Hacker News: tappaseater

New comment by tappaseater in "Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now"

tappaseater — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:55:49 +0000

Anthropic bought Bun, so they kinda, sorta had to make this work. I am sure the cost at $145,000 in Claude time will get some attention.

I am curious how this will work going forward from FOSS perspective. Will humans be allowed to modify the generated code? Only the .md prompts for the agents? Or what?

New comment by tappaseater in "Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback"

tappaseater — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:25:29 +0000

It's funny you should say that, because the next release apparently directly addresses this. Including startup to tray. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/close-tray-starting-154

New comment by tappaseater in "Exceptions should not be handled – they should be aggregated"

tappaseater — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:00:50 +0000

Incredibly well said.

New comment by tappaseater in "Usenet Archives"

tappaseater — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:28:27 +0000

ne.general, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose, meowww wars, Stephen Boursey. Anyone else old?

New comment by tappaseater in "Flightradar24 for Ships"

tappaseater — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:45:44 +0000

Nitpick: It's called Contributor and supposedly has the same features of the previous subscription. It still feels like a setup for future degradation by some marketing genius.

New comment by tappaseater in "Canada Announces Divorce from America"

tappaseater — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:11:15 +0000

The whole section that introduces Zaphod is so apt for Trump. It talks about the president's position not being to concentrate power, but to distract attention FROM it. It really feels that way to me, anyway.

New comment by tappaseater in "Reverse Engineering Yaesu FT-70D Firmware Encryption"

tappaseater — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 13:06:11 +0000

I used to follow the balloon projects that hams would launch. A mylar balloon with a tiny 50 milliwatt transmitter and GPS, solar powered on the 10Mhz band tracked thousands of miles away.

New comment by tappaseater in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

tappaseater — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:35:04 +0000

You’re right — H-1B is dual intent. But my main point still stands: conflating H-1Bs with “immigrants hollowing out the middle class” is misleading. H-1B was designed to address shortfalls in skilled labor by granting temporary work authorization to foreign workers. On paper, it’s a fine idea.

In practice, the program has been abused, by body shops for instance, that we ended up with a new word: insourcing. That’s the real issue, and not immigration per se, but the way a temporary labor program reshaped whole categories of employment. And while politicians sometimes talk about fixing it, I wouldn’t expect much. If anything, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the “dual intent” aspect pared back in the future under the current guy.

New comment by tappaseater in "Cassette Logic: technology that never dies but is already dead"

tappaseater — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:18:28 +0000

I've seen plenty and even tossed them as streamers as a kid. I've also seen many scratched CDs lying at the side of the road.

New comment by tappaseater in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

tappaseater — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 11:16:11 +0000

It’s important to clarify that H-1B is a non-immigrant visa — you don’t get to stay if you lose your job. That matters because the debate isn’t about immigration itself but about how the program functions. H-1B was meant to supplement shortages in highly skilled roles. Over time, though, it’s reshaped whole categories of employment. Anecdotally, I see very few young U.S. devs compared to many late-career ones finishing out their working lives. If we dare to use the term “national interest,” the real issue is whether a temporary labor program has morphed into something that permanently alters the market.

New comment by tappaseater in "Cassette Logic: technology that never dies but is already dead"

tappaseater — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:42:29 +0000

I often wonder why compact disc was the bridge technology to full digital and not DAT.

New comment by tappaseater in "The future of solar doesn't track the sun"

tappaseater — Sat, 03 May 2025 11:04:10 +0000

I'm probably not thinking this through, so go easy, but why wouldn't tracked panels also produce a normalized power curve? My assumption behind the question is that they follow the same track as Sol every day, which doesn't vary at least year-to-year.

New comment by tappaseater in "Is the TikTok ban a chance to rethink the whole internet?"

tappaseater — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 13:33:50 +0000

The TT creator, John Aravosis, said recently on his show that it took TT 3 days to figure out he is gay and he said he never interacted with it in any way that would convey that. On the other hand, it kept giving me animal snuff that utterly revulsed me, despite my reporting it, thumbs downing.

I deleted my account about a year ago. Although I loved a lot of content and was awed by the work of many creators, I got this weird anxiety when I had been scrolling for, say, an hour. It was like my brain was giving me a warning sign, though my consciousness did not perceive it. I came to a personal decision, unscientifically, and without any jingoism or conspiracies, that short-form scrolling is bad for my health.

A couple of weeks ago I signed up for Loops (the fediverse version of TT) and I scrolled a few videos. I had such a strong negative feeling that I closed it and uninstalled. I am so happy YouTube Shorts is so shit, because I watch one or two that catch my eye, then go back to the longer videos.

New comment by tappaseater in "Calling women 'household objects' now permitted on Facebook"

tappaseater — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 12:33:40 +0000

When Zuck said on Jan 7th, 2025, that he wants to work with President Trump to oppose states threatening free speech, he wasn't talking about China. It was 100% the EU and its regulations. The quid pro quo starts to emerge.

New comment by tappaseater in "Of Psion and Symbian"

tappaseater — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 11:03:16 +0000

When I was just starting my career around the late 1980s, I wrote a program on the Psion for a chain store in the UK that had 21 stores. Basically a person would walk the aisles and enter the stock codes and quantities. When they were done they would plug the device into a serial device. I wrote this other program in MS Basic (DOS) that dialed up all these Psions and downloaded the orders into an IBM S/38 Order and Inventory management system. I thought I was the dog's. I loved those devices.

New comment by tappaseater in "Netflix's '3 Body Problem' Has Chilling Social Media Parallels"

tappaseater — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 15:28:32 +0000

It is poorly written, with some atrocious dialog. I watched it all because the story intrigued me, but all I kept thinking was, "The last season of GoT was shit for THIS?"

New comment by tappaseater in "David Hahn, the 'radioactive boy scout' who tried to build a nuclear reactor (2022)"

tappaseater — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 12:48:25 +0000

The excellent YouTuber "Plainly Difficult" covered this story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCwWX_9grrE

New comment by tappaseater in "I used to not worry about climate change. Now I do [video]"

tappaseater — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 13:19:54 +0000

I always tell my gun-hoarding, go-box toting, bug-out planning prepper friends the same thing. You don't have enough guns and ammo to stop the masses coming for your canned pork'n'beans.

New comment by tappaseater in "Norway to allow mining waste to be dumped in fjords"

tappaseater — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 19:54:03 +0000

So much for the Brisling Sardines industry. We hardly knew ye.

New comment by tappaseater in "Ask HN: What has quantum computing achieved so far?"

tappaseater — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 13:17:59 +0000

I have been confused by Quantum Computing and have been reading and watching as much as possible on the topic. I can never seem to grasp the potential. I keep thinking about classical problems. Like what if I multiply a real number by a number consisting of qbits? Or what happens to bitwise operations with qbits?

Then, something I read to the effect that we need to stop thinking of QC as solving classical problems but solving different problems at least reassured me I wasn't too dumb to get it.