Hacker News: qingcharles

New comment by qingcharles in "The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist"

qingcharles — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 19:44:59 +0000

And most systems and forms in the USA only provide for one middle initial, which makes things tricky for those coming from other cultures.

New comment by qingcharles in "The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist"

qingcharles — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 19:42:49 +0000

Having a single-letter first name is also a road to dystopian aggravation.

I knew someone with a single-letter name and good luck flying anywhere -- most ticket sales systems won't allow it because the devs didn't read those Falsehoods guides. So you expand the name, e.g. T -> Tee so you can buy the ticket, but when you get to the gate your ticket doesn't match your ID and now you're being escorted out of the building.

New comment by qingcharles in "The Legend of the Novell NE2000 [video]"

qingcharles — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:24:02 +0000

Half the Internet was running on these in the mid-90s. Every Linux and BSD PC had one stuffed in it.

New comment by qingcharles in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

qingcharles — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:34:02 +0000

One day those autostereo displays and 3D cameras from the early Androids will return too.

New comment by qingcharles in "Grok 4.6"

qingcharles — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:18:28 +0000

At least Gates was honest that he "surrounded himself with smart people", and he has some really decent assembler code in his early years.

New comment by qingcharles in "Grok 4.6"

qingcharles — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:37:54 +0000

https://xcancel.com/SpaceXAI/status/2087562800982077492?s=20

Grok 4.6

qingcharles — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:37:54 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/SpaceXAI/status/2087562800982077492

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49274137

Points: 7

# Comments: 2

New comment by qingcharles in "Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's"

qingcharles — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:22:18 +0000

And it's supposed to be called Marathon, too.

New comment by qingcharles in "50k Boat Names"

qingcharles — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:20:06 +0000

I've seen how that one ends too :D

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1640571/

New comment by qingcharles in "Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM"

qingcharles — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:04:43 +0000

I just set up a web server for a hobby project on a $10 Dell PC that has 2GB of RAM welded to the board. After booting Debian 13 it still has 1.6GB of free RAM.

In fact, that seems a lot. Back in ~1996 I was running one of the EFnet servers on a Compaq with 8MB of RAM.

New comment by qingcharles in "Finding zombies in our systems: A real-world story of CPU bottlenecks"

qingcharles — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 06:55:21 +0000

I feel like they can't have any devs left at this point, the quality of the site code has gone down significantly in the last couple of years. Real shame, it used to be an awesome utility for bookmarking ideas.

New comment by qingcharles in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

qingcharles — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 06:50:42 +0000

There are pics from the developer in this article (not sure why he neglected them in the README):

https://www.neowin.net/news/developer-ported-word-for-window...

New comment by qingcharles in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

qingcharles — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 06:48:37 +0000

The original source for WfW 1.1a was open sourced (I realize that doesn't mean there isn't copyright, but it's unlikely to be the reason that there are no pics):

https://github.com/danielcosta/MSWORD

New comment by qingcharles in "Why are all the amounts values negative?"

qingcharles — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 06:06:33 +0000

I was converting some PDF documents recently and I noticed a few pages were missing their text. I wondered if the text was white-on-white. I got Claude to check it, and I was partially right. The original (image) text layers were gone, but the OCR layer remained. Lost all the font data, but most of the text was recoverable.

New comment by qingcharles in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

qingcharles — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:42:18 +0000

And here's the rub -- the bots are "running" the latest "MacOS" and have no problem accessing the site.

New comment by qingcharles in "The BBC Tetris Companion"

qingcharles — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:08:37 +0000

Crazy that this single use console was more expensive than a fully-loaded PS5 at launch, factoring in inflation.

The hardware is great, could make some really nice 8-bit games for it.

New comment by qingcharles in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

qingcharles — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:51:29 +0000

It's an anti-freeze. Ask the people that survived the Titanic in the water :)

New comment by qingcharles in "Manual: •.,:;…!?·"

qingcharles — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 05:37:39 +0000

Agreed. I've started to use space now as the decimal separator and trying to spread the gospel.

New comment by qingcharles in "Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users"

qingcharles — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:40:46 +0000

Also, remember the bulk of AI users are using free models, getting terrible answers, and wondering why people keep saying AI is going to take everybody's jobs away.

New comment by qingcharles in "Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2"

qingcharles — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:09:57 +0000

I had no idea about this before. I just enabled it.

  You're eligible for free daily usage on traffic shared with OpenAI.

      Up to 250 thousand tokens per day across gpt-5.4, gpt-5.2, gpt-5.1, gpt-5.1-codex, gpt-5, gpt-5-codex, gpt-5-chat-latest, gpt-4.1, gpt-4o, o1, and o3
      Up to 2.5 million tokens per day across gpt-5.4-mini, gpt-5.4-nano, gpt-5.1-codex-mini, gpt-5-mini, gpt-5-nano, gpt-4.1-mini, gpt-4.1-nano, gpt-4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o4-mini, and codex-mini-latest.

  Usage beyond these limits, as well as usage for other models, will be billed at standard rates. Some limitations apply. Learn more.