Hacker News: skipkey

New comment by skipkey in "Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died"

skipkey — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:34:39 +0000

Back in the 90s and the early aughts Simmons was on my “automatically buy everything he writes” list. But it seemed like he had stopped writing. But then I happened to browse Barnes and Noble beyond the SF&F and horror aisles and discovered he had been writing crime novels. And they were good.

I think if he had ever decided to write romance novels I would have probably enjoyed those as well.

New comment by skipkey in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

skipkey — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:38:31 +0000

Eh, not really? If it's a legit company who provides services to various governments, they're going to pay you, they're going to report the income to the government, you'll get a 1099 for contract/consulting, and you'll pay your taxes on the legit income. No red flags. Assuming they're legit and not currently sanctioned by the US government that is.

New comment by skipkey in "Toyotas and Terrorists: "Why are ISIS's trucks better than ours?" (2023)"

skipkey — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:59:30 +0000

In 1993 I paid a shade under $10k for a new Chevy S10 where the only options were AC (not actually optional in Texas) and CD player in the radio. It was manual transmission, V6. Indexed to inflation that would be, what, about $24k today if regs allowed them to be built?

If it existed they would fill every rural high school parking lot in the south. Allow them to exist and someone will build them.

New comment by skipkey in "Semaglutide improves knee osteoarthritis independant of weight loss"

skipkey — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:21:06 +0000

It’s not just you. I’ve known several people who lost their desire to drink beer specifically on these drugs. I didn’t personally experience it, but then I am more of a whiskey guy.

New comment by skipkey in "Git Rebase for the Terrified"

skipkey — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:06:35 +0000

I can give you an example of when I am glad I rebased. There have been many times I have been working on a feature that was going to take some time to finish. In that case my general workflow is to rebase against main every day or two. It lets me keep track of changes and handle conflicts early and makes the eventual merge much simpler. As for debugging I’ve never personally had to do this, but I imagine git bisect would probably work better with rebased, squashed commits.

New comment by skipkey in "Ultima VII Revisited"

skipkey — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 20:22:43 +0000

For years, Ultima VII was the buggiest RPG I ever finished the main quest on. Then I played Daggerfall.

New comment by skipkey in "Vibe Debugging: Enterprises' Up and Coming Nightmare"

skipkey — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 19:06:43 +0000

But that’s just it-as a design aid it can really go off the rails, but as a testing strategy it’s really useful in one domain. Defect fixing. If I can convince a junior engineer that when he gets a bug report to first write a test that shows the problem and then fix it, using the test to prove it’s fixed, it provides immense benefits.

New comment by skipkey in "Lateralized sleeping positions in domestic cats"

skipkey — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 04:13:56 +0000

I resemble this remark. My wife and I run a feral/stray cat rescue, and anecdotally, this seems to be true, with a few caveats. In particular, the ferals tend to sleep with their backs to a wall, which overrides the left/right preference, the strays not so much.

New comment by skipkey in "Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git"

skipkey — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 13:30:52 +0000

As I recall, one problem was you got silent corruption if you ran out of disk space during certain operations, and there were things that took significantly more disk space while in flight than when finished, so you wouldn’t even know.

When I was at Microsoft, Source Depot was the nicer of the two version control systems I had to use. The other, Source Library Manager, was much worse.

New comment by skipkey in "How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully"

skipkey — Tue, 27 May 2025 14:38:36 +0000

In my neighborhood in the East Valley in Phoenix, I’ve seen Cooper’s hawks, kestrels, peregrine falcons, zone tailed hawks, merlins, and one immature bald eagle. Along with the numerous turkey vultures and the occasional black vulture.

New comment by skipkey in "The number of new apartments is at a 50-year high, but states expect a slowdown"

skipkey — Sat, 03 May 2025 13:21:06 +0000

But see, to the politicians this is a feature, not a bug. It’s the same reason that it’s incredibly expensive in terms of permitting and such to start a brick and mortar business in many cities. They would rather leave the locations unoccupied and available for something that will bring in high tax revenue than tie them up with low revenue occupants.

New comment by skipkey in "Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges"

skipkey — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 12:36:01 +0000

Both HP and Brother offer this - it goes to a server that then sends to an email you have configured. I’d guess the vast majority of people who use the scanner do this rather than setting up a share on a home network.

New comment by skipkey in "Steve Meretzky – Working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker's Guide"

skipkey — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 03:32:31 +0000

It took me like two weeks to figure out the babel fish puzzle. I almost gave up, but I could only afford one game at a time then.

New comment by skipkey in "Hoard of coins from Norman Conquest is Britain's most valuable treasure find"

skipkey — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 02:35:09 +0000

You used to be able to get uncleaned late Roman bronze coins from the Balkans for about a buck apiece in the early 2000s, so I’d guess they’d be maybe $3-5 each now. Then you get the fun of very carefully removing the encrustations to reveal the coin underneath. You generally ended up with a coin worth about what you paid for it, but it was fun.

New comment by skipkey in "Goldman and Apple 'illegally sidestepped' obligations to credit-card customers"

skipkey — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 18:14:16 +0000

So I can kind of understand where the confusion comes from. I used this to buy my wife and I MacBooks last year. When I started the checkout flow I didn’t initially realize I was just applying for an Apple Card, rather than just being a loan with a fixed payment. I could see people that don’t understand how zero interest offers interact with revolving credit accounts might not have understood.

But the UI is pretty clear when you make a payment, if you drop the amount under the recommended payment how much interest it’s going to cost you.

New comment by skipkey in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

skipkey — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 13:30:10 +0000

A pretty good rule of thumb was always, $_ is most likely the thing you need it to be. Oh, there are exceptions, but in my experience they were generally caused by code that had been made inappropriately clever.

New comment by skipkey in "Abandoned mines cover the West"

skipkey — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 02:55:36 +0000

There are still quite a few accessible mines on public lands in Arizona. Well, generally the mine shafts themselves are off limits for safety reasons, but you can usually get to the tailings piles. In the last couple of years I have pulled nice specimens of chrysocolla, fluorite, onyx from tailings.

New comment by skipkey in "What I tell people new to on-call"

skipkey — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 02:30:03 +0000

Depends on the size of the team. Startup or small team? Yes. Everyone is on call all the time. Large number of developers? Someone on every team is on call all the time, and leads need to be almost always available for large outages.

On call pretty much just comes with the job, and always has.

New comment by skipkey in "Show HN: Chili. Rust port of Spice, a low-overhead parallelization library"

skipkey — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 13:36:35 +0000

If it has beans it isn’t Texas chili…

New comment by skipkey in "Why Not Comments"

skipkey — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 18:54:11 +0000

It was pretty common say 25 years ago when you would be developing in a terminal. When you were limited in the number of lines displayed, it sometimes made it easier to follow the code when functions and control structures were large.

I know I had coworkers using brief configured to do that.