Hacker News: smcameron

New comment by smcameron in "Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored"

smcameron — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:23:43 +0000

Funny enough Adam Savage just posted a youtube video about building a replica of the demon core and the box to hold it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Y4UR8xqxA

New comment by smcameron in "F-35 is built for the wrong war"

smcameron — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:19:00 +0000

Ukraine, in operation spiderweb, has already launched drones from containers deep within Russia to damage "... one third of Russia's strategic cruise missile carriers, estimated to be worth $US7 billion ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb

New comment by smcameron in "One item purchased, ten emails"

smcameron — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:27:08 +0000

Not to mention the endless stream of marketing emails you'll get forever after.

New comment by smcameron in "How to get better at guitar"

smcameron — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:01:15 +0000

Similarly, Ben Travers didn't have a delay pedal, so learned to pick the delayed parts on Pink Floyd's "Run like hell" when he was younger, since taken to ludicrous speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CY0_HG8J5M

New comment by smcameron in "The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes"

smcameron — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:36:00 +0000

The TI99/4a version of the Logo language which has turtle graphics used user defined characters to implement them. There were only (I think) 128 user definable characters, and when the turtle graphics had redefined all of them to create its output, it gave the user a message, "out of ink".

New comment by smcameron in "Show HN: I made open source, zero power PCB hackathon badges"

smcameron — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 11:16:14 +0000

Interesting... RP2040 seems like maybe a bit overkill for a zero power badge. I've participated in writing some software for an RP2040 powered badge for the RVASEC conference in Richmond, VA, for several years, and the RP2040 is really nice to program for, and is quite powerful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5ZrHAXCFLA

New comment by smcameron in "Reinventing the pull request"

smcameron — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 04:47:38 +0000

PRs can contain multiple commits. You need something like stgit to make it easy to make a bunch of small commits that appear to be the work of an omniscient genius who knew exactly what they were doing. Try using stgit for awhile, and you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

New comment by smcameron in "Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)"

smcameron — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:32:41 +0000

On the "reset"/"stty sane" trick, I also sometimes have found it necessary to press Ctrl-J rather than RETURN at the end of the command.

New comment by smcameron in "Conway's Game of Life, in real life"

smcameron — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:57:38 +0000

Something like those switches might be made very cheaply with a 3D printer, possibly a laser cutter, some transparent or semitransparent acrylic sheet, tactile switches and some LEDs. I designed a cheapo replacement for $50 tellite switches and got the price down to about $0.60 Not quite the same, as these are a lot bigger, and getting things down to the desired size might be troublesome. Anyway, here's a little video of my fake cheapo tellite switches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaenrgPVCjc

New comment by smcameron in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

smcameron — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 18:54:49 +0000

Control, Alt, Delete.

New comment by smcameron in "How can I read the standard output of an already-running process?"

smcameron — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 15:22:13 +0000

Can't you just read from /proc/pid/fd/0 ?

New comment by smcameron in "Using LLMs at Oxide"

smcameron — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 13:51:31 +0000

I found it funny that in a sentence that mentions "those who can recognize an LLM’s reveals", a few words later, there's an em-dash. I've often used em-dashes myself, so I find it a bit annoying that use of em-dashes is widely considered to be an AI tell.

New comment by smcameron in "Stacked Diffs with git rebase —onto"

smcameron — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:58:07 +0000

For me, the answer is stgit. https://stacked-git.github.io/

New comment by smcameron in "McDonald's is losing its low-income customers"

smcameron — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 03:31:30 +0000

> When you are a single person, the math changes.

No, you just have to cook meals that freeze well and learn to use your freezer.

New comment by smcameron in "The fate of "small" open source"

smcameron — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 21:10:38 +0000

In the U.S., anything machine generated is uncopyrightable.

Why would you put uncopyrightable code into your codebase?

New comment by smcameron in "At the end you use `git bisect`"

smcameron — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 18:44:26 +0000

and sccs

New comment by smcameron in "Stdlib: A library of frameworks, templates, and guides for technical leadership"

smcameron — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 11:57:11 +0000

stdlib already means something else. Don't you know when you pick a name, you need to pick something with zero google hits?

New comment by smcameron in "The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review"

smcameron — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 22:14:48 +0000

> I've got an internal alarm that starts to go off somewhere around 72 hours.

Nah, in my experience, if you've got good commit hygiene you can often merge even ancient commits.

Here's a pretty hefty commit I merged five years after it was originally written, converting a ~100k line codebase from GTK to SDL2, written in 2015, committed in 2020, with tons of development in between, with "10 files changed, 777 insertions(+), 804 deletions(-)"

https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space/commit/4ab...

I was expecting it to be a bit of a nightmare, but it really wasn't bad at all.

New comment by smcameron in "The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review"

smcameron — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 22:05:29 +0000

> - “every commit must compile” - again, unnecessary overzealousness.

So you're the one breaking git bisect all the time. Grrrr.

Use stgit and make decent commits instead of rolling in the dirt like an animal.

New comment by smcameron in "Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years (2019)"

smcameron — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 13:26:42 +0000

> there is apparently an old expression "the rabbit died" in English

This shows up in the Aerosmith song, "Sweet Emotion"