Hacker News Reader

cluomaon Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

Same here. Some of the worst seasonal allergies I've ever had was while living in Germany. I'm not sure what exactly was responsible; my guess at the time was some sort of grass but I don't know for sure.

cluomaon British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time

I live in the Yukon so will now be in sync with BC time again after this change. The concerns about commuting to school in the dark seem almost comical, given the experiences of everybody here with the winter darkness.

For other reasons, I also wish we were closer to solar noon though. High noon is actually closer to 2pm here and seems to push the whole day back in the summer. The best (warmest) parts of the day get pushed too late into the afternoon.

cluomaon LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger

I used to get this same feeling during lectures in uni. Often the information was presented well and, along with some clear examples, everything seemed to make perfect sense.

It wasn't until working through practice problems later, on my own, did it become clear how much detail I was missing.

cluomaon My Truck Desk

That's been exactly my experience as well. Sometimes doing a little research on a lunch break gives enough direction on how to spend available time later on my project.

Accepting that progress will be slow has been the most difficult adjustment, and applies to more than just side-projects. Choosing books or games also becomes a more strategic decision when what used to be a weekend sprint, turns into a several week marathon.

cluomaon Apple Debuts iPhone 17

I think I'm throwing in the towel on my 7 Plus this year. I'd love to keep it around for a bit longer but too many apps and websites are no longer functional. It's starting to become a usability issue.

cluomaon A Typology of Canadianisms

I grew up in BC as well and never heard it. My parents were from Ontario and always called it the flipper. Because it flips channels I guess. Felt like every household had a different name for it though.

cluomaon Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)

https://github.com/cluoma/Pico2Maple-fw

Currently working on a USB/Bluetooth to Sega Dreamcast controller adapter.

It's based on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2/W board and originally started as a fun project to play around with the PIO features of the RP chips and get my Steam Controller working on the Dreamcast. It has since expanded to support more controllers, keyboards, mice, and acts as VMU - the Dreamcast's memory card - while plugged in. Building the dongle itself has also been a fun exercise in 3d printing, cad and pcb design.

I'd really like to expand the amount of supported USB devices as I only have access to a limited amount of hardware that I can test myself. I've started looking into if I can use the SDL Game Controller DB (https://github.com/mdqinc/SDL_GameControllerDB) to kind of crowd source support for a bunch of controllers. I'm definitely open to other ideas though. I feel like I'm slowly learning that USB controllers are minefield of one-offs and edge cases.

cluomaon Raspberry Pi RP2350 Now Available for Purchase, Stacked Memory Variant Coming

The PIO functionality, I think, is a killer feature for interfacing with retro consoles. I've been working on a Sega Dreamcast controller adapter and the PIO made it pretty easy to start interfacing with the console's custom protocol, even for somebody with near-zero experience in this kind of thing.

cluomaon Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

What would you look for to see if somebody is 'staying relevant'? Side projects? Personally, I would like to explore new technologies, and am still excited to learn, but feel limited by what is actually needed/required in my day-to-day which is unlikely to change.

cluomaon Steam drops Windows 7 and 8 support with the latest client

I feel you, extremely frustrating when the phone is otherwise in good working order. I've started to get update prompts from apps, on my aging iPhone, even though no new versions exist for my OS.

cluomaon I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it

There is the Zink project[1]. It is an OGL to Vulkan translation layer.

[1]https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/zink.html

cluomaon Error Handling in Baby Toys

I had my son's lying around and it definitely happens consistently with the konami code in both the 'learning' and 'playing' modes.

cluomaon Safety benefits of roundabouts

This is certainly an issue. There is a roundabout on my morning commute that regularly has pedestrians crossing inside the roundabout (alongside cars on the outside) because that's the most direct route.

cluomaon I applied to 250 jobs and timed how long each one took

I also don't think 2.5 minutes is unreasonably long or much of a barrier. After spending an hour looking for relevant postings at companies I'm interested in, another few minutes to actually apply is not a big deal.

What is truly annoying though is creating new accounts for each company's application portal.

cluomaon Met Office says Northern Lights will be visible in England tonight and tomorrow

I live pretty far north in Canada and have been making nightly timelapses trying to catch the northern lights. What surprised me the most is how common they are here. Most nights, they will be visible for a few minutes or more, weather permitting.

So far today it’s clear skies so looking forward to tonight.

cluomaon Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

I was in the same situation with a Macbook Air 2011. At about 9 years old I needed to replace the battery, but got turned away from the Apple Store because it was 'too old'.

I tried buying a replacement battery online but it only worked for a short time before it stopped charging all-together.

Left a really sour taste in my mouth because the battery was the only thing stopping me from using an otherwise perfectly fine piece of hardware.

cluomaon Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs

At the Whitehorse dam we also had one of the lowest counts of Chinook on record this year. Not looking good for northern sea life at the moment.

cluomaon Analysis of Apple Watch running data

If you already have an Apple Watch, I recommend trying WorkOutDoors before looking for another device. It’s a huge step up from the default workout app that I’m still using my Series 3 for everything up to marathons.

cluomaon Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

Not a good week for internet infrastructure in Canada. Yukon Territory had essentially no internet for most of this Wednesday after the only fibre was broken.

cluomaon New cars make me want to Saab (2020)

I really like a lot of stylings in modern cars. It's nice to see some harder angles. Never was a fan of the overly smooth, almost bubbly, look of cars from the 90's and 00's.

cluomaon How Not to Support Desktop GNU+Linux, Zoom Edition

Same audio issues here. Zoom always wants to set my mic level to 0 and change the default output source for whatever reason.

My last company used Teams which I had a much better experience with on Linux (gnome+xorg) than Zoom.

cluomaon Porting USB applications to the web. Part 1: libusb

Given that the 'pile of online crap' has been around for a while now and seemingly not going anywhere, having access to this in the browser, and on any OS, sounds pretty convenient.

cluomaon Fleet, a Lightweight IDE from JetBrains

Installing single IDEs is clunky. Basically it's up to you to put it where you want and then create any shortcuts you may need. Flatpaks make this easier but I would rather not use them.

Besides this, I never really felt that Linux was an afterthought though. At least from my experience using CLion.

cluomaon Developing Games on Linux: An Interview with Little Red Dog Games

I haven’t used KDE in a couple years but what you describe sounds like what I encountered with its compositor. When launching fullscreen applications it turns off the compositor for better performance. Tabbing out doesn’t always (or at least didn’t for me) turn the compositor back on. Add to that weird, seemingly Nvidia-specific bugs (again just my experience) and the whole desktop experience falls apart.

cluomaon Europe’s cookie consent reckoning is coming

An article dissing cookie popups has a cookie popup with no easy opt out. Amazing.

cluomaon Comparing Svelte and React

I went with Svelte for my first side-project[1], having never touched a frontend framework or used Javascript before.

The experience was actually really nice. Obviously I don't know how it compares to other options out there, but it was a pretty enjoyable experience overall. I felt like I was able to do exactly what I wanted and wasn't missing anything.

[1]: https://squidpoll.com/

cluomaon Joan Fons hired to work on Godot's rendering

Definitely agree with you're last point, it makes it so easy to just get something on the screen.

I had written an AI for the board game Khet, but wanted an easy way for people to actually have fun playing against it. Godot was the perfect tool for the job to create a nice little frontend. And it was quite a pleasant experience to boot.

cluomaon Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

Is this not available in the EU? I get forwarded to my dashboard page.

cluomaon Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)

I think this is a common problem on Nvidia. Firefox used to crash for me all the time coming out of hibernate. You can try Nvidia's solution.[1]

[1]: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/455.38/READ...

cluomaon FastCGI – The Forgotten Treasure (2002)

After hearing about CGI I became a bit obsessed with its simplicity and started writing my blog[1] as a CGI app, eventually incorporating a FastCGI library later.

Performance-wise I don't know how it would compare to other options, but I think it's a great way to expose C/C++ code to the web.

[1]: https://github.com/cluoma/bittyblog