Hacker News: niwtsol

New comment by niwtsol in "Haunting Photos Show the Aftermath of the Kursk Submarine Disaster in 2000"

niwtsol — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:19:41 +0000

I didn't realize how big the submarine actually was

- Ohio class - US' largest: 18,750 tonnes displaced submerged, 170m long, 13m beam

- Typohoon-class - USSR's biggest: 48,000 tonnes displaced, 175m long, 23m beam

- Oscar II-class (Kursk) - 19,400 tonnes submerged, 154m long, 18.2m beam

New comment by niwtsol in "OpenClaw privilege escalation vulnerability"

niwtsol — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:23:01 +0000

Title is a bit misleading, no? You have to have openclaw running on an open box. And the post even says "135k open instances" out of 500k running instances? so a bit clickbait-y

New comment by niwtsol in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

niwtsol — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:16:38 +0000

I believe it is by group - AWS started the weekly operations meeting, effectively every service's oncall from the last week had to attend. Then it grew massive, so they made it optional. Alexa had a similar meeting that tried to replicate what AWS did. A lot of time spent reviewing load tests getting ready for holiday season, prime day, and the superbowl (super bowl ads used to cause crazy TPS spikes for Alexa). And a lot of finger pointing if there was an outage from one team. While it probably did help raise the operational bar, so much time wasted by engineers on busywork/paperwork documenting an error or fix vs improving the actual service.

New comment by niwtsol in "Google Safe Browsing missed 84% of confirmed phishing sites"

niwtsol — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:18:05 +0000

Multiple comments that start w/ "what's interesting about" by this user and very similar formatting kind of answers that question on human vs bot. Weird internet we live in these days.

New comment by niwtsol in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

niwtsol — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:13:18 +0000

This is not exactly correct. If you have an M5 Pro chip instead of m5 Chip - I just built a 16inch, M5 Pro chip, it is $400 to go from 24 -> 48gb. An additional $200 ($600 over base) to go to 64gb. So the memory prices change based on chip. M5 Max Chip starts with 48gb of memory.

New comment by niwtsol in "A NASA Engineer Discovered a World of Semi Truck Aerodynamics by Accident"

niwtsol — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:59:32 +0000

Roger that - thanks for the OC graphs. In the first chart, the sloping cluster of data points, is that just the max torque output of the engine then? And the vertical clusters at ~950, ~1050, and ~1110 - can we assume those are some sort of cruise control or gearing outcome?

Also, your 28.5M+ miles driven is such a great stat - thanks for sharing this knowledge!

New comment by niwtsol in "A NASA Engineer Discovered a World of Semi Truck Aerodynamics by Accident"

niwtsol — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:52:57 +0000

Thanks for the informative post. In America, I frequently see/hear the diesel engines idling all night at rest/truck stops. Smart cruise control that coasts perfectly over the top of a hill sounds great, but if the driver leaves his engine idling for 8 hours so he has ac… feels like that matters more, no? Has there been any sort of push for batteries or solar to power the sleeper cab amenities instead of running that engine while not driving?

New comment by niwtsol in "430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found"

niwtsol — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:43:59 +0000

As you seem knowledgeable of this topic and it is super interesting, any books you would recommend that gives a good broad overview of all of this?

New comment by niwtsol in "Thirteen Months That Changed IBM (2020)"

niwtsol — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:24:09 +0000

It is so wild to me the idea of large enterprises that rely on the big "old" databases (db2, IMS, vsam) - on one hand, I think "there must be a whole devops crew that supports these on-prem systems that are super old and unique" and the other hand is "they must be pretty reliable for the task at hand and no one wants to touch the migration project to update." Which makes me think these are still in use at the biggest and oldest enterprises( banks, government entities). Would love to hear any anecdotes from folks who work on those today.

