Hacker News: rm445

New comment by rm445 in "Thunderbird for iOS"

rm445 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:04:23 +0000

An e-mail client is the archetypal demo-in-a-weekend, ten-million-lines-in-production program. Not to deny the power of coding agents, and maybe you can vibecode something that's just right for reading your e-mail, but does it support my nested MIME folders and the obscure encryption used by my mail host?

New comment by rm445 in "Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy"

rm445 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:01:52 +0000

Tried and failed in my thirties, succeeding much better in my forties. I doubt you've lost neuroplasticity.

New comment by rm445 in "The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings"

rm445 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:20:35 +0000

I feel that DHTML Lemmings deserves a mention - an implementation of Lemmings in Javascript in 2003 or 2004. At the time I saw it, my understanding of websites was basic HTML - I had no idea web technologies could be so powerful.

Here it is online, not sure if this is the original site. https://pccc.com/downloads/junk/cool/lemmings/index.html

New comment by rm445 in "Mayday Mysteries"

rm445 — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 22:21:01 +0000

So... someone has been posting cryptic adverts annually from 1981 through 2026, which together constitute logic puzzles and obscure references.

The main thing I think is quite cool, besides the sheer persistence, is that anyone noticed and there's a community following this. Everyone has stuff going on in their lives, this seems so obscure that you'd almost expect people to shrug and ignore.

New comment by rm445 in "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"

rm445 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:48:14 +0000

I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases.

It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.

I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.

New comment by rm445 in "Factories are just rooms"

rm445 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 18:41:31 +0000

I worked for a company whose factory really was just a room - the company was a machine-builder, a B2B manufacturer of custom production equipment, but with very little investment in special-purpose machinery for its facilities or even machine tools, just an attitude that the company is the people and we can do or buy anything that our customers need.

In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.

That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.

New comment by rm445 in "Brexit Ten Years On: The Economy"

rm445 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:17:30 +0000

The EU has mildly outperformed the UK in overall economic growth by perhaps 1 percentage point over the last 5-6 years, i.e. ~7% vs ~6%. While of course both massively underperformed the USA.

It's hard to avoid concluding that the actual effects of Brexit have been smaller than this kind of analysis suggests, and while we squabble about such things our countries are missing opportunity after opportunity.

New comment by rm445 in "Mini Micro Fantasy Computer"

rm445 — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:45:15 +0000

So... It's an interpreter (together with a virtual filesystem and some utilities) packaged into a program with a graphical display window? Still good for lots of interesting uses, I suppose, but surprising. Since it's introduced as a "virtual computer", I thought underneath the hood it would be emulating a machine. Then people, if they wanted, could tinker a level deeper than the scripting language, write an assembler etc.

New comment by rm445 in "Microsoft isn't removing Copilot from Windows 11, it's just renaming it"

rm445 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:35:34 +0000

You can run all the Office apps in a browser, and update documents that are on SharePoint live in collaboration with someone else. Maybe that's not earth-shattering, but it's quite a big change from huge separate Office legacy apps. It must have been a big effort decreed from the top. Given Microsoft leadership is obsessed with AI, you'd think they'd be pushing hard.

New comment by rm445 in "Television is 100 years old today"

rm445 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 23:19:10 +0000

This is a fascinating post but I don't believe it reflects (most) human memory development, which has a pronounced forgetting phase called 'childhood amnesia'. When your kid starts to talk, it's startling what a two-year-old can remember and can tell you about. And it's kinda heartbreaking when they're 4-5 and you realise that those early memories have faded.

New comment by rm445 in "Sony Data Discman"

rm445 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:08:22 +0000

Those applications seem pretty weak. In a similar timeframe I seem to recall possessing a standalone dictionary/crossword solver device, and a five-language translator/dictionary. Both of which were much more compact and presumably had small, solid-state data in ROM chips. The monochrome, text-first Data Discman software looks similar to the output of those basic devices.

I suspect the problem with the Data Discman was weak multimedia capabilities, compared to the what can fit on a CD-ROM, in either its API or what the hardware could push. If the software of the Data Discman had been more like Microsoft Encarta, it might have wowed people.

New comment by rm445 in "Our approach to advertising"

rm445 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:26:44 +0000

People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this.

ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ads in your ChatGPT in 2030. The good news is you're still going to have a job in 2030.

New comment by rm445 in "Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever"

rm445 — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 22:26:13 +0000

I have all my photos back to my first digital camera in 2004. (Plus digital photos a few years further back - I used to use a service that developed and printed your film rolls and also delivered files on CD-ROM). The strategy of keep copying files to newer hardware remains undefeated.

