<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: nwallin</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nwallin</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 16:05:39 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=nwallin" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A lot of people don't understand just how bad the 3d printer ecosystem can be. Most people understand how bad HP/Epson/Canon ink printers can get, but they really need to understand that 3d printers can be worse than that.<p>While I kinda sorta need my 3d printer more than my 2d printer, it's an absolute nightmare in a way that my 2d printer isn't, and it's caused entirely by the dogshit proprietary software I have to use in order to print things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 13:14:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121486</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121486</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121486</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Bambu's software" is forked from an AGPL project and is therefore itself AGPL. I have a right to fork, modify, and use it how I wish subject to the terms of the AGPL. Bambu's TOS is irrelevant. Their TOS is superceded by the terms of the AGPL.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 13:09:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121416</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121416</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121416</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "CVE-2026-31431: Copy Fail vs. rootless containers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I like the idea of keeping stuff out of the kernel as much as possible, but in this case, there are good reasons why cryptography <i>has</i> to live in the kernel.<p>We need on disk encryption, and we need to be able boot from an encrypted disk. So we need encryption for that.<p>We need network filesystems, and we need the traffic over the network to be encrypted. So we need encryption.<p>IPsec, for better or for worse, is authenticated and partially encrypted at the transport layer, so if we want a linux machine to speak IPsec, we need encryption.<p>Fixing/changing this would require a huge restructuring of the kernel; it would basically require switching to a microkernel. Given the fact that nobody's ever written a microkernel that doesn't completely suck ass, I don't know that it would be worth the effort.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 19:42:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48027490</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48027490</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48027490</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."--IBM training presentation, 1979</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 02:49:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917187</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917187</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917187</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Within the past month or so there was a fix for rtx cards that should unlock a massive performance increase for certain games. Only applies to rtx 30xx, 40xx, and 50xx. Search terms are "vulkan descriptor heap" if you would like to know more. It's very fresh so you'll need an up to date distro.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:31:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729039</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729039</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729039</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It feels... commercial. I feel like I have to read a EULA and hit I Agree before I can listen to that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:43:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664289</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664289</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664289</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The last time I had a season pass to something, they printed me the equivalent of an employee id badge with my face and name printed on it. The badge <i>was</i> the ticket. How do you resell an individual ticket?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:24:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663982</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663982</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663982</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hiding profiles has genuinely made the platform profoundly worse. It's impossible to tell if you've just got a troll on your hands or someone who's making a good faith argument. It used to be enough to check their profile, and either downvote and move on, or engage with someone on a human level.<p>Now everyone is a troll/bot by default unless proven otherwise.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:36:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559693</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559693</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559693</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was on a jury a few years ago. The defendent was a homeless person with mental health issues. The cop was <i>obviously</i> lying about the one thing that was the core element of the crime. It was like a child telling the truth about every element of the indoor soccer game expect the part where they were the one who kicked the ball.<p>The jury was me, (white) nine other white people, and two brown people. Me and the brown people thought the cop was obviously lying, and was therefore not guilty. The nine other people thought he was guilty.<p>Like the cop was obviously fucking lying.<p>After three days of deliberation we declared a hung jury.<p>I was speaking with the prosecutor afterwards and he mentioned they were going for the felony version of the crime instead of the misdemeanor (he was obviously guilty of the misdemeanor, the felony depended on the element the cop was lying about) because the dude was a bad dude and they needed to get him.<p>I looked him up when I got home. (I didn't look him up during the trial, they expressly forbid you from doing that) He had done something bad and went to prison for four years. He did his time and got out. They were still trying to throw the book at him for bullshit.<p>I looked him up recently. He was never convicted of anything ever again, but died in jail two years after we declared a hung jury. Prosecutor got what he wanted in the end, I suppose.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:59:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372142</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372142</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372142</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>AirGas prioritizes industrial users, in the case of helium, copper welding. Argon is perfectly good enough for almost all welding purposes, but copper is different because of its heat conductivity. The heat from the weld really wants to go anywhere else. Helium has substantially higher heat conductivity than argon, which allows the heat to flow from the electric arc into the metal faster, resulting in better welds.<p>Obviously you can't have oxygen in welding gas; it would oxidize the shit out of everything.<p>A little bit of oxygen in party balloon gas is beneficial. Some kid <i>will</i> breathe it, and when they do, you didn't want them to asphyxiate themselves.