New comment by niwtsol in "Why is there a tiny hole in the airplane window? (2023)"

niwtsol — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:07:39 +0000

The article claims it helps stop condensation, but I have several memories of little ice crystals and/or condensation that originate right at the little hole…

New comment by niwtsol in "Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration"

niwtsol — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 06:24:01 +0000

I agree that Google's console is slightly better, but a few of my gripes with AWS specifically: 1. input fields that lack basic validation so you do some action and then get an error message that is cryptic when simple "if this value selected in drop down, you can't do X". Another example of this is needing to get quota increase for your AWS account for an instance type, but nothing on the frontend tells you that, and you have to go through 3 or 4 weirdly linked support ticket/pages to figure out how to make a request for an instance. 2. As another commenter said, billing - so many pages and ways to cut the data but somehow it still seems complicated to find "which instance is attached to resource X that is costing me $Y per month" 3. Documentation not matching UI - so many PMs/TPMs over the years making resources that you find a blog/post that is a walk through, but then you find they redesigned or moved a button and that makes it difficult to follow. 4. I worked at Amazon for a bit and the internal tools feel like they were built in the early 2000s and I think I have PTSD from that which I still ascribe bad feelings towards AWS as there are similarities

I think as you use it, you start to understand the gotchas and the flows you need to do to get something working. I also appreciate there is a ton of stuff they are empowering users to do and the scale is incomprehensible, but just frustrated the UX is so poor.

I just started using Azure for another project and my goodness, I can't even login to that vs the microsoft ads account w/ the same email because of some weird MS365 permissions issue - by far the worst.

New comment by niwtsol in "Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration"

niwtsol — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:59:48 +0000

The article lightly mentions it, but how AWS and Google Cloud Console are so absolute nonsensical in UX and ease of use is beyond comprehension.

New comment by niwtsol in "Apple Services Experiencing Outage"

niwtsol — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:43:00 +0000

This outage was affecting developer.apple.com and pushing iOS app versions to test flight/production. I thought I was going crazy, thanks for posting this.

New comment by niwtsol in "Japanese four-cylinder engine is so reliable still in production after 25 years"

niwtsol — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:55:12 +0000

This comment made me question the specifics of my mental model pushrod vs overhead cam engine. I found this site that has three nice gif’s which was exactly what my visual brain wanted to see for comparing the differences - https://www.samarins.com/glossary/dohc.html

Thanks for the comment as it was the impetus for me to expand my engine knowledge today!

New comment by niwtsol in "Pebble Watch software is now open source"

niwtsol — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 22:05:14 +0000

Well said and exactly my thoughts on it as well. Eric has done more than he really had to, and it is unclear to me what rebble really wants/is positioning for.

New comment by niwtsol in "Pebble Watch software is now open source"

niwtsol — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 20:56:18 +0000

Thank you for posting this, it really gave me an answer to the "huh, how did all that drama from last week play out." IMO rebble jumped to some conclusions and felt robbed/cheated by what Eric was doing. With Eric going above and beyond to open source everything, I really feel he is trying to live up to what the original promise of pebble was. It is cool what rebble did to keep the pebble community alive, and I get that they might feel slighted, but if you take all egos out of the equation, what Eric is doing is like the best possible outcome - we get new pebble devices. Isn't that the best possible outcome?

New comment by niwtsol in "You can now buy used Ford vehicles on Amazon"

niwtsol — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 18:00:40 +0000

If I go to amazon autos, I see more than just Hyundai and Ford pre-owned certified cars for sale - I see toyota, chevrolet, kia, jeep, honda, etc. I guess this announcement is an official partnership with Ford corporate, but I assume smaller dealerships could have integrated before this.

New comment by niwtsol in "Blue Origin lands New Glenn rocket booster on second try"

niwtsol — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 22:36:26 +0000

Video of the launch if anyone was looking for it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iheyXgtG7EI&t=14220s

New comment by niwtsol in "Welcome to hell; please drive carefully"

niwtsol — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:42:29 +0000

Thanks for sharing your fun project. Do you mind eli5 the logic of the circuit for someone unfamiliar with circuits?

New comment by niwtsol in "Introducing architecture variants"

niwtsol — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:04:39 +0000

Thanks for sharing this. I'd love to learn more about micro-architectures and instruction sets - would you have any recommendations for books or sources that would be a good starting place?