Hacker News: nikanj

C64 Demo Effects Explained: Rodents in the Attic [video]

nikanj — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:55:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ1atMUOUMU

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49165137

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nikanj in "How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood"

nikanj — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:50:28 +0000

Movies like Forrest Gump, Return of the Jedi, Men in Black or Harry Potter 5 all managed to lose money, according to "GAAP".

If that's not creative accounting, I don't know what is.

New comment by nikanj in "Turn And Face The Strange"

nikanj — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:21:04 +0000

1) Slap AI on the pitch deck

2) Acquihired by one of the AI companies, probably after a bidding war because everyone has infinite money and wants to block competitors from getting talent

New comment by nikanj in "Android May Soon Restrict On-Device ADB"

nikanj — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:19:32 +0000

Exhibit A: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40093420

Decades of people desperate for a fix, utter stonewall from Google

Some PM somewhere decided that autocomplete belongs on all your fields, and who are you, the poor site developer, to disagree?

New comment by nikanj in "Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time"

nikanj — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:40:30 +0000

The trackpad is not "locked", it's moving just as much as it used to, but the driver running the haptic fake click feedback is dead.

Apple's haptic technology is some deep black magic

New comment by nikanj in "Safari Technology Preview 248 Released"

nikanj — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:46:00 +0000

The only way for commoners to reach the actual devs is HN or similar, bug trackers are as useful as a wishing well.

The odds of Safari devs reading the comments on a Safari-related HN piece is quite high, and reporting long-standing bugs here might actually get fixes

See also: the biweekly ”Microsoft closed my account and is stonewalling me” post here. Those reliably manage to break the customer service blockade

New comment by nikanj in "Safari Technology Preview 248 Released"

nikanj — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:28:35 +0000

It’s impressive that pinch-zooming reddit.com in-out-in-out has reliably crashed ios safari for at least a few years already. One would assume Apple gets telemetry from iphone default browser crashes, and reddit seems important enough to warrant a fix

New comment by nikanj in "Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth"

nikanj — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:00:55 +0000

Essentially nothing, fractions of a penny on a dollar, because players who could afford paying real money won't risk the crusty old hardware - so you're limited to buyers who still need a massive cluster but don't have AI infinite money glitch enabled

New comment by nikanj in "Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude"

nikanj — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:49:17 +0000

It doesn't do anything?

Au contraire! Now the creations of the LLMs stand on legal ground. This was an excellent deal for Anthropic

New comment by nikanj in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

nikanj — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:46:46 +0000

To be clear, bot spam and social media manipulation are legitimate business needs for the business selling said services.

New comment by nikanj in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

nikanj — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:44:49 +0000

They've seen the ruckus that follows from controlling / curating the app store experience. For example, see the comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028

New comment by nikanj in "The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired"

nikanj — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:37:03 +0000

It's so weird to look at the patents list for H.264 and see multiple patents granted after the H.264 specification was released. Was the situation similar for MPEG-4?

New comment by nikanj in "Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again"

nikanj — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 06:33:07 +0000

The same problem also exists in countries that use English as their first language. If you don't speak passable english, you will have a hard time integrating or finding an engineering job.

New comment by nikanj in "Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again"

nikanj — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 06:29:29 +0000

How is your English compared to her German?

New comment by nikanj in "Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years"

nikanj — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:42:32 +0000

Fibre to the house and calling over wifi is the most typical way. Hasn’t the US moved to wifi calling? It’s such a simple win, as screaming packets to a distant 5g tower eats much more battery than talking to nearby wifi

New comment by nikanj in "Half-Baked Product"

nikanj — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 18:10:45 +0000

But what were the huge, established companies that had refused to deliver a better product before Google came along?

New comment by nikanj in "Please stop the AI confidence theater"

nikanj — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:55:33 +0000

Dropbox is an AI-company, according to to Dropbox https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-power...

The challenge in 2026 is finding the company that's not AI-powered (according to themself)

New comment by nikanj in "Please stop the AI confidence theater"

nikanj — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:53:44 +0000

They sleep very well, in a fully-paid off house, on a mattress filled with benjamins

New comment by nikanj in "Half-Baked Product"

nikanj — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:45:35 +0000

It's some variant of chesterton's fence, where you believe all of these huge, established companies in a space are just stupid and refuse to release a product thats 10x better

New comment by nikanj in "Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%"

nikanj — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 20:29:53 +0000

In BC, the government bought all the unsold, unfit units to prop up the housing market. Your tax dollars at work!