Hacker News: taffronaut

New comment by taffronaut in "You are not your job"

taffronaut — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:27:16 +0000

I'd respectfully challenge that your opinion reflects reality. Nihilism [1] is just one philosophy amongst many. It's no more 'the one truth' than any of the others. Many of the other philosophies have evolved in the light of folks living for centuries through harsher reality than most of us are experiencing today. You might consider other philosophies to be delusional (as others consider nihilism to be delusional), but even in that different delusion they provide a framework to relate your love of your own personality and humanity with the same feelings that a lot of other people also feel about themselves and also each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

New comment by taffronaut in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

taffronaut — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:52:22 +0000

I have struggled to understand why houses don't get built and land sits idle for years. I can only assume that it's significantly more complicated. I'm not trying to excuse the complications. I guess if the house prices are forecast to go up, you build some houses, but not all that you can because the longer you wait, the higher the profit will be on the ones you start later. If house prices are going down, even if it's profitable when you start, you're not likely to build houses because you might be left holding houses that will sell at a lower margin. If there was a tax on unused land, that might skew things towards building more even if prices are declining, but I'm sure there are lots of views on that.

New comment by taffronaut in "You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account"

taffronaut — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:18:13 +0000

No, I think he searched for the ETA App and was disappointed at the lack of emphasis on an alternative to the app once you are in it. If you just search the web for ETA and gov.uk it takes you straight to the online portal (which also asks for feedback as it's a service in Beta). The gov.uk website is neutral between you using the app or the online portal.

The only point I can see here is that once you are in the app it keeps encouraging you to use it and doesn't keep suggesting you might like to use the online portal instead. But I don't understand the initial premise about not using app stores. If the author didn't want to use an app store, why did he download an app instead of going to gov.uk?

New comment by taffronaut in "'Ghost jobs' are on the rise – and so are calls to ban them"

taffronaut — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 08:47:22 +0000

I worked at a company where managers would endlessly push this argument to open a job posting. Of course there was no budget to hire, but they would delude themselves that the perfect candidate was out there and they'd 'be able to make a case' for the budget with the stellar application in hand. Of course they had no idea what that actually entailed otherwise they would do it in advance. To HR's credit at that company their policy was never to advertise a post unless the budget was signed off. They would patiently explain this each time some deluded optimist showed up at their door. I can easily believe in companies where the rules are less explicit that the delusion would manifest as an endless procession of advertised postings that could never be actually hired because there is no money to fund them.

New comment by taffronaut in "Bricklink suspends Marketplace operations in 35 countries"

taffronaut — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 10:49:16 +0000

There is jazz improvisation handbook "Harmony with Lego Bricks" written in the 1980's by Conrad Cork in the UK. It's pretty niche. Conrad approached Lego at the time and they gave him permission to use the Lego name. It's written "LEGO(R)" on the cover. Those were more innocent times I guess. (edited for a typo)

New comment by taffronaut in "State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview"

taffronaut — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 21:08:22 +0000

I'm not sure that the RK3688 and a big chunk of the article spent on its specs belongs in a "State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview" given that it's due sometime in 2026. I'm sure it's going to be great but I suggest it belongs to a future state.

On the other hand, CIX have been putting actual Arm v9 hardware in developers' hands for some time.

New comment by taffronaut in "Samsung makes ads on smart fridges official with upcoming software update"

taffronaut — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:35:14 +0000

The cheapest appliance is definitely cheap, whereas you generally have to take on trust the quality of the most expensive. The rule of thumb I use is "you don't get what you don't pay for", which is not the same as "you get what you pay for".

New comment by taffronaut in "Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?"

taffronaut — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 10:46:30 +0000

Thomann - for musical instrument stuff

New comment by taffronaut in "NSA and IETF: Can an attacker purchase standardization of weakened cryptography?"

taffronaut — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 10:36:24 +0000

I misread that as "the bassoon of security standards" and it sent my brain in a whole other direction

New comment by taffronaut in "Take something you don’t like and try to like it"

taffronaut — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 07:04:23 +0000

Most posts here seem to be offering easy on-ramp listening for jazz, but they seem at odds with the spirit of the original post. For jazz that is off-putting at first listening but rewards deeper study, consider Thelonious Monk (Blue Note sessions 1 & 2) or if you are really up for it, Coltrane's Interstellar Space.

