Hacker News: shhsshs

New comment by shhsshs in "Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production"

shhsshs — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 21:15:45 +0000

The charging port is on the rear of the Cybertruck, which means if you have a trailer attached, you would have to find a charger with a long enough cable, or one that lets you pull all the way through.

If the charging port were on the front of the vehicle, you could pull straight in, but now your trailer is probably blocking traffic.

Of course you could disconnect and reconnect the trailer, which adds an extra 5-10 extra minutes to your 15-40 minute charge time depending on your battery level.

New comment by shhsshs in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

shhsshs — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:31:51 +0000

> It’s not the kind of book that’ll make me cry

I thought so too, until I read the 2nd Mistborn trilogy!

New comment by shhsshs in "English: A vs. An"

shhsshs — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:38:19 +0000

One could imagine a very stressful weekend (two evenings), one of which was “the rough evening” and the other was “the nice evening”.

New comment by shhsshs in "English: A vs. An"

shhsshs — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 02:38:38 +0000

“Care” may not be the correct word, but in those examples the difference is whether you are referring to a specific instance, or any instance of a group. When you say “I went to the doctor,” you did in fact go to a specific doctor (or “I will go to the doctor” meaning you will go to one). It would be equally valid to say “I went to a doctor”, it’s just less specific.

New comment by shhsshs in "Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush"

shhsshs — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:25:38 +0000

"AI toothbrush" was not on my 2026 bingo card.

Surprisingly, $30 for two replacement heads is comparable to other electric toothbrushes (not counting third-party bulk knockoff replacements, which I have been using for years without issue). The RFID reader might force you to buy the official replacements, though.

New comment by shhsshs in "Software engineering is about managing complexity"

shhsshs — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:18:13 +0000

A compiler translating high-level code to machine code is a predictable and repeatable process.

An LLM translating a prompt to to high-level code has a much lower degree of predictability. To say an LLM prompt is a comparable abstraction is unfair, though I admit it's getting very close.

New comment by shhsshs in "Go 1.27"

shhsshs — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:26:15 +0000

That is a LOT of code (very ugly code, I would add) that could be replaced by `type Float = float32 | float64` in a language with actual support for union types.

New comment by shhsshs in "The largest available Minecraft world, totalling 15 TB"

shhsshs — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:45:14 +0000

The word "snapshot" is not entirely accurate. They used several bots to manually download the world by flying around, and that collection process takes several months (as described in the blog post).

New comment by shhsshs in "The largest available Minecraft world, totalling 15 TB"

shhsshs — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:51:39 +0000

The only redundant part of this snapshot is the second 512k^2 snapshot of the overworld. The End and Nether snapshots are still meaningful. Excluding the 512k^2 snapshot, the size would be around 12TB.

And the actual size of the 2b2t world is likely much larger than 15TB. The data for this project is stored in a highly compressed form, much more efficient than the game's standard file format.

New comment by shhsshs in "Ask HN: How do you use Vim in the era of AI?"

shhsshs — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:24:09 +0000

I see coworkers reach for AI to perform many tasks that are made trivial by a few keystrokes or a simple macro in Vim.

New comment by shhsshs in "Fox to buy Roku"

shhsshs — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:31:41 +0000

"fine" is a very accurate word to describe Tizen. It's slow and really hard to find things sometimes (why do TVs not have a simple "input switch" button any more?), but ultimately it gets the job done.

You can make Tizen much faster by manually uninstalling the Samsung TV Plus app. It runs in the background constantly. "Much faster" is still slow overall, unfortunately.

New comment by shhsshs in "Life is too short for a slow terminal"

shhsshs — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:46:34 +0000

I use aliases that lazily load nvm when I actually want to use it. This converts the shell startup penalty into a node/npm startup penalty.

New comment by shhsshs in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

shhsshs — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:22:13 +0000

If you constantly pawn a task or cognitive load onto someone else (AI or not), you'll eventually get worse and worse at that particular type of thinking. Your overall mind doesn't necessarily get weaker, but you definitely start to get worse at anything you don't regularly practice.

New comment by shhsshs in "[dead]"

shhsshs — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:02:13 +0000

I am a bit confused and very curious what purpose this site is trying to serve. They seem to have many articles all talking about the same concept which I think could be summarized as: "code is fungible". That is to say, the tests, specifications, and other supporting documentation are the truly important pieces of a system. The code part is easily replaceable. Every article on the site is about that concept in some way.

Human language is imprecise and it seems to be a common thought on HN that it is impossible to clearly and completely define the requirements of a sufficiently complex system of software without, well... writing the software. I just don't see a scenario where The Phoenix Architecture would actually make sense.

> The deletion test is not a recommendation. It’s a diagnostic.

> That’s not robustness. It’s entanglement.

> This isn’t a tooling fad. It’s an economic shift.

I have a strong feeling this article would survive regeneration well.

New comment by shhsshs in "The Self-Cancelling Subscription"

shhsshs — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:34:04 +0000

In 2020 Netflix claimed they would start to automatically cancel inactive accounts [1], but the post has since disappeared. I also remember Microsoft saying the same thing about Xbox Game Pass but have not searched for their statement.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200522032356/https://media.net...

New comment by shhsshs in "How an oil refinery works"

shhsshs — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:38:04 +0000

As someone with no real-world petrochemistry experience, but much gaming experience, I was very surprised how familiar the crude oil processing diagram looks. Factorio and GregTech are two prime examples of fairly realistic oil processing lines (probably as accurate as any game would reasonably try to be).

New comment by shhsshs in "Show HN: BAREmail ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi"

shhsshs — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:16:52 +0000

I would love one of these for Google Chat. It feels like it's been getting slower and slower these past few years.

New comment by shhsshs in "iPhone 17e"

shhsshs — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:02:46 +0000

I'm trying to understand what you mean by this. Are you saying they're "bad" in terms of resolution, or artistic value, or something else? They seem good enough (far from "bad") by any definition I can think of.

New comment by shhsshs in "The largest number representable in 64 bits"

shhsshs — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:37:28 +0000

`9↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑9` seems like a reasonable guess (barring encoding cheats/trickery like @masfuerte commented!)

Edit: I've misread the above comment and my number is is 64 bytes (significantly more than 64 bits. The largest 64 bit number through my approach would be `9↑↑↑↑↑↑9`, which is significantly smaller.

New comment by shhsshs in "Round and Round"

shhsshs — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 19:52:13 +0000

No, because it never sees its back!