Hacker News: tolciho

New comment by tolciho in "Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast"

tolciho — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:55:35 +0000

Oklo, Gabon appears to have run a nuclear reactor about 1.7 billion years ago, though whether you can get a natural nuclear explosion on some chunk of rock somewhere might be difficult to tell.

New comment by tolciho in "Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)"

tolciho — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:11:48 +0000

25% might be low for the "better dead than red" crowd, given the lasting and widespread popularity of communism in the worker's paradise that is America.

New comment by tolciho in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"

tolciho — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:10:59 +0000

And that slop increases the range of things bikesheddable, like having free kerosene and matches available at an Arson Anonymous meeting.

New comment by tolciho in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"

tolciho — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:50:25 +0000

LLM increase the range of things bikesheddable, so some folks will try to have a LLM design a nuclear reactor and manage the coffee budget in addition to the traditional bikeshed design complications. Whether this is an improvement or more engines of what passes for civilization catching on fire, well…

New comment by tolciho in "EYG: A Programming Language for Humans"

tolciho — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 03:45:53 +0000

AppleScript "English" was designed to be intuitive and easy to understand (or so claimed various manuals), but boy howdy did I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what "English" it did accept.

New comment by tolciho in "Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data"

tolciho — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 03:33:10 +0000

One might wonder whether the Late Bronze Age collapse had similar (copper, finance, tin) reasons for going the way it did.

New comment by tolciho in "'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling"

tolciho — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 04:20:40 +0000

The profit urge was already made fun of in a recent novel.

  “And what does the author mean to do?” said Don Quixote.

  “What?” replied Samson; “why, as soon as he has found the history which
  he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at once
  give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to him
  from doing so than by any thought of praise.”

  Whereat Sancho observed, “The author looks for money and profit, does he?
  It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry,
  with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are
  never finished as perfectly as they ought to be.

New comment by tolciho in "I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs"

tolciho — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:41:21 +0000

  printf 'silent data loss' | while read l; do printf '%s\n' "$l"; done

though at the point I need to write

  while IFS= read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do
    printf '%s\n' "$line"
  done

I'll use a different language.

New comment by tolciho in "I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs"

tolciho — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:25:32 +0000

  for name in `ls`; do echo "$name"; done

is an unportable and expensive way to write

  for name in *; do printf '%s\n' "$name"; done

but you could also just

  printf '%s\n' *

New comment by tolciho in "Have you restarted your computer this week?"

tolciho — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:21:08 +0000

Months to years without a reboot sounds like a pretty big gamble as to whether the hardware still boots, or not. More frequent reboots tend to catch "the hardware has soured" (and how would you know?) issues sooner, like maybe the BIOS decides to come up with the clock set four years into the future and then time sync can fail and then everything fails. The prior example was strictly hypothetical, of course no real system would ever do that.

New comment by tolciho in "The Boeing 747 begins its final descent"

tolciho — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:10:08 +0000

The "big old plane" was from the B team at Boeing, everyone with money or ambition or plain common sense then had put their chips on supersonics, which guzzle even more fuel in addition to the Operation Bongo II problem.

New comment by tolciho in "Ask HN: I miss old days of blogging without promotions"

tolciho — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:49:28 +0000

Try the smolnet, which would be the web before it went all "the 'Akira' stadium scene", or gopher, or gemini (no, not the google twaddle).

New comment by tolciho in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

tolciho — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:46:14 +0000

Note the use of 'may'; the details of the car-hell vary. Perhaps the I-90 pollution instead spills into the lake and then bioaccumultes into larger organisms, Bon Appétit! My anecdote was a bit southwesterly of the I-5 bridge where there was, besides the horrific noise pollution, definitely a greyish black soot to clean off everything. A fine result of rolling a natural one and automatically failing the skill check for "copy the autobahn", probably.

As to why some beings need to be whisked hither and yon with such haste, and thus spend quite a bit of time (and energy) trying to be somewhere, anywhere else, well, are they hungry ghosts? Or maybe they min/maxed for wizard and ended up with only three points in wisdom?

New comment by tolciho in "The Future of Email"

tolciho — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:15:26 +0000

(The RFC also allows for (recursive (comments, so there's probably a middle ground between insanely overengineered specifications and a )))regex( someone found on a PHP forum somewhere (and yes this post is a valid email address (assuming there is a local regex account (or alias)))

New comment by tolciho in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

tolciho — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:36:07 +0000

> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.

Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the little black particles over everything in the surroundings but nobody likes to tear down the interstate.

New comment by tolciho in "Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]"

tolciho — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:35:33 +0000

I wore the rsa-dolphin t-shirt all over the place and nobody batted an eye back then, but a dolphin made up of ASCII characters is quite a bit less obvious than the one you linked.

OpenBSD being based in Canada ships strong crypto, but has had a sometimes troubled relationship with certain regimes.

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#34

New comment by tolciho in "Stop the Apple Music app from launching"

tolciho — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:19:32 +0000

But why isn't there an easy option to turn the "feature" off? Why the kluges and workarounds for Apple going downhill (Microsoftean is indeed a good term here) for a while now? Same story for the nasty notifiction system, the annoying finder "spacebar may preview some random file hopefully without too many security vulns" (the low contrast design whereby you think Firefox is in foreground but it's actually the Finder is another bad design element that contributes to mixing up what the active app is), etc etc etc

New comment by tolciho in "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight"

tolciho — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:19:47 +0000

Why would "money" be necessary?

https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...

New comment by tolciho in "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight"

tolciho — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:05:11 +0000

Japanese militarism was a thing recently, so the kids got eveything but the batleth.

New comment by tolciho in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

tolciho — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:38:50 +0000

OpenBSD used to have sqlite in base, but the code churn rate was too high to review. This was well before the recent LLM craze, so a human (perhaps not a normal one, though) already sufficies to generate too many changes for others to check for errors.