New comment by taffronaut in "Arm to launch its own chip in move that could upend semiconductor industry"

taffronaut — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 19:27:53 +0000

Arm isn't competing with its biggest customers here. This doesn't affect their relationship with e.g. AWS or Azure (Cobalt) as those folks are not selling CPU chips on the open market. Nvidia probably couldn't care less as commodity Arm IP isn't anything they make their margins on. It affects anyone selling Neoverse server chips which is ... Ampere, but Ampere is bankrolled by Oracle and Oracle could take them in-house.

New comment by taffronaut in "How AI is unlocking ancient texts"

taffronaut — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:01:41 +0000

From TFA "decoding rare and lost languages of which hardly any traces survive". Assuming that's not hype, let's see it have a go at Rongorongo[1] then.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

New comment by taffronaut in "Jaguar Land Rover electric car whistleblower sacked"

taffronaut — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 15:47:51 +0000

As British as the British Royal Family then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Windsor

New comment by taffronaut in "RISC-V HiFive Premier P550 Development Boards with Ubuntu Now Available"

taffronaut — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 21:30:52 +0000

Ubuntu has historically had a business model that is more open to supporting out-of-tree kernel patches

New comment by taffronaut in "Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]"

taffronaut — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 07:16:45 +0000

The UK government ran an initiative in the mid 1980s to get electronics CAD into every university and polytechnic. The institution I worked for got a lab of DN300 and DN500 workstations running various digital and SPICE-based tools. We used them for undergrad classes and also for some consultancy projects. They felt like a huge leap to us. To put it in perspective, our other labs at the time were either CP/M or mainframe terminals.

New comment by taffronaut in "Ask HN: How do you find a "boring" tech job?"

taffronaut — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 09:31:41 +0000

This is good advice. There are many boring jobs in 'cost side' departments of big companies and the only attention they get from upper management is a continuous focus on reducing costs. Even the most inoffensive manager can get ground down by having to do more with less every year. IMHO, a sweet spot is rather where you can trace that you contribute to revenue but you are not on the critical path.

New comment by taffronaut in "Formal Mechanised Semantics of CHERI C: Capabilities, Undefined Behaviour"

taffronaut — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 08:53:49 +0000

Here's a link to the Arm program: https://www.morello-project.org/

New comment by taffronaut in "AI 'hallucinated' fake legal cases filed to B.C. court in Canadian first"

taffronaut — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:34:12 +0000

From TFA, "the case was a high-net-worth family matter" so probably not an existential threat to anyone.

New comment by taffronaut in "The first results from the biggest basic income experiment"

taffronaut — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 10:03:18 +0000

It's not inherently ridiculous. Administration is a non-zero cost. Anything below that cost is cheaper to give rather than administer.

Hip operations are a weird counter example to refute UBI. They're obviously not universally applicable and are more expensive in cost and resources than the administration overhead. That's leaving aside the ethical issues of giving people unnecessary surgery.

New comment by taffronaut in "Why doctors in America earn so much"

taffronaut — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:00:25 +0000

I have multiple problems with this comment

> 95% of health is being proactive about your health: food, fitness, sleep, dentist, etcetera.

This is a statistic pulled out of nowhere.

>> But we're all going to have severe medical problems at some point.

>Which often are untreatable - and the doctoring is regularly prophylactic. Hip-replacements are an obvious outlier.

Again this is pulled out of nowhere. All types of joint replacement, stents and heart surgery are major procedures which are common and not prophylactic. Prostate cancer surgery has an 85% success rate in eradication where I live, and no, I didn't get it from bad lifestyle choices.