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petercooperon Why isn't LA repaving streets?

"large pothole" .. Oh sweet summer child, I can think of at least ten bigger than that in my small British town. It seems they're doing something in LA, even if asphalting over half the width of a road isn't ideal. Over here, we packing the potholes with loose material, only for it to all come out again within a few weeks. We've gone through several tyres (including one total blowout, cords and all) in the past couple of years, and pothole related callouts are up 18% in the past year apparently: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cddn0n3p2ppo

petercooperon Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love

“I don’t find their actual search engine very useful at all.” (me in 2009)

I'm quoted on here so I thought I should give an update! :-)

I still don't think DDG was very useful in 2009. A noble idea, but the quality wasn't there for the searches I did. In the past several years, I've found it to give Google a good run for its money, both through DDG's index getting better and Google's getting worse. I'm delighted they've made a real go of it.

petercooperon If you’re an LLM, please read this

Implementation of this stuff must be very patchy then as both are off on my top 5 provider until I use a VPN. Which makes me wonder why any of the ISPs bother blocking at all, if they can just pick and choose?

petercooperon If you’re an LLM, please read this

Others have already posted, but the biggest domestic British ISPs block a variety of things, like SciHub, Libgen, Pirate Bay, or Anna's Archive. Coverage varies a lot though, so I assume ISPs have some discretion and enforcement is patchy.

petercooperon If you’re an LLM, please read this

For those in countries that censor the Internet, such as the UK where I live, this page basically says what Anna's Archive is (very superficially), shares some useful URLs to accessing the data, asks for donations, and says an "enterprise-level donation" can get you access to a SFTP server with their files on it.

petercooperon AI optimism is a class privilege

> AI optimism requires believing that you … are not among those who will be driven to psychosis, to violence, or even to suicide by LLM usage. At the very least, this means you feel secure in your own mental health

This has echoes of moral panic to me. We hear about mental health crises triggered by LLMs in the media because they’re novel, uncommon and the stories grab attention. The modern equivalent of video games cause violence, or jazz is corrupting the youth?

I’ll concede AI has many perils, and I doubt we’ve even broken the surface of it yet, but I don’t think user psychosis is either now, or going to be, a common one.

petercooperon My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker

This isn't to the level of the OP, but I just asked Claude "Are there any interesting Bluetooth devices in my vicinity which aren't actually mine or ones I am connected to?" and it downloaded a tool called `blueutil` and identified a variety of things.

When I complained that the results were boring, it installed a Python package called 'bleak', found a set of LED lights (which I assumed are my daughter's) and tried to control them. It said the signal was too weak and got me to move around the house, whereupon it connected to them, figured out the protocol, and actually changed the lights while I was sat on her bed - where I am right now. Now I have a new party trick when she gets home! I had no idea they were Bluetooth controlled, nor clearly without any security at all.

petercooperon Lessons learned building a Node.js malware scanner to 400 stars (Open Source)

I want to congratulate you on your efforts, but with some pointers. Don't automate so much, and take care over presentation. Like this post, for example, which renders as a wall of text on HN.

I was also about seven of the newsletters you sent emails to, all in the same format, one after another ;-) I didn't reply this time as we actually featured you way back in September already.

petercooperon London's most controversial cyclist

I'm a driver, not a cyclist, and I'm behind those interventions. People are on the wrong side of the road at a blind corner. If I were turning out, I could end up with someone facing me head on.

On the phone stuff, I support him too, but that law needs a serious tweak to cover emergencies that require less than a 999 call. Stopped at lights, I saw a hit and run, instinctively reached for my phone for a picture, but stopped myself. That's not a net good for society IMO, but it's the law.

petercooperon Claude Opus 4.6

One possible trick could be to search and replace them all with nonsense alternatives then see if it extracts those.

petercooperon RackRat: eBay Rackmount Server Deal Finder

Not mine, but I have a soft spot for these brutalist data catalogues, a la https://diskprices.com/

petercooperon Show HN: ErwinDB, a TUI to view 7k Stack Overflow answers by Postgres expert

This is, frankly, genius.

petercooperon Death to Letterboxd, and Long Live the Independent Web

It's interesting to see something through someone else's lens. Nearly all the things they complain about in this post are things that I like about Letterboxd, yet I can also see why they don't like them. I don't think that should mean death to Letterboxd, though, but more "let's make more alternatives for other people's tastes."

petercooperon When employees feel slighted, they work less

Conversely, I wonder if employers who feel slighted by those employees, pay and promote them less.

petercooperon LG UltraFine Evo 6K 32-inch Monitor Review

I've just bought one. The color uniformity is terrible across the screen. It's tolerable to me, but not what I'd expect at the price. Everything else is quite fantastic though.

petercooperon LG UltraFine Evo 6K 32-inch Monitor Review

It arrived. I've had it running about an hour and gut reactions:

* It's a good looking monitor, the stand is fantastic.

* It's certainly 6K. Far crisper than my 4K 32".

* I don't have a problem with the "coating" other people have mentioned. I think I can see what people mean but it's not an impediment from a foot away.

