Hacker News: wkjagt

New comment by wkjagt in "Show HN: Zanagrams"

wkjagt — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:11:12 +0000

This is so much fun. And something while playing reminded me of a this video I saw where someone asks her boyfriend "what does Y-E-S spell", and he said "yes". Then she asked him what "E-Y-E-S" spelled, and he couldn't figure it out (he kept saying "eee... yes?"). Anyway, I was looking at the remaining letters with just one word left to go. Four of them formed a word I had already guessed, plus one letter, but didn't make any sense with that additional letter. Until it did. I won't spoil which was it was, but it was in puzzle #1.

New comment by wkjagt in "HP re-releases classic computer science calculator: The HP-16C"

wkjagt — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:02:30 +0000

I felt the same and got a Casio CM-100 that has similar functionality. Not as nice as the HP but it does the job. Much cheaper too if you can find one.

New comment by wkjagt in "Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching"

wkjagt — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:25:42 +0000

I am Dutch and moved to Canada about 20 years ago (my wife is Canadian). Imagine our first meal at my new in-laws, and me not speaking much French yet (we're in Quebec), and still wanting to show my appreciation for the meal...

New comment by wkjagt in "Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching"

wkjagt — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:20:50 +0000

I also learned in an awkward way that waving my hand next to my cheek isn't an international sign for lekker. I moved to Canada about 20 years ago, and still sometimes do it, but apparently here it means you're signaling that someone is a little bit crazy.

New comment by wkjagt in "Omarchy Is Not A Distro"

wkjagt — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:20:16 +0000

Doesn't it come from car culture? Where (mostly young) people put giant wings and shiny wheels on a clapped out Honda Civic to make it look like a race car. I always thought that "rice" was an intentional misspelling of "race" (as in "race car", which, hold on a minute, I guess would also make it race... ist?)

New comment by wkjagt in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"

wkjagt — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:48:00 +0000

Oh yeah I totally get that, and I feel the same, but the author of this project specifically says that it's hand written (first paragraph of the readme in the repo).

New comment by wkjagt in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"

wkjagt — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:01:23 +0000

It doesn't diminish the art form though. If anything, I value these kinds of hand written projects even more now that so many people are pulled in by AI doing their projects for them in a fraction of the time and effort. I love doing these kinds of projects, and I love writing assembly, but I must admit that the temptation of just copy pasting generated code is big sometimes, because it's _right there_. In this context, seeing someone handwriting something awesome by hand is even more valuable to me.

New comment by wkjagt in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"

wkjagt — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:39:19 +0000

> "strlen" will always iterate through a string searching for a NULL byte whether it's in C, Rust, Assembly

Not all languages use NULL terminated strings. I think Rust actually stores the string length alongside a pointer to the start of the string data. You can do the same in C, but you'd have to do it manually using a struct. In assembly you could do the same thing since you get to decide basically everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8PLpDgZc0E

New comment by wkjagt in "EEVblog: The 555 Timer is 55 years old [video]"

wkjagt — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:57:35 +0000

It's too bad. It's a good mode for low power.

New comment by wkjagt in "EEVblog: The 555 Timer is 55 years old [video]"

wkjagt — Wed, 06 May 2026 10:30:15 +0000

A couple of years ago I used a 555 in an attempt to fix a problem I had with my Xiegu G90 ham radio. When sending CW (morse code), the radio would sometimes not see a "dit" (the short tone in morse code). I could reproduce it by tapping the paddle too quickly. My theory is that the G90 doesn't use interrupts to detect paddle presses, but rather polls those lines, and sometimes misses when a pulse happens completely in between polls. I made a little circuit using a 555, where the dit side triggers the 555 and closes the dit line just long enough to always be picked up by the G90, but short enough to never cause two dits (at least not at the speed I was going at). I didn't bother doing the same for the dah side, because apparently my index finger is slower than my thumb and the problem never came up there. It worked flawlessly, but only when not transmitting. As soon as RF got involved, it behaved weirdly. I tried adding ferrite beads, but it didn't solve it. In the end I never used it, and just learned to not slap the dits so fast, but it was a fun experience and see the 555 work.

More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/1eo9ki7/xiegy...

New comment by wkjagt in "Framework Laptop 13 Pro: Major Upgrades and Linux Front and Center"

wkjagt — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:03:00 +0000

> I even went around at Linux conferences and counted, like 30-40%

I don't think the interest in the hardware is necessarily low among Linux users, it's just that MacBooks aren't built with Linux in mind at all, and you can't run Linux on it as easily as on something like a ThinkPad.

> cloned every detail of the product you are definitionally not interested in

I guess a lot of people actually are interested in Apple's hardware, and wish something like that existed, but running Linux. You can't extrapolate your own preferences to Framework's market.

New comment by wkjagt in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

wkjagt — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:02:41 +0000

I left big tech about 5 years ago, which was an interesting timing looking back. It's not even that long ago, but man have things completely changed since then. I still code a lot, but only for fun. I've never even tried agentic coding. I'm kinda sad that "coding the old way" (as what this apparently is now) has become obsolete so quickly, but also very grateful that I was coincidentally born at the right time to have lived through a good chunk of time where people still wrote code themselves.

New comment by wkjagt in "The Soul of an Old Machine"

wkjagt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:11:23 +0000

Oh yeah that's not so recent either, but it helps that it's a desktop version. Yours has 4 cores, whereas for example my 7th gen i7 (Kaby Lake) laptop only has 2.It's about 10 years old, but still enough for everything I use it for. I am always impressed how much you can do with older hardware.

New comment by wkjagt in "Caffeine, cocaine, and painkillers detected in sharks from The Bahamas"

wkjagt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:56:23 +0000

Maybe it says something about the people taking cocaine and go swimming with sharks.

New comment by wkjagt in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

wkjagt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:16:01 +0000

Juggling has a very special place in my heart. I met my wife through juggling. We were both staying at a youth hostel in Ireland, and the owner introduced us to each other because she'd seen us both juggling, and said we should juggle together. She was way better than me. She juggled with clubs, burning torches and knives, so yeah, life was never the same after that.

New comment by wkjagt in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

wkjagt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:10:23 +0000

Why autism?

New comment by wkjagt in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

wkjagt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:08:22 +0000

For real? I am a juggling nerd, but didn't know that was a thing. I gotta go find my people now.

New comment by wkjagt in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

wkjagt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:06:40 +0000

Slang for rationalists, apparently, according to another comment.

New comment by wkjagt in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

wkjagt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:04:55 +0000

I am not the person you're asking, but they were a thing in The Netherlands at least. Not super common, but they did exist. Typically they sold other related things too, like diabolos, flower sticks, etc. This was a while ago, before Amazon, when there were just a lot more different types of shops. I am not sure they still still exist.

New comment by wkjagt in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

wkjagt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:57:05 +0000

It's crazy how much you don't actually need to look at your hands. I learned juggling a long time ago, and I remember discovering this. It feels like you become good at predicting from the top of the arc where you need to place your hand so that it intersects with the arc. I was surprised to see that as I got better, I also started catching the balls where the throw was a little off and I had to extend my arm to catch it, but still without actually looking at my hands. And at some point it becomes automatic and fast.

There was this one time when I was grocery shopping (I had been practicing a lot at that point), and someone accidentally pushed a jar off a shelf, and I caught it without looking or even thinking. I felt a little bit like a super hero with super reflexes :-)