HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

bergie

8,227 karma · joined October 6, 2010

Sailor, hacker, and an occasional adventurer. Author of Create.js (http://createjs.org/) and NoFlo (http://noflojs.org/).

More on http://bergie.iki.fi and https://lille-oe.de/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/bergie; my proof: https://keybase.io/bergie/sigs/94Ea8rkF51hWAkqI5uBmafa01SABlUwEamPyaPswvoM ]

submissionscomments
bergie··on A barbarian tribe's mythic origin story is true, ancient DNA reveals
Estonian "Venemaa" for Russia sort of points at a common origin there ("venemaa" would be "boat land" in Finnish). So rowing land, boat land.
bergie··on What's the worst bug an AI coding agent silently introduced into your code?
On a piece of navigation software, GLM hallucinated astro tables instead of using a library. I wondered why my sun sight was 1000NM off, and then it confessed.

On the current offshore passage I got to within 7NM of GNSS position, so the fixed version works. 7NM might sound a lot, but from the deck of a small boat in big seas it isn't bad, and totally enough for making landfall.

bergie··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
On our boat[1] we have deployable solar that we need to take down every time it gets windy so I'm quite familiar with the process.

Plan it and it won't be a huge deal.

That said, I'm sure there are spots on this planet where solar isn't the best renewable option. Maybe small-scale wind power would be better where you are? On our boat we have both (and hydro for when we're sailing). Sadly these mechanical generators haven't yet received similar scale effects to their price as solar has.

1: https://lille-oe.de/

bergie··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
I've seen plenty of solar in areas that get hit by hurricanes or tropical cyclones. If your panels get blown to bits, you just put up new panels once the storm is over (or you know, take them down when the storm is forecasted)
bergie··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
Solar panels cost less than $1/Watt. Then you need some brackets to hold them, some wiring, and likely an MPPT controller. The rest of that price is red tape specific to your locality.

They're so cheap that bars in Colombia had panels as their terasse awnings. Cheaper than cloth and makes power.

bergie··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
After all, it comes from the Star of America.
bergie··on Ask HN: What did you replace pocket with?
Wallabag
bergie··on We are entering a period of overlapping crises
Crisis of the 3rd Century is another big Eurocentric one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century

bergie··on A sustainable web career, for when all this blows over
IoT did happen, too. You just won't notice it unless you work in specific industries. Just couple weeks ago I chatted with a dairy farmer who had crazy amount of telemetry from each of their cows.
bergie··on Reading’s Bayeux Tapestry
That fanfic ending of the Bayeux Tapestry in Reading is an obvious Victorian fabrication. The original depicts the c-base space station crashing on earth. It can be viewed in Berlin:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bergie/46619220061/

bergie··on Tokens too cheap to meter
Having your own solar can be "too cheap to meter", though it is definitely a feast and a famine kind of a thing.

We had batteries full and were spending electricity on all kinds of luxury things like whole-day internet and desalination for several weeks, and now that it has rained for over a week we're starting to turn non-critical systems off to keep the lights on.

bergie··on Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage
What was the classic joke on this one?

"What happens if we train these people and they leave?" "What happens if you don't and they stay"

bergie··on German Hospitals Prepare for War, Drones and Mass Casualties
They've been helping Ukraine defend itself. Every Russian (and Ukrainian) death in this "special military operation" is on Putin.
bergie··on OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework
I'm simply using rngit work documents for this. In planning sessions (or sometimes by hand) I produce working a work document.

Then for implementation, I tell Pi to read the appropriate work document. Pi can also post updates as we go along.

https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html#work-documents

bergie··on One Phone. One Computer
That's basically Samsung DeX, or the other Android desktop systems that started appearing recently.
bergie··on How much oil-market buffer is left?
> Sadly, in CA, charging at home (minimum $0.26/kWh) isn't that much cheaper.

Just get some solar panels. We live on a sailboat and charge the electric outboard of our dinghy (kind of our "car", this is what we use to go to stores etc) with the surplus on sunny days.

Solar panels are ridiculously cheap now.

bergie··on I changed my license
Fair point, but "making billionaires multi-billionaires" didn't have quite the same ring to it :-D

(I'm the author of that blog post)

bergie··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
I'm nowadays hosting my projects on rngit (git over Reticulum). But also pushing a mirror to GitHub via a cronjob to increase visibility.

https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html

I don't think moving to another forge is much of a solution, at most it is buying a bit of time. We've seen this happen with SourceForge, with Tigris, and now with GitHub.

bergie··on 50k Boat Names
My favorite so far was a motorboat named "Maday". Imagine hailing them on VHF...
bergie··on Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History
In Europe flying is subsidised and ridiculously cheap. That would need to end.

Further than removing subsidies, if flight cost would include its negative externalities, few would fly.

bergie··on Samsung reveals Galaxy Z Fold 8 that will compete with the iPhone Ultra
They did match it to the _released_ Pixel
bergie··on Should you wash your solar panels?
Yes, on a boat you have to wash the panels periodically to get rid of salt and bird poop.

The latter can be a surprisingly big problem. Southeast of Galapagos we had a booby sit on our spreader for a day, and it managed to cover our two 100Wp panels in the bow almost completely.

bergie··on Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects
Git over Reticulum is another option. You get git, issue tracking (work documents), release management

https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html

bergie··on Ask HN: What are your personal websites?
http://bergie.iki.fi is my personal site. Has been updated quite sporadically, but has a post history stretching back to late 90s.

https://lille-oe.de updates whenever we go sailing.

bergie··on Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks
That's the way. Get on a train, sleep, wake up in a new city.

Last time I did interrail (some 15 years ago), you could sometimes pay a bit of extra to get a spot in a sleeping car.

bergie··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
Doing a JavaScript port of Reticulum. We'll need it soon for a boat project
bergie··on Why Vanilla JavaScript
You still need a build tool, and that tool is likely broken if you need to return to the project in a year or two.

TypeScript benefits can be had without a build step by leveraging JsDoc.

bergie··on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
Starlink has worked great for us so far from Europe to Polynesia. Prices keep going up, so would be nice if the service had actual competition.

The backups are sadly becoming trickier, as fewer and fewer carry SSB radios or operate shore stations.

And yet we do have SSB, and also an Inreach as backups. You never know when Elon wakes up and decides he doesn't like sailors.

bergie··on Hollywood's spent 25 years chasing the wrong lessons from The Lord of the Rings
But the Tove Jansson illustrations make it all worthwhile. Adorable.

https://tovejansson.com/hobbit-tolkien/

bergie··on How We Made IPFS Content Publishing 10x Faster
Back when I was working at a website builder, we used IPFS for distributing content between our serving clusters.

If also made the sites available on IPFS, but that was a secondary concern.

Page 1 of 34Next →