Hacker News: wilsonnb3

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

wilsonnb3 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:16:38 +0000

Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)"

wilsonnb3 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:33:03 +0000

I highly recommend the book “How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)” if you are interested in this subject.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "MacBook Neo"

wilsonnb3 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:05:27 +0000

My understanding is that students are very hard on school provided laptops, I don’t think many of them that have been in use for a year will be in good resale condition.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "MacBook Neo"

wilsonnb3 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:58:00 +0000

The surface laptop is a competitor to the MacBook Air, the cheaper Surface Laptop Go was the low cost attempt from MS.

Also, there are plenty of good laptops from HP, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, and others, the market is not that dire.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution"

wilsonnb3 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:43:48 +0000

How are you going to reach out to someone first if all communication is blocked because they don't already know you?

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US"

wilsonnb3 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:51:28 +0000

You can upload custom emoji to teams, most businesses just turn it off

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "JuiceSSH – Give me my pro features back"

wilsonnb3 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:24:00 +0000

I don’t think it is that widely available due to Snapdragon chips not supporting some feature it requires.

Good option for Pixel owners or phones with MediaTek chips though.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data"

wilsonnb3 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:19:09 +0000

I never really understood that angle - do you think the Germans would have thrown their hands up and not killed anyone because they lacked accurate data on who was Jewish?

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Running Claude Code dangerously (safely)"

wilsonnb3 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:24:48 +0000

Programs can’t want things, it’s no different than running any other program as your user

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro"

wilsonnb3 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 04:09:23 +0000

They already have a modern copy on write file system (ReFS), you just can’t use it on desktop Windows for some reason

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro"

wilsonnb3 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 01:47:53 +0000

They already do that for Azure

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Tired of AI, people are committing to the analog lifestyle in 2026"

wilsonnb3 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:05:34 +0000

I know language evolves over time, but I can’t help but be irritated when people refer to anything non-computerized as analog.

If it isn’t representing something with a continuously various signal then it ain’t analog!

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

wilsonnb3 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:25:46 +0000

To be fair, downloading and running random executables from the internet is a genuinely terrible security model when the OS (like Windows, Linux, or (to a lesser extent) MacOS) does nothing to prevent it from doing anything you can do.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans"

wilsonnb3 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 01:42:01 +0000

> "Why is Claude writing TypeScript I'm supposed to read?" 40% of code is now machine-written. That number's only going up.

How much of the code is read by humans, though? I think using languages that LLMs work well with, like TS or Python, makes a lot of sense but the chosen language still needs to be readable by humans.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans"

wilsonnb3 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 01:34:57 +0000

> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer. If that layer is natural language, debugging becomes: "Hey Claude, the login is failing for users with + in their email."

I debug at my abstraction layer because I can trust that my compiler actually works, LLMs are fundamentally different and need to produce human readable code.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "2025 was a disaster for Windows 11"

wilsonnb3 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:20:40 +0000

> making mandatory perpetual payments to be allowed to use tightly-controlled devices that they must manage their entire lives through

This is the mainframe experience for companies that run on z/OS, the licensing makes Azure look simple by comparison

https://ibmlicensingexperts.com/ibm-mainframe-licensing-z-sy...

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "2025 was a disaster for Windows 11"

wilsonnb3 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 23:27:54 +0000

The old context menu can get slow as hell too, there have been third party tools to manage it for ages, like https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "2025 was a disaster for Windows 11"

wilsonnb3 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:40:33 +0000

This is the fault of whoever is administrating your Windows machines, Teams and Outlook are perfectly capable of opening links in your configured default browser.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "2025 was a disaster for Windows 11"

wilsonnb3 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:38:52 +0000

How would rebuilding Windows on top of Linux help anything? Nobody is complaining about the NT kernel and none of the Linux DEs are clearly superior to the Windows userland, they all have at least as many bugs and warts.

New comment by wilsonnb3 in "Day laborers protest noise machines installed at Home Depot"

wilsonnb3 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:54:15 +0000

See season 7, episode 4 (“Sex Ed”) of The Office for a non-cartoon media reference :)