read aloud together alternating chapters of a chosen book, and I love how get _much_ more out of the book than I would reading alone in a tenth of the time.

I've also found that some books seem written to be read aloud: the sentence structure and punctuation lends itself to easy reading aloud, whereas some books have really convoluted sentences with multiple parenthetical sub-clauses that are a real challenge to read aloud in an a way that's easy to follow. I've ended up so that normally try to write in a way that's easy to read aloud. I think if something's easy to read aloud it's going to be easy to comprehend when read normally. And Yes, I know that the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph probably doesn't match that.

0: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/festina%20lente)