Hacker News: Asooka

New comment by Asooka in "The Case Against Gameplay Loops (2024)"

Asooka — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:43:53 +0000

The trolls (and haters) are always the most vocal. It was true 40 years ago and it is still true today: Do NOT feed the trolls.

New comment by Asooka in "Dr. Dobb's Developer Library DVD 6 (2010)"

Asooka — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:09:37 +0000

Ah, the e2 article says it was patented, so no wonder it never gained traction. Surely that patent is long expired, though?

New comment by Asooka in "LittleSnitch for Linux"

Asooka — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:47:12 +0000

Yeah I will also be safe if I never turn on the PC, but some of us use computers to do actual work.

New comment by Asooka in "The curious case of retro demo scene graphics"

Asooka — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:45:05 +0000

This sounds so insane to me. If I own land and grow a tree on it, the tree and its fruits are private property forever (mine until I die, then inherited by my children, then their children, or sold, transferred, etc ad nauseam). At no point does the tree become "public", that would be utter nonsense. It is property. Why should my ideas then be anything different? They come from my head. I own myself, including my head, thus I should own the fruits of my head like I own the fruits of my tree and they should remain property forever. The fact that copyright expires is one of the great tragedies of modern life, though at least I can take solace in knowing I own my ideas until I die.

New comment by Asooka in "An unstoppable mushroom is tearing through North American forests"

Asooka — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:41:45 +0000

Goatherd's pie.

New comment by Asooka in "False claims in a widely-cited paper"

Asooka — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:00:02 +0000

What does it matter that the claims are "false" if claiming them as the truth results in encouraging the society we wish to exist? That paper is a cornerstone of sustainability initiatives, if you retract it, you might as well set the whole Earth on fire. To hell with integrity, I say, it's time to do some good for the world!

New comment by Asooka in "BIO – The Bao I/O Co-Processor"

Asooka — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:21:52 +0000

The status quo wasn't great for the ordinary people and the only offramp they had was clown world. Brexit should have been a hard lesson proving the people will vote against their own interest if they believe they are also voting for something harmful to the regime they despise.

New comment by Asooka in "An update on Steam / GOG changes for OpenTTD"

Asooka — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:38:46 +0000

By googling "best open source games" and finding blogs and forums that talk about them. In fact googling that exact phrase returns as its first search result a Reddit thread in which OpenTTD is one of the first games listed.

It's not like you can discover it on Steam any easier.

Of course, searching for information itself is also a skill, but it is a truly essential one for the modern world.

New comment by Asooka in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

Asooka — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:19:39 +0000

I know things are bad in the USA right now, but news like these show that you still have your basic rights. This kind of song would not fly in any other country on Earth. No other country has Freedom of Speech laws strong enough to defend against insulting the police. There have been some people abusing their freedom in recent times cough Kanye cough, but for every loud nazi there are ten more excellent people whose right to speak should not be infringed!

New comment by Asooka in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"

Asooka — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:34:49 +0000

Well we can't not review things, because the workflow demands we review things. So we hacked the process and for big changes we begin by asking people who will be impacted (no-code review), then we do a pre-review of a rough implementation and finally do a formal review in a fraction of the time.

New comment by Asooka in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

Asooka — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:49:48 +0000

>The server starts at session login

Okay so I STILL have to log in locally before I can log in remotely. Also the list of known issues is pretty concerning. This is in not even close to a remote login solution. You are not accomplishing anything by pretending Wayland is anything more than a half-baked toy at present.

New comment by Asooka in "Why I love FreeBSD"

Asooka — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:43:21 +0000

It is.

New comment by Asooka in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

Asooka — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:17:18 +0000

It's because people got used to using screen share in X11 when they really want remote login. You cannot do remote login if there has to be someone sitting at the PC to approve it. Since Wayland has no remote login model, people are left trying to kludge together something out of screen sharing. I can guarantee the moment login over RDP becomes available everyone complaining about the screen sharing will quiet down. And yes, I know this is "not Wayland's concern". Kicking the ball does not fix the problem of "if I switch to Wayland I cannot login remotely". There needs to be a parent project which IS concerned with all the use-cases people require to function for a full working desktop experience. Otherwise you get left with this fragmentation, which isn't good for anyone. Basic OS services being fragmented between implementations really sucks. Microsoft figured this out 30 years ago.

New comment by Asooka in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

Asooka — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:32:50 +0000

Honestly, probably the best Linux GUI stack would look like a root Wayland server (not running as root ofc), inside which are nested a per-user Wayland servers (which can be switched between rendering to a monitor or offscreen for a remote login), inside which is nested an X11 server (which is freed from having to care about hardware), inside which runs a normal window manager.

New comment by Asooka in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

Asooka — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:27:09 +0000

It is 18 years old (started in 2008 IIRC) and just now approaching something usable. So on the one hand it is a really old project whose original design considerations became obsolete a decade ago - I remember people were very bothered by the performance loss of needing several process switches with the X11 damage model in order to push an update to the screen, but on today's multi-core hardware that is basically free and everyone is using browser engines and writing their GUI in javascript anyway. But on the other, do you really want to spend another 10-20 years rewriting the Linux GUI stack from scratch only to reimplement "Wayland with best established extensions"?

New comment by Asooka in "Vim-pencil: Rethinking Vim as a tool for writing"

Asooka — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:32:24 +0000

Vim only works for writing if you are writing in a language that uses the latin alphabet. It's one of its bigger failings as a text editor and I have considered if it would be possible to remap everything so it uses only ctrl- and alt- key combinations for commands (those always send the equivalent ascii keycode), but in the end that sounds like a completely new editor.

New comment by Asooka in "Show HN: Geo Racers – Race from London to Tokyo on a single bus pass"

Asooka — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:17:02 +0000

No hotel accepts cash nowadays, there is absolutely no need to exchange currency basically ever. I would remove that part of the game.

New comment by Asooka in "IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world"

Asooka — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:56:01 +0000

I've been thinking we could simply extend the ipv4 address to be 11 bytes by (ab)using the options field. That is, add an option that holds more bytes for the source and destination address, which are to be appended to the address already present in the header.

I am thinking that since an option starts with 2 bytes and everything must be padded to a multiple of 4 bytes, we can add 16 bytes to the packet, which would hold 7 extra address bytes per source and destination, giving us 11 byte addresses. ISPs would be given a bunch of 4-byte toplevel addresses and can generate 7-byte suffixes dynamically for their subscribers, in a way that is almost the same as CGNAT used today but without all the problems that has.

Most routers will only need to be updated to pass along the option and otherwise route as normal, because the top level address is already enough to route the packet to the ISP's routers. Then only at the edge will you need to do extra work to route the packet to the host. Not setting the option would be equivalent to setting it to all 0s, so all existing public hosts will be automatically addressable with the new scheