Hacker News Reader

wiredfoolon DuckDB Internals: Why Is DuckDB Fast? (Part 1)

Few different use cases, other than just a general swiss army knife for vaguely tabular data.

* fastapi + duckdb + parquet for the backend for a relatively high profile website

* wasm duckdb + react for a few visualization websites

* yaml driven ETL from lots of sources, principally ugly spreadsheets, into usable data. More T than E or L really

wiredfoolon Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness

Saw this before the evening bus commute, trying it. 15 min in, not sure it’s working for me.

wiredfoolon Cloudflare CEO is lying to you about the bot traffic jump

I run some moderate profile gov and ngo opendata sites, and I’d say that bot like traffic is 99% of the requests we’re seeing on some sites.

Mostly current valid user agents, lots of ip addresses, but the traffic patterns are not organic. I’m not clear if it’s bad ai scraping or dos, but at some level it’s indistinguishable.

wiredfoolon I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

Unschooling works for a fraction of kids, and at some stages of their life.

How big is that fraction? In my experience being around a bunch of home schoolers (and adjacent, and school system), some of whom were more in or out of unschooling, I think it's small enough that it should be a rarely considered option.

There are some kids where it will work _really_ well. I've interacted with a couple. There are a lot of kids where it really doesn't work, especially in a distraction rich environment.

wiredfoolon Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)

Unfortunately, digeridoo playing is just as disruptive to partner's sleep as snoring is. Perhaps they should try bagpipes?

wiredfoolon Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart

Apple 2 was often az/,. .

wiredfoolon New Nginx Exploit

Ubuntu has patched as of this morning. Debian doesn't look like they've patched trixie yet.

wiredfoolon California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply

I paid the equivalent of $12.50 a gallon for diesel at the peak price a month or so ago.

wiredfoolon IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

Personally I’d look for the coveted 5 eights uptime.

wiredfoolon Troubleshooting Email Delivery to Microsoft Users

I've seen issues last week onboarding a new employee, where emails from Jira and Slack and lastpass just weren't getting through.

wiredfoolon US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

I doubt it. The spanish (really tetra pack) wine was dry, and after double distilling it was basically moonshine. The Hungarian one was more in the mixing back into the undistilled wine -- making something akin to port+ strength that drinks like wine. It's the same idea behind pineau, first distilling + the cheap young white wine of the region.

wiredfoolon US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

The best I’ve ever done was a double distilled Spanish box wine we picked up for 1eur/l. The wine was undrinkable, but the brandy was sooooo smooth.

Next best was cheap tokaij furmint, distilled once and then mixed back into some of the undistilled wine. Basically the same thing as pineau de charante, but Hungarian and on the kitchen table.

wiredfoolon A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it

  It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
  The minor falls, the major lifts

wiredfoolon Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

This is a strong contender for an Ignobel.

wiredfoolon AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

I get that feeling in Lidl. Their ambient music used to be somewhat identifiable, now it just seems a bit off.

wiredfoolon Rank the 50 best Apple products

Damn, the number of these that I've had.

Hardest choice for me:

Apple Extended Keyboard 2 vs TiBook.

Had both, Used AEK2s for a decade or more, still have the TiBook with Myst on it.

wiredfoolon UK total wind generation record beaten today

In Ireland, we’re running at about 75% renewables for the day, with most of that being wind. The absolute numbers are smaller, but that’s a peak of about 500 MW of solar and 3.6GW of wind, against something like 5-6Gw of demand.

wiredfoolon Antimatter has been transported for the first time

When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock)

The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.

wiredfoolon The Hunt for Dark Breakfast

Dutch Baby or German Pancake is probably right in that abyss.

Very eggy, with some flour/milk. It's essentially a souffle, puffs up to like 6" high in the oven. Tasty with maple syrup, powdered sugar/lemon, or just butter.

6 Eggs, 1 C flour, 1C milk.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/36900/german-pancakes-ii/

wiredfoolon Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed

I just type -- and jira fixes it.

wiredfoolon Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk

I wish.

Seems like this is the only place where the verge is in the inside.

wiredfoolon Where did all the starships go?

And then there’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. (Anthony Doerr)

wiredfoolon Where did all the starships go?

Fantasy is certainly big, but it’s not like there isn’t space sf or space opera out there.

Authors in my library who’ve released space sf stuff in the last few years — Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal.

To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even romance. But the settings are SF.

wiredfoolon TÜV Report 2026: Tesla Model Y has the worst reliability of all 2022–2023 cars (2025)

Suspension and steering is probably loose bushings. Side Slip is alignment/tracking. Wheels and tires is almost always worn tires, especially passenger side front due to roundabouts.

I'm not sure what the vehicle safety and equipment failures would be, nor the distinction between lights and lighting and electrical. The fact that it's a noticable failure point is a little surprising to me because all the lights should be LED and pretty solid.

(Though, I'll say, even though we have mandatory inspections, 5-10% of cars in my area are driving with at least one light that's out.)

wiredfoolon TÜV Report 2026: Tesla Model Y has the worst reliability of all 2022–2023 cars (2025)

The Irish NCT results for 2024 show high failure rates for Teslas in:

  - Vehicle safety and Equipment
  - Steering and Suspension
  - Side Slip
  - Wheels and Tires

and to a lesser extent

  - Lights
  - Lighting and Electrical

The (Tesla) overall failure rate is over 50% (697/1301), which is above the (population) overall failure rates of just under 50%.

Note that the oldest Tesla is 2015, and most are 2020+ which is significantly newer than a good chunk of the cars on the road here.

Also note that in my personal experience of ~10 NCTs, I've had 3 nominal failures which were stupid trivial things that aren't actually maintenance issues. (1, extra seat not in car. 2, tent peg fell in and folding seat didn't lock in place. 3, folding seat wasn't up when tested, as well as at least one where my mechanic swears that they screwed it up (steering rack boot not attached))

https://www.rsa.ie/road-safety/statistics/nct-statistics-and...

wiredfoolon Some notes on starting to use Django

Ok, from memory --

There's a pre, do and post phase for the migrations. When you run a single migration, it's: pre, do, post. When you run 2 migrations, it's: pre [1,2], do: [1,2], post: [1,2].

So, if you have a migration that depends on a previous migration's post phase, then it will fail if it is run in a batch with the previous migration.

When I've run into this is with data migrations, or if you're adding/assigining permissions to groups.

wiredfoolon Some notes on starting to use Django

There are some subtle edge cases in the django migrations where doing all the migrations at once is not the same as doing migrations one by one. This has bitten me on multiple django projects.

wiredfoolon Heathrow scraps liquid container limit

We had 4 bags go through, 3 had liquids (2 water bottles and one Barenfang) in them. All three were pulled for secondary screening, at which point they put the specific liquid bottles in a secondary scanner and cleared them.

So, yes, they stay in the bag, but then they're pulled out and scanned separately, at least in Frankfurt.

wiredfoolon Heathrow scraps liquid container limit

In Zurich, you can buy Swiss army knives in the secure zone.

wiredfoolon Heathrow scraps liquid container limit

I don't recall it in Frankfurt last summer, but it was definitely going earlier this month. Though, they've got a weird security setup for some of the gates, so I'm sure it varied from gate to gate. Dublin and Edinburgh have had it for a while too, Dublin since last summer. Really speeds up security.