Hacker News: nickdothutton

New comment by nickdothutton in "VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'"

nickdothutton — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 16:43:54 +0000

"I want to do the thing that gets me the most votes and carries the least political risk". Note this is not necessarily the wisest thing, or even the thing that objectively solves or mitigates the problem the most. Many such cases...

New comment by nickdothutton in "AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs"

nickdothutton — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:19:16 +0000

This sort of shenanigan is why it’s important to have a competitive market for CPUs.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)"

nickdothutton — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:56:51 +0000

We all live in Ballard's future now. I encourage you to check out some of his interviews on YT.

New comment by nickdothutton in "The RCE that AMD wouldn't fix"

nickdothutton — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:47:54 +0000

AMD's inability to make good software has been a recurring problem for decades. Many years ago I had some success with their optimising compiler, but everything else I've touched was bad. A real pity.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones"

nickdothutton — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:33:35 +0000

If I were a (potentially) hostile foreign power, I'd use a game to enlist people in the target country to record sensitive locations.

New comment by nickdothutton in "The British university is dying, and it seems that almost nobody cares"

nickdothutton — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:40:26 +0000

The UK student loan book regularly changes hands on the secondaries market at half of face value. Make of that what you will. Draw whatever conclusions you might about the market value of some of the education provided.

I support anyone's wish to gain an education, including the study of esoteric subjects if that is what interests them. However many young people have been mis-sold an education in the belief that it would result in a well paying job. Of course the young are the easiest people of all upon which to perpetrate such a scam. There are very few with a film studies degree, who manage to secure a job as film director. About 500 people every year study golf course management. We have about 2500 golf courses.

New comment by nickdothutton in "CP/M-86 & MS-DOS Cross Development Environment"

nickdothutton — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:29:57 +0000

Supercalc2, Maxam2, dBASE II. You could do a lot with CP/M software, especially if you had access to a hard drive which would eliminate the "insert floppy disk X into drive Y" tedium.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)"

nickdothutton — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:37:48 +0000

I'm the downvoted poster above, and I used to run a BBS. Mostly hosting info files and CP/M software (Thanks U.S. Robotics, couldn't have done it without HST). I am genuinely interested in know where (and if) such a network of people could ever exist again. For those who may be too young to get the joke... Reddit is certainly not it.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it"

nickdothutton — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:57:25 +0000

It is quite common to find device manufacturers, even those of many years standing, who _appear to_ begin with the device and add the software as an afterthought. Paying little attention to security or even the software lifecycle (patches, updates, the changing landscape/ecosystem). I have even known it happen that the device brand subs out the software to a random small developer, who then closes up shop/dies/gets out of that business, and the device company doesnt even have the source code, let alone any ability to further improve/fix the software that drives their device. This leads to layers upon layers of subsequent middleware, UIs, shims etc.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)"

nickdothutton — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:56:45 +0000

I too remember. Where is the "FidoNet" of today?

New comment by nickdothutton in "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software"

nickdothutton — Sun, 31 May 2026 08:00:30 +0000

Torture testing required before acceptance of vibed/AI submissions?

New comment by nickdothutton in "Ahoy, DECmate II the little PDP-8 that could"

nickdothutton — Sun, 31 May 2026 07:56:45 +0000

Does anyone know what that characteristic smell is DEC equipment has? It's different from the characteristic smell of (for example) Sun equipment. Rainbow's smell like VAXen.

New comment by nickdothutton in "The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time"

nickdothutton — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:04:19 +0000

You are going to love Digital VAT, closely followed by Real-Time VAT.

New comment by nickdothutton in "The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time"

nickdothutton — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:03:20 +0000

"The system is working as intended". I once attended an official seminar given by the government procurement department, to an audience of (mostly) government department people with purchase authority. The subject of which was how to construct your invitations to tender such that only the largest 3-4 suppliers could possibly respond. "Solves the problem of having to consider 20-30 suppliers and review their submissions". I'm so glad that was early on in my career (as a vendor).

New comment by nickdothutton in "Warm up your MacBook (2019)"

nickdothutton — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:13:55 +0000

May I introduce you to local LLMs?

New comment by nickdothutton in "Why Did South Africa Relinquish Its Nuclear Weapons?"

nickdothutton — Sat, 23 May 2026 14:19:34 +0000

The most interesting thing about this article is that it leaves out all the interesting stuff. I recommend googling one Dr David Kelly, and a young fellow called David Cameron who would become better known later. When the US and UK learned RSA had the bomb, and the ANC were about to inherit it, they were suddenly a lot less enthusiastic about the incoming administration they had previously endorsed.

New comment by nickdothutton in "The first British person in space"

nickdothutton — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:30:43 +0000

Out of all day to day government spending on services (health, schools, police, courts, etc), the NHS consumes about 40% of departmental expenditure limits [1]. Although it is pre-covid and the picture has worsened significantly since then, this BBC article is quite good too at examining the different figures [2].

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-sta... (Diagram in section 2.2) [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42572110

New comment by nickdothutton in "The first British person in space"

nickdothutton — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:57:55 +0000

Brits more or less completely abandoned space in any meaningful way. Successive governments didn't value it at all in comparison to other areas of policy. Even after we developed our own independent orbital launch capability. The story is much the same today, a couple of satellite companies, very little real primary capability. Our "spaceports" are mostly artist impressions or computer generated imagery. Meanwhile we will spend £250b annually on the health service by 2028, up from £45b in 2000.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?"

nickdothutton — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:07:33 +0000

Google really should publish a flow diagram for how they decide to turn off someone's business.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier"

nickdothutton — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:28:30 +0000

China is much more interested in waging a campaign against companies that represent the material of the future growth in productivity, exports, and prosperity of the US and her people, than learning about you as an individual. Unless of course you are a Chinese dissident living in the US.