Hacker News: w4der

New comment by w4der in "Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

w4der — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:33:16 +0000

I don't care how good you think it is, the fact that it (back when I used to be a TA) would break if two TAs tried concurrently grading different parts of an assignment of a student is bonkers. The workaround for that was to use a Google Sheet document so TAs just looked at the submission in Canvas, then filed in their grades and feedback on the sheet. The issue is that Canvas, as far as I could tell, did not support mass uploads from a csv, so we had a script which would read every entry on the csv, map that to the student's ID and grade them, which made it look like the TA which had generated the API key graded all of the students (and would get all the backlash from poor grades).

I completely agree that it is not trivial software in the worst sense, it tries to do too much, while not being particularly good at any one of those things, and is way too rigid for how diverse the needs of different courses might be even inside a single faculty. And saying "It's AGPL, just self host and add your requirements to it" is not really useful, that would mean way more money and effort than what a university's overworked IT dept. is capable of.

New comment by w4der in "“Kitten Space Agency”, a Spiritual Successor to “Kerbal Space Program” (2025)"

w4der — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:01:04 +0000

There is historical precedent tho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9licette

New comment by w4der in "The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild"

w4der — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 11:33:20 +0000

I said this in another comment, but I feel it's edited to look like water he uses in his garage demos with that blue glitter.

New comment by w4der in "The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild"

w4der — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:51:13 +0000

I think it's edited to look like water he uses in his garage demos.

New comment by w4der in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

w4der — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:57:35 +0000

> only about $20-30 million

That is still an absurd amount of money

New comment by w4der in "Personal Computer by Perplexity"

w4der — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:11:56 +0000

Funny how you didn't even mention MS Copilot, which many of my friends who work for big corporations seem to have been forced to use at work, and as a consequence, also for personal use.

New comment by w4der in "Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]"

w4der — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:46:11 +0000

Keep in mind that this is an Australian startup, and they already have some publications out on the ethics of doing this.

New comment by w4der in "“Car Wash” test with 53 models"

w4der — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:22:26 +0000

But what is being pitched as "AGI" hype is the latter.

New comment by w4der in "Voith Schneider Propeller"

w4der — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:42:17 +0000

They are installed in pairs and work together with bow thrusters to allow for dynamic positioning, the RV Falkor (too) has them for this reason.

New comment by w4der in "Picol: A Tcl interpreter in 500 lines of code"

w4der — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:22:00 +0000

Tcl's first "release" was in 1988 and Magic was released in 1984, but it seems like John Ousterhout then wrote Tcl to have a common interface across tools [https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/tclHistory.php]. It still is a big thing in EDA, because (in theory) it lets a chip designer run their designs by tools from different vendors

New comment by w4der in "Reports of Telnet's death have been greatly exaggerated"

w4der — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:56:39 +0000

Some of KUKA's controllers still use telnet in their startup sequence.

New comment by w4der in "xAI joins SpaceX"

w4der — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:42:10 +0000

No, but I live in a country were Chinese cars have been sold since the 2010s and spare parts are still an issue. It might be an issue with their sales partners here, but many sell other brands from Korea and Japan and have no issues with them.

New comment by w4der in "xAI joins SpaceX"

w4der — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:22:02 +0000

BYD are just affordable and maybe reliable, regarding maintenance their spares are hard to come by and are almost as hard to work with as Tesla and other brands.

New comment by w4der in "Bose has released API docs and opened the API for its EoL SoundTouch speakers"

w4der — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 08:50:49 +0000

It is a pretty sad story, and one that has been rather well told:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insi...

https://www.philmckinney.com/i-convinced-hps-board-to-buy-pa...

New comment by w4der in "Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?"

w4der — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 04:25:21 +0000

On a related note, if you studied and got a degree at a university, check if they have an alumni program. I pay a small yearly fee that lets me access the university's academic databases and their VPN, so I get some other perks as it looks like I'm connected through eduroam.

New comment by w4der in "Inside the university AI cheating crisis"

w4der — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 02:53:50 +0000

I never once submitted an assignment on a course with TurnitIn turned on, it makes you agree to their terms of service, which I disagree with and I'd just sed my work to the teacher through email, explaining what was my issue with TurnitIn, and most times they'd just turn it off, which I think speaks loads about that "tool".

New comment by w4der in "UK's Online Safety Act comes into force"

w4der — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 20:11:20 +0000

But when I go and buy booze, I just show my ID and that's it, it isn't stored in a database with what I bought and then leaked on the internet.

New comment by w4der in "Why is Chile so long?"

w4der — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 18:28:10 +0000

Not really, that would probably be the north of Chile on the Atacama desert, there's a reason why the Extremely Large Telescope, Giant Magellan Telescope and Vera C. Rubin are being built there.

New comment by w4der in "Amazon-powered AI cameras used to detect emotions of unwitting train passengers"

w4der — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 22:44:03 +0000

Another thing I figure they might be trying is anticipate suicides, so they can stop them before they happen. But it's probably just to sell you a grimace shake or whatever.