Hacker News: smackeyacky

New comment by smackeyacky in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

smackeyacky — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:05:16 +0000

Hmm. I feel like it isn’t over the history of the US and there was a period where US governance tended toward an ideal but the last 50 years have reverted to the norm. E.g Oliver North

New comment by smackeyacky in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

smackeyacky — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 05:34:30 +0000

In the modern world they don’t have to be. I’m not sure a bubbling still in every home is a great idea but they won’t be wood fired so that’s a start. You could also test alcohol cheaply these days for the poisonous alcohols.

Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free

New comment by smackeyacky in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

smackeyacky — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:54:46 +0000

Alan Kay invented a dead end (smalltalk). Meanwhile Linux became the future.

Apple had a terrible Unix until they bought NextStep.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses"

smackeyacky — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:10:48 +0000

Giving back to society means a very different thing to billionaires than it does to ordinary folk. They’d rather spend it on politicians to tear down the society they think is wrong rather than shore up the parts that are failing. I have always blamed the idea that seems to stem from liberal economics (not liberal in the American sense) that equates money with virtue, something that conservatives have taken on as a mantra.

So be careful what you wish for. Ordinary morality or virtue loses all meaning when the world becomes abstract due to your wealth.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)"

smackeyacky — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 06:12:03 +0000

My counterpoint to this is that something that threatened to be a standard space opera had the delightful juxtaposition of Ruby Rhod and the opera singer. The initial appearance of Ruby Rhod really jolted my attention the first time I saw this movie. It’s weird but it works for me

New comment by smackeyacky in "The Importance of Being Idle"

smackeyacky — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:02:12 +0000

If you’re an ant, sure!

New comment by smackeyacky in "Brain scans reveal how to enters a psychedelic-like trance without drugs"

smackeyacky — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:46:10 +0000

https://tim.blog/2009/09/21/how-to-lucid-dream/

I roughly followed these sorts of techniques after a period of having terrifying dreams related to stress.

It worked. I can recognise dreams and control the outcomes to a very large degree. The downside is that while that’s great for terrifying dreams it’s not so good for interesting ones. To lucid dream is to stop being able to let go completely. I’m ambivalent about it now.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Brain scans reveal how to enters a psychedelic-like trance without drugs"

smackeyacky — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:27:20 +0000

I don’t know whether it’s related to training yourself how to lucid dream, but once you can you may regret it as dreams stop working in the old way once you do. So be aware of that possibility before you go down that path.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Software never had a soul"

smackeyacky — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:19:01 +0000

To me it’s an anthropomorphic reaction to things that generate heat, that rumble and roar or you mistake their weird “I am the only one who knows how to start this” quirks.

I never give a name to a car until I’ve done something substantial to it and it rewarded me with a decent trip in return. My wife’s Subaru will likely never have a name because I haven’t cut myself fixing it or replaced anything major.

The old SRT8 300C? It has a name.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

smackeyacky — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:31:47 +0000

I used to find it better to shortcut the AI by asking it to write python to do a task. Claude 4.6 seems to do this without prompting.

Edit: working on a lot of legacy code that needs boring refactoring, which Claude is great at.

New comment by smackeyacky in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

smackeyacky — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 02:23:32 +0000

You don’t need a jubilee. At this point Trump could release a video of himself eating a crying baby and his supporters simply will ignore it.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone"

smackeyacky — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 03:01:11 +0000

Perhaps nurses would be a better pool of astronaut candidates than test pilots.

I remember seeing a Russian space toilet when they had it set up in the powerhouse museum in Sydney. It looked like a booth with a vaguely pubic area shaped vacuum attachment designed to be unisex. I stared at it for some time trying to work out how it worked. The Apollo system seems horrendous!

New comment by smackeyacky in "The Australian government has announced gambling advertising reforms"

smackeyacky — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:04:19 +0000

It’s too late. Professional sports is already ruined by gambling. You don’t always see it in the results but in the weird side bets (how many tackles, home many metres).

It should be more heavily regulated and the advertisements are so blatant and intrusive they ruin any pleasure you might take from watching sport in Australia.

New comment by smackeyacky in "A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky"

smackeyacky — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:59:04 +0000

Bollocks. Making the payload weird just shows the lengths that idiot will go to to give the finger to everyone

New comment by smackeyacky in "The Windows equivalents of the most used Linux commands"

smackeyacky — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:55:20 +0000

I guess you get git bash for free when you install git, which speaks legions about the pain of powershell

New comment by smackeyacky in "The Windows equivalents of the most used Linux commands"

smackeyacky — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:24:04 +0000

Because powershell is weird and obtuse? Or because powershell works slightly different in the terminal va the powershell dev environment? Its a tool most of us use under duress rather than choice

New comment by smackeyacky in "The Windows equivalents of the most used Linux commands"

smackeyacky — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:21:22 +0000

Cygwin was so much work but you’re still stuck in windows.

New comment by smackeyacky in "The Windows equivalents of the most used Linux commands"

smackeyacky — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:20:13 +0000

Yuck. Just install WSL and be done with it

New comment by smackeyacky in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

smackeyacky — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:11:09 +0000

I’m not American. The Artemis launch feels to me like a beacon that the America the rest of us looked up to isn’t gone.

New comment by smackeyacky in "A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky"

smackeyacky — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 11:53:29 +0000

Why should he be allowed to pollute the night sky like that?