Hacker News: niccl

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

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?