Hacker News: thombat

New comment by thombat in "Dutch Train Map Simulator"

thombat — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:20:37 +0000

I delegated this errand to my manservant. I am quite unaware of what means of access he may have at his disposal but I trust that his resourceful nature will suffice to provide a precis of this internet website.

New comment by thombat in "Grok Bot"

thombat — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:43:10 +0000

I'd mark them face-to-face, but here? Maybe I'm talking to a bot. Or maybe you'll be, if you reply.

New comment by thombat in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

thombat — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:50:45 +0000

Of those 15, it might be illuminating to know how many did not on grounds of principle versus merely that the cost/benefit didn't favour it for them at that time?

New comment by thombat in "In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words"

thombat — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:41:25 +0000

I used character styles that set the proofing language with hot keys assigned, so shift-alt-1 sets to English, shift-alt-2 to German, etc. As character styles they apply both to the current insertion point when typing or any selected range (e.g. when I forgot to set it proactively and now have a line spattered with wiggles)

Or just set the proofing language for the entire text to None to banish all spelling and grammar diagnostics.

New comment by thombat in "Show HN: Criterion Closet as a website – pull any of 1,247 films off the shelf"

thombat — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 06:41:57 +0000

The link to Criterion streaming doesn't work for "Brazil" (#51) - it shows a list of movies that likely have the word in their synopsis such as "Kiss of the Spider Woman" but not the actual film (which famously doesn't reference the country at all)

New comment by thombat in "Hospitals and universities repurposing drugs at lower cost"

thombat — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:34:49 +0000

This note in that WP link is wild:

"On July 7, 2021, Barry Cadden's original 9-year sentence was increased to 14.5 years. An appeals court court decision required the trial judge to consider patients, and not only hospitals, as victims of the crime."

The law is always more complex than a layman like me thinks, questions of standing, etc. But I would have simply assumed that the patients hurt and killed would naturally be counted among the victims and not just the organisations left out-of-pocket.

New comment by thombat in "Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts"

thombat — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:02:44 +0000

Feels like a proper movie that political boundaries like state lines would be significant for all concerned. One meteor for Rhode Island, one for Texas... Any questions? (Asks the alien overlord of his minions in his crisp British accent)

New comment by thombat in "LLMs Are Closer to Religion Than They Appear"

thombat — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:37:32 +0000

And then you have arrived at "Last Thursdayism", where the universe could have been created a few days ago, or literally now, or might not exist at all and you are the only soul in existence hallucinating everything, because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator.

New comment by thombat in "Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids and Failed Supernovas"

thombat — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:10:23 +0000

This overlooks that the Rubin telescope has a relatively wide field of view and a thirty second exposure time, so LEO satellites do routinely appear in images. The size of the object isn't so important as its relative brightness, so while a car on the surface of the Earth is hard to locate from 400km above, a sunlit car 400km up in the night sky is visible to the naked eye.

New comment by thombat in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

thombat — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:10:50 +0000

The US requirement is that passengers on flights to the USA have been processed in conformance with US regulations _and_ since that processing have not had any contact with passengers processed otherwise. It's not in itself a stupid rule but does make the US rules contagious, since either other airports re-build to keep the US-bound and other passengers segregated or they have to apply US rules to all.

This hit Auckland International badly: it had a lovely open atrium with a garden but the rules forced a forest of partitioning walls since passengers were transferring from smaller airports that couldn't quickly adopt the US rules.

New comment by thombat in "California bill would require patches or refunds when online games shut down"

thombat — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:30:08 +0000

Not OP, but it's more the warning not to underestimate the cost required for compliance, and apprehension of this cost may deter their creation.

New comment by thombat in "California bill would require patches or refunds when online games shut down"

thombat — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:27:30 +0000

The final phase of Symbian OS was becoming the open-source Symbian Foundation. This required the existing codebase, hundreds of thousands of files, to be categorised properly (mostly homegrown, some acquired, some licensed) and where necessary restructured so that each directory only had one kind. Painful, exacting, tedious archaeology which all-but-froze development for weeks. Like a long-deferred merge, the cost to pay for belatedly resolving a mess of licenses is daunting.

New comment by thombat in "The day the Pintupi Nine entered the modern world (2014)"

thombat — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:46:50 +0000

Thank you for that haunting image, of the recognition that their last user was gone, that this aspect of 65,000 years of local history had come to its end.

I hope that Payirti, the one who turned back, embraced that final solitude and understood how his family had chosen otherwise. I hope he felt his ancestors with him as he died.

New comment by thombat in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

thombat — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:59:47 +0000

But a much shorter flight time compared to ICBMs coming from the USA, and being launched from unhardened sites, so looking more like a first-strike decapitation weapon than a retaliatory MAD capability.

Of course submarine-launched ballistic missiles have the same flight time if launched from the Black Sea or off the Eastern Seaboard, but at least they have a strong second-strike potential.

New comment by thombat in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

thombat — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:39:58 +0000

Which directly followed the USA stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey with the range to strike Moscow. As part of the mutual climb down from the missile crisis the USA removed the Jupiters, as both sides then understood the wisdom of avoiding hot brinkmanship

New comment by thombat in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

thombat — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:15:36 +0000

But it isn't speeding by, it's heading away following a closely predetermined trajectory. A better analogy would be filming a high-altitude aircraft flying away from you, using a gear-driven tripod mount.

New comment by thombat in "$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor"

thombat — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:11:01 +0000

He wasn't wrong in that claim: for the most part the bombers did get through, especially at night. The problem was that their effectiveness once "through" was far lower than the bombing proponents had claimed, due in particular to the lack of precision, but also the resilience of both targets and the enemy population.

New comment by thombat in "Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results"

thombat — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:03:38 +0000

It comes years too late, but I finally understand the reliability problems I had with a DVD drive mounted on its side. If only I'd had your insight then, I could have taken the PC to a playground and burnt disks on the carousel.

New comment by thombat in "I Regret to Inform You That the FDA Is FDAing Again"

thombat — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:16:48 +0000

Derek Lowe's take on this, probably written before those HHS comments, was that "the agency appears to have signed off on the trial design as proposed, and I can’t see Moderna going ahead with it if the agency had done otherwise". Does it appear that the design was actually approved?

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-refusal-file

New comment by thombat in "Why is the sky blue?"

thombat — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:37:36 +0000

Please do! It will fit the spirit of your splendid post, unpacking the complexity of a thing we take for granted (at least as native English speakers)