Hacker News: rhplus

New comment by rhplus in "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS"

rhplus — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:21:10 +0000

Their contention seems mainly focused on the heavy resource use of AI tooling.

They run a service: they could impose limits on the number of submissions, builds, branches, scans, etc, and give additional usage credits to the large community projects they want to encourage.

New comment by rhplus in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

rhplus — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:40:19 +0000

What happens to all the precious metals that go up with these data centers? At least with a land based data center we have a vague hope of recycling the raw materials at some point in the future.

New comment by rhplus in "Show HN: Koi.rest – watch some fish and regain your balance"

rhplus — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:33:05 +0000

Pleasant flashbacks to the Windows 95 classic Serene Screen “Marine Aquarium”

https://youtu.be/PprsZgA-kxs?si=waSpdI4J323fNNGh

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/a-former-air-force-p...

New comment by rhplus in "What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?"

rhplus — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:38:23 +0000

I think this article highlights more the importance of understanding system limits in the 1990s versus today. No-one would care to much today if the code review for this feature had “files.count()” or whatever in it, but in the mid 90s that would have been a huge performance red flag because a user would literally hear their hard drive clicking away and see the blinkenlights.

New comment by rhplus in "What's the Scam?"

rhplus — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 20:05:35 +0000

Kind of out there, but if you were running a network of agents that are autonomously looking for exploits, then perhaps those agents have decided that a good source of fresh ideas might be to periodically receive Schneier’s newsletter in an inbox they control.

New comment by rhplus in "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"

rhplus — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:20:05 +0000

> not always your first exposure

Great point. How many professional sports players credit their elementary aged PE classes to their success in sport (as opposed to say crediting a high school coach)?

Progressive, unbridled access and exposure is key.

New comment by rhplus in "American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died"

rhplus — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:01:27 +0000

> unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears

Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a 777 doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated and republished to all maintenance crews worldwide.

New comment by rhplus in "Don't Wordle"

rhplus — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:49:08 +0000

I sense this is not winnable for all Wordle dictionary words. Is that provably the case?

New comment by rhplus in "Stop Making TUIs"

rhplus — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 13:12:10 +0000

Don’t forget operations and maintenance. You can have a box of vibe coded custom tools and services, but they’re all going to slowly rot as the underlying dependencies - network APIs, platform APIs, auth handshakes, reverse engineered file & DB schemas - change their behaviors and availability.

Sure, an LLM can fix it, but that assumes your original spec sufficiently described the user requirements and wasn’t just a transcript of the original session trying to figure out how how to interface with all those dependencies in the first place.

New comment by rhplus in "Electric shock gloves in use by police departments in Bellevue, Omaha"

rhplus — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:48:18 +0000

> Touching face, chest, groin, etc is forbidden.

It’s really hard to believe that an officer who’s wrestling someone hand-to-hand, possibly on the ground or against a wall, is going to restrain themselves from grabbing face or chest in the heat of the moment.

New comment by rhplus in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

rhplus — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:28:39 +0000

The first half of the article seemed fine, but then it appeared padded with AI filler.

New comment by rhplus in "IBM Simon (1994): the original smartphone, explained in its own ad [video]"

rhplus — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:07:52 +0000

They even predicted that smartphone users would inevitably ruin the (movie) theater experience (skip to 3:55 and 4:57)

New comment by rhplus in "We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility"

rhplus — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:13:08 +0000

> Then LLMs killed stackoverflow.

I think the common consensus is that stackoverflow killed stackoverflow, quite a few years before LLMs became entrenched.

New comment by rhplus in "GPT 5.6 Sol is the best "vision" model OpenAI ever released"

rhplus — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:07:24 +0000

Especially the pill counting example. The best model was shown at 81.1% accuracy, which is a terrible rate for pharmacy scenarios. It seems like implementors would be better off instructing the models to use deterministic tools (like OpenCV) until the models are at 99.99% accuracy (or whatever an acceptable error rate is for pharmacy techs).

New comment by rhplus in "Pneumatic tube mail in New York City"

rhplus — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:41:19 +0000

I’m fairly certain the Tesco and Sainsburys near me were still using vacuum tubes to send money and receipts up to their back-offices well into the 1990s.

New comment by rhplus in "Delta"

rhplus — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 03:50:08 +0000

I don’t think the emphasis here is on real time multiplayer, but instead on async multiplayer. The way it’s described is about an evolving code base over time. Everyone sees the conversations, comments and decisions that lead to the code in screen. Individuals directly interact with the code via agents. Other devs see all those deltas and can add to the discussion.

New comment by rhplus in "Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows"

rhplus — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:39:44 +0000

It looks like you’re describing something like an MCP server and a client model.

If you’re in the C# ecosystem you could consider converting your APIs to MCP format tools using the MCP SDK.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/build-a-model-context-...

And then leveraging Microsoft Agent Framework for the client and orchestration side of things:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/agent-framework/

New comment by rhplus in "A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS"

rhplus — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:33:52 +0000

A parked domain would potentially make more money hosting AI generated “content” to improve its SEO and passive ad revenue. That’s why invested interests have pushed for this side-channel “For sale” sign.

New comment by rhplus in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"

rhplus — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:09:34 +0000

For iPhone users, you can set up a Shortcut that achieves similar results because many snatchers will instinctively try to turn off cellular:

+ When airplane mode is enabled + Lock the screen and require password

Locking the phone is the most important thing. Losing the physical device is a bummer but it can be replaced and restored. Allowing access to any apps or message history is the worst case scenario.

New comment by rhplus in "It's a shame what's happened to radio"

rhplus — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:35:40 +0000

Unfortunately, they broadcast on DAB so there’s a strong chance that two car radios next to each other are buffering differently and out of sync.