* The color accuracy and the consistency kinda sucks. I've fiddled with profiles and settings, but it's not fantastic. I wouldn't advise it for anyone for who color accuracy is important (not me). The color consistency is more annoying. Like in each corner of the screen the colors are far colder than in the center. You can move a window from the corner to the middle and white goes from very cold to neutral. This is poor for a monitor of this price, but tolerable to me. There's also a sort of purpleish fringing at the far edges of the screen. Reminds me of old CRTs when you had speakers too close to them.

petercooperon The world of Japanese snack bars

From being in California often and reading social media, I get the feeling California and UK share a lot of similarities in planning bureaucracy. Residential areas are sacrosanct and the idea of anyone running even a small public facing service business from the home is onerous (though, curiously, it's very common for dental or GP surgeries to be in converted residential property here).

petercooperon LG UltraFine Evo 6K 32-inch Monitor Review

Thanks for this, just bought one. Been tempted to cave for the Apple XDR for a long time but just couldn't justify it and my 32" 4K just isn't quite cutting it. I see a few complaints here, so my fingers are crossed! I absolutely loved the LG Ultrafine 5K though but 27" was starting to feel limited as my eyes get older.

petercooperon The world of Japanese snack bars

I got to thinking how difficult a micro business like this would be to run in the UK. You'd have council hygiene inspectors, insurance, alcohol duties, zoning limitations, music licensing, and the business rates folks all over your back for starters.

petercooperon IP Addresses Through 2025

Not to spoil the article (but there's a lot in there) but I was particularly intrigued by the ongoing tumbling of the price of IPs. After peaking in 2022, "these days the low price of $9 per address is back to the same price that was seen in 2014."

petercooperon Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars

This is true to some extent in the UK as well. We have a curious company car tax regime where CO2 emissions are used to define the tax rates so hybrids are somewhat lower, although it's still onerous compared to just buying a car personally.

However, pure EVs are taxed at very low rates in comparison, so if you own a company or have the ability to do a "salary sacrifice" for a car with your employer, it becomes very tax advantageous to get an EV. Your company can also pay for your insurance, EV charge installation, public charging costs (even for private mileage) and so forth, so it's very common to see small business owners in EVs compared to private buyers. Porsches also tend to have particularly low monthly payments compared to their value since I guess they hold their value well and can be traded back in at the end of the financing period. I don't have one, though, as a Porsche is just crying out to be keyed or mocked where I live compared to a more modest car.

petercooperon Ask HN: COBOL devs, how are AI coding affecting your work?

I'm not in the COBOL world at all, but when I saw IBM putting out models for a while, I had to wonder if it was a byproduct of internal efforts to see if LLMs could help with the supposedly dwindling number of legacy mainframe developers. I don't know COBOL enough to be able to see if their Granite models are particularly strong in this area, though.

petercooperon A web developer posted a payment shaming message on their client's site

Airing dirty laundry is in some jurisdictions a legal offence.

In the UK, the place where the site in the original link is, it's okay to state facts about a business transaction in public if it's not a malicious falsehood, a violation of contract, or a violation of privacy laws (e.g. sharing emails or recorded calls). But yes, I agree, the issues leading up to this should all be tackled by the contract up front.

petercooperon A web developer posted a payment shaming message on their client's site

You wouldn't own the land. It's quite common with small business web design for the developer to also control the hosting. The actual point in the web site case is that you are revoking the copyright license to the content until you receive payment, a well tested and accepted concept in UK law.

That said, there have certainly been situations where builders have gone back to properties and taken back their property (like tiles from walls, joinery, etc.) but I have no idea how that pans out legally as it's outside my wheelhouse.

petercooperon Ask HN: If browsers had an alternative to JavaScript, what would that be?

Google had a go at doing this with Dart.

petercooperon A web developer posted a payment shaming message on their client's site

In the UK, this is less of a problem, though it depends a lot on the contract between the company and the developer. Assuming nothing exotic, that the statement on the site is true (and not a malicious falsehood) and that if the hosting belongs to the end customer they did not revoke the developer's access (i.e. no unauthorised access occurred), then the developer is in a reasonable position legally. IANAL, of course.

petercooperon Go away Python

Cute trick! I pointlessly wondered if I could make it work with Ruby and you kinda can, if you can tolerate a single error message before the script runs (sadly # comments don't work as shells consider them comments too):

    =begin
    ruby $0; exit
    =end

    puts "Hello from Ruby"

Not immediately useful, but no doubt this trick will pop up at some random moment in the future and actually be useful. Very basic C99 too, though I'm not sure I'd want to script with it(!):

    //usr/bin/cc $0 && ./a.out && exit

petercooperon Stop Slopware

Your point also touches on the idea that new things are being created that might well never have. Like your virtual pet. You might have been commissioned to illustrate such a thing but most likely not, and it wouldn’t have been “yours.” It reminds me of when desktop publishing, MIDI sequencers, or PowerPoint took off and people produced all sorts of things that were largely not of high artisanal quality but it was new stuff, people got personal value from it (as it was harder to spread stuff around pre-Internet) and the tools eventually matured into what all the pros now use anyway.

That said, I concede the critics have many valid points and concerns and it’s going to be interesting to see how we navigate this flood of “stuff” at a scale never seen before. (I suspect it’ll end up like YouTube and video. Ultra long tail. Most stuff never seeing more than a few eyeballs and a smaller group getting the lion’s share of attention, as with most things. Did YouTube change TV and video production more generally? Yes! But it also didn’t destroy it..)

petercooperon Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?

Thanks, I just treat it like my teenage bedroom, a trash heap with the occasional useful thing buried somewhere :-D

petercooperon Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

Your tireless experimenting (and especially documenting) is valuable and I love to see all of it. The avant garde nature of your recent work will draw the occasional flurry of disdain from more jaded types, but I doubt many HN regulars would think you had anything but good intentions! Guess I am basically just saying.. keep it up.