Hacker News: smackeyacky

New comment by smackeyacky in "The Last Surviving Japanese Porsche 912 Police Car"

smackeyacky — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:04:36 +0000

Bit of a shame what has happened to classic Porsche prices. They used to be “car guy” cars. Now the prices went wackadoodle they’ve become cars for people who…aren’t car guys and can’t even pronounce it properly.

Interesting history on that one, bit of an odd choice for the Japanese police.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

smackeyacky — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:33:31 +0000

It’s wood. You put it in your fireplace and set fire to it for heat

New comment by smackeyacky in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

smackeyacky — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:40 +0000

My grandfather was like this, and not with soft wood. We try to burn Australian hardwoods and that takes quite a bit of force to split. He could pound through it like a knife through butter. There’s a definite art to hardwood, looking where the slightest fault might be. You can’t just smash it in the middle, your block splitter (preferred) or axe just bounces off it.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Has AI Killed How-To Nonfiction?"

smackeyacky — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 02:24:26 +0000

Especially since the books in question are older and likely aged out.

New comment by smackeyacky in "RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon"

smackeyacky — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:37:15 +0000

Last hackathon I went to our team was beaten by a group that produced a PowerPoint presentation. I have no interest in doing that any more

New comment by smackeyacky in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

smackeyacky — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:24:06 +0000

Making peace with the lived ones might be harder. Chasing the startup dream ended in bitterness, disappointment and debt. It forever damaged my marriage and my mental health. Be careful what you wish for.

New comment by smackeyacky in "US banks rely on a 65-year-old programming language"

smackeyacky — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:43:13 +0000

Or people don’t want to be trained in it because while you’re doing it the industry keeps on inventing new things you’re supposed to know.

I’ve been offered a job doing cobol and another legacy language on core banking systems and I’m going to take it. I’m getting toward the end of my career so the risk is low and the work might be more interesting than fighting npm or feeding questions into a clanker

New comment by smackeyacky in "HeidiSQL – Lightweight MariaDB, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQLite Manager"

smackeyacky — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:27:01 +0000

One thing that tripped me up with Heidi was the default collation for tables is Swedish. Makes sense for them I guess. I stopped using it when I ditched windows. The older versions did crash a bit for me but they probably sorted that out. Dbeaver is good enough.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Japan Lost 3M People in Five Years"

smackeyacky — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:49:46 +0000

Why is this fact awkward?

New comment by smackeyacky in "Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?"

smackeyacky — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:45:05 +0000

Exactly. Nobody wants smalltalk programmers or IIS whisperers. You just have to embrace the idea that your skills become worthless every five years and move on.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Micromania: The Whole Truth about Home Computers (1984)"

smackeyacky — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:46:30 +0000

This is interesting. I became enamoured of computers in the 8 bit age because those blinking cursors seemed to offer endless possibilities. I don’t think I ever looked at one as obedient, more a willing but strict companion.

In a lot of ways the LLM era seems like a culmination of that illusion.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Ask HN: I found out that I'm about to be laid off. How do people find jobs?"

smackeyacky — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:10:12 +0000

I’ve had 3 jobs in the last 3 years. What didn’t work: cold applications mostly were a waste of time. LinkedIn has been a complete farce for job seeking.

However the last cold application did work, although it was to an agency rather than direct to the company.

It’s demoralising work applying for jobs. Good luck!

New comment by smackeyacky in "C array types are weird"

smackeyacky — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:28 +0000

Embedded programming is still in C for a lot of micro controllers and whatnot. If you’re programming with limited resources it’s essential to understand pointers and arrays. Likely you won’t be doing anything useful without them

New comment by smackeyacky in "Ferrari Luce"

smackeyacky — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:30:05 +0000

Rolex run a similar scam with watches. It’s supposed to prevent people flipping the objects in question which is important for anything with artificial scarcity.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Ferrari Luce"

smackeyacky — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:09:41 +0000

Yep they do despite it seeming like an anachronism from the 1980s. I have a few car posters in my workshop because grown ups aren’t allowed to have them on their bedroom walls, at least according to my wife.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Ferrari Luce"

smackeyacky — Mon, 25 May 2026 22:38:00 +0000

It’s a five seat nearly SUV despite Ferrari claiming it isn’t. It makes fake noises in sports mode like the other EVs, it seems to have only two features that come from Ferrari and that’s the quad rear lights and the yellow badge.

I’m not the target market for this and never will be but nobody is going to make a poster of that for a teenagers bedroom. Yuck.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Why Do We Sleep Under Blankets, Even on the Hottest Nights? (2017)"

smackeyacky — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:20:32 +0000

Safety. If something creeps up hopefully one of you is partly awake to raise the alarm. I sometimes think cats are still like this, they seem to sleep very soundly around people but only snooze and are easily startled when isolated.

New comment by smackeyacky in "AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome: A Communications Intervention"

smackeyacky — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:12:26 +0000

Rove and his ilk were enabled by the ultra wealthy. Otherwise he’d be a divorce lawyer.

New comment by smackeyacky in "AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome: A Communications Intervention"

smackeyacky — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:16:41 +0000

It would seem to me that becoming ultra wealthy necessarily disconnects you from ordinary people. You have security concerns for yourself and family, you don’t want to be constantly peppered by requests for financial help.

Plus your resources allow consumption of things otherwise out of your reach: women, exotic travel, yachts, mixing with other elites. Also the darker things (Epstein elites).

So after a while you not only won’t mix with the hoi polloi, you literally can’t because you share nothing with them.

The trappings of wealth start to include political influence, which seems to encourage the idea that being wealthy makes you some kind of expert because important people listen to you and will do what you want with an appropriate consideration or contribution.

There is an argument in here for limiting wealth to avoid this descent into disconnected sociopathy.

New comment by smackeyacky in "Microsoft surprises with its first server Linux distribution: Azure Linux 4.0"

smackeyacky — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:42:10 +0000

WSL was the first public sign Microsoft had given up on windows.