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:02:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371689</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371689</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Avoiding Trigonometry (2013)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My experience is that it's really easy to subtly fuck something up if you're doing a bunch of trig in code. If there's something subtly wrong somewhere, everything seems to work for a while, then one day you hit gimbal lock. Then you have to add a special case. Then you hit gimbal lock somewhere else in the code. Or you have tan spit out +/- infinity or NaN. Another special case. Or you have acos or asin in their degenerate regions where the minor imprecision isn't minor anymore, it's catastrophic imprecision. Another special case. Trig heavy code will work 0% of the time if you have an obvious bug, or will work 99% of the time if you a subtle bug, and once you start chasing that long tail you're just adding 9s and will <i>never</i> get to 100%. And if you have code that will run thousands/millions of times per frame, you need a <i>lot</i> of 9s to make sure a user can get through minutes or hours of using your software without hitting bugs.<p>Doing the same work sticking strictly to vectors and matrices tends to either not work at all or be bulletproof.<p>The other thing is that trig tends to build complexity <i>very</i> quickly. It's fine if you're doing a <i>single</i> rotation and a <i>single</i> translation, but once you start composing nested transformations it all goes to shit.<p>Or maybe you're substantially better at trig than I am. I've only been doing trig for 30 years, so I still have a lot to learn before I stop making the same sophomore mistakes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:46:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47358886</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47358886</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47358886</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "F-Droid Board of Directors nominations 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not true. The Bible provides a recourse for unwanted pregnancies in the form of a procedure to perform an abortion.<p>Which is another reason the Bible should be banned from being accessed by minors. If a child needs an abortion, they should consult a medical professional. They should <i>not</i> read about how to perform an abortion in an app on their phone and attempt to perform the procedure themselves.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 01:45:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188935</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188935</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188935</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The law pertains to providers of covered application stores <i>or</i> operating system providers. Or, not and.<p>They are not a covered application store, but they are an operating system provider, so the law does apply to them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 01:28:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188787</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188787</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188787</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Origin of the rule that swap size should be 2x of the physical memory"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have 64GB of RAM and 16GB of swap. Swap is small enough it can't get <i>really</i> out of hand.<p>I have memories from like 20 years ago that even when I had plenty of RAM, and plenty of it was free, I would get random OOM killer events relatively regularly. Adding just a tiny bit of swap made that stop happening.<p>I'm like 90% sure at this point it's just a stupid superstition I carry. But I'm not gonna stop doing it even though it is stupid.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 01:54:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160798</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160798</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160798</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "SIMD programming in pure Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Single pumped AVX512 can still be a lot more effective than double pumped AVX2.<p>AVX512 has 2048 bytes of named registers; AVX2 has 512 bytes. AVX512 uses out of band registers for masking, AVX2 uses in band mask registers. AVX512 has better options for swizzling values around. All (almost all?) AVX512 instructions have masked variants, allowing you to combine an operation and a subsequent mask operation into a single operation.<p>Often times I'll write the AVX512 version first, and go to write the AVX2 version, and a lot of the special sauce that made the AVX512 version good doesn't work in AVX2 and it's real awkward to get the same thing done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:12:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46715224</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46715224</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46715224</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Elasticsearch was never a database"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am not OP and am not speaking for them.<p>"A $30 million mess-up" can look like (at least) two things. It can be $30 million was spent on a project that earned $0 revenue and was ultimately canceled, or it can look like $x was spent on a project to win a $30 million contract but a competitor won the contract instead.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:00:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46653374</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46653374</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46653374</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Every inside contributor (besides the original author) started as an outside contributor. If the solution to the problem of LLMs is a blanket ban on outside contributors, I fear for the future of open source.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:34:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650090</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650090</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650090</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Maybe something changed between 2020 and 2025, <i>shrug</i><p>It's my understanding that this is the case. I could be wrong; I hope to be.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:59:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625167</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625167</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46625167</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Every GitHub object has two IDs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hyrum's law is a real sonuvabitch.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 01:39:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611253</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611253</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611253</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nwallin in "Waymo passenger flees after car drives on Phoenix light rail tracks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>These are light rail/tram tracks, not railroad tracks. The road is the same type of road that you normally drive up, they just have train tracks embedded in the road surface, signs telling you not to drive there, and every now and then a tram drives along it.<p>Functionally, they're no different than bus lanes or a wide shoulder. Humans drive on them all the time, because there's no traffic on them and they can get to where they're going faster. They shouldn't, it's illegal, and they can get ticketed for it, but they do it anyway. If you load up google street view in Phoenix/Tempe/Gilbert you can see a few people driving on them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:21:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46593722</link><dc:creator>nwallin</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46593722</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46593722</guid></item></channel></rss>