Hacker News: wkjagt

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 :-)

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

wkjagt — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:46:29 +0000

Balloons are pretty small before you inflate them, and you're not inflating them, just stuffing them with rice.

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

wkjagt — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:05:00 +0000

Which generation? Just i7 by itself doesn't mean much. I think the newest are like 14th generation? The X220 is only 2nd generation ("Sandy Bridge"), about 15 years old.

New comment by wkjagt in "Every plane you see in the sky – you can now follow it from the cockpit in 3D"

wkjagt — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:30:49 +0000

Creator posted it as Show HN last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603966

Current post is by someone else

New comment by wkjagt in "Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers"

wkjagt — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:31:46 +0000

Maybe it's someone's old project idea that they never got around to finishing, and OP randomly found it and posted it here. Maybe it was never meant to be shared.

New comment by wkjagt in "RAM Has a Design Flaw from 1966. I Bypassed It [video]"

wkjagt — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:23:21 +0000

I have become oversensitive to this, and my brain is probably generating a lot of false positives. I don't think it's necessarily the case here, but I've wondered if people who use LLMs a lot take over some of its idiosyncrasies and in a way start sounding like one a bit. A strange side effect is that I've come to appreciate text with grammatical errors, videos where people don't enunciate well etc because it's a sign that it's human created content.

New comment by wkjagt in "Modern Generic SVGA driver for Windows 3.1"

wkjagt — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:02:29 +0000

I use a 27 year old Pentium 2 laptop with Windows 98 for a hobby project. And I keep asking myself: why does this thing feel so fast? And it could be even faster if I replaced the HDD with a CF card.

New comment by wkjagt in "Windows 3.1 tiled background .bmp archive"

wkjagt — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 01:07:08 +0000

Funny coincidence. I was just (as in just now) looking for a graphics driver for my old Pentium laptop to get Windows 3.1 to work at the full 800x600 resolution.

New comment by wkjagt in "The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)"

wkjagt — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 20:31:01 +0000

On my phone I always zoom in on the vote buttons as far as it will let me so each is as big as my thumb.

New comment by wkjagt in "Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive"

wkjagt — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:53:11 +0000

I am not necessarily against AI, but in this case, I also lost interest at that point. I love reading about reverse engineering, and to me the first part of the article felt like it was leading up to that. But then it ended with what to me feels like "and then I asked AI to finish the project for me, which it did". That's not a criticism by the way, there's nothing wrong with the author using AI to reach a certain goal. I just don't find that interesting personally.

New comment by wkjagt in "The “small web” is bigger than you might think"

wkjagt — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:26:20 +0000

Oh boy, I do miss the days of things being under construction. It meant people were actually constructing things.

New comment by wkjagt in "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"

wkjagt — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:06:29 +0000

I so miss the days when software was like this. I recently got a 386 laptop that needed loads of repairs. I'm almost done with the repairs, and I will definitely put Lotus 1-2-3 on it (along with dBase, Word Perfect 5.1, and Turbo C). Thanks for this post, it motivated me even more to finish those repairs!

New comment by wkjagt in "LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop"

wkjagt — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:23:41 +0000

Yeah the Commodore 64 did something similar. I love that era of hardware.