Still, there are big gaps due to prevailing photo-taking habits. Unless you were seriously into photography, people took way fewer photos. Lots of posed pics of family and friends on special occasions, fewer of everyday life. I have like 2 pictures of my undergraduate projects.

New comment by rm445 in "Street-Fighting Mathematics (2008)"

rm445 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 23:29:52 +0000

I've read this book. It's definitely one of the more interesting and readable maths texts out there. I wasn't exactly sure I'd use the methods. Working as a mechanical engineer I probably go straight to numerical methods, or approximate things even more crudely and approximately than a mathematician's 'rough' work. Though "replace a complicated function with a rectangle" definitely resonated. Overall the impression was that it was full of great techniques for mathematicians and scientists puzzling out every bit of meaning they can from a situation whose true features aren't yet known.

New comment by rm445 in "Sony PlayStation 2 fixing frenzy"

rm445 — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 17:04:21 +0000

Try a gaming store that offers a guarantee? I don't know where you are, but here in the UK, second-hand stores such as Cash Converters are full of PS2s, fat and slim. Dedicated second-hand entertainment stores like CEX will test consoles before buying them off people, and claim to offer a several-months guarantee.

New comment by rm445 in "Kurt Got Got"

rm445 — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 09:16:10 +0000

I think the claim is that plugging in the USB device is enough. If people needed to try running an executable from the device, some devices would still be compromised, but with lower frequency. I don't know exactly what happens. Automatically-triggered 'driver' install that is actually malware? Presenting as a keyboard and typing commands? Low-level cracks in the OS USB stack?

It feels to me more like OSes ought to be more secure. But USB devices are extremely convenient.

New comment by rm445 in "How England misplaced its first king"

rm445 — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 23:21:21 +0000

The strength of feeling some English lovers of history have for the Anglo-Saxon kings slightly mystifies me. Athelstan created a unified English kingdom. Briefly, till he died and it un-unified. England was fully conquered by a Danish king later (Cnut). A couple of the kings, Aethelred the Unready and Edward the Confessor, were such colossal wet blankets that you get the impression of a people just crying out to be conquered. I can see why so much of the popular conception of English history basically starts with the Norman Conquest.

New comment by rm445 in "Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK"

rm445 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 17:08:20 +0000

I am a Durham graduate, still somewhat involved with the university via some voluntary roles, and a bit of a 'booster' in the sense that I'll sing its praises to anyone. I also have a postgrad degree from Cambridge and did a little teaching while there. So, I'm quite familiar, and while I'm happy to see Durham get some love, this is bunk.

There is a gulf in undergraduate teaching between Oxbridge and the pack. The supervision system guarantees all Oxbridge students weekly, small-group tutorials, organised and paid for by the colleges, which retain much more academic involvement than other collegiate universities like Durham and York (whose colleges are mainly residences with pastoral care and sports teams). If you go to Oxbridge as an undergrad, you'll be pushed hard and closely supported.

The second gulf is of course the selection effect of every bright child in the UK having Oxford or Cambridge as their first university pick. No-one from an older generation would advise any teenager to do otherwise. (Incidentally, I'm acutely aware that Durham first, then Cambridge is lower social status than vice versa. Because I didn't get in at 17). Everyone knows about this, and we could debate how reputations change, but I suspect my point above about the supervisions system for undergraduate teaching is less well-known.

I could also mention the gulf in wealth between universities (which pays for those supervisions, book grants etc), in age (Oxbridge actively lobbied against new universities in England for hundreds of years), which has a consequence for historic buildings, famous names and prizes, and so on. It all creates an almost unbreakable flywheel of reputational lead for Oxbridge that would take generations to overturn.

New comment by rm445 in "Nvidia buys $5B in Intel"

rm445 — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:27:05 +0000

Might rather see it the other way around - Nvidia getting license to create products with x86(_64) CPUs integrated in the silicon. Nvidia are the big boy in this transaction and they'll get what they want out of it. But I can see the attraction for Intel.

New comment by rm445 in "The obstacles to scaling up humanoids"

rm445 — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 18:50:33 +0000

The biggest bottlenecks are hardware design and software design. Materials science to an extent, particularly battery materials, but we could build robots with currently-available materials and power density if only we knew how to make them work usefully enough.

I'm not against the concept and I agree the manufacturing can be scaled. There just isn't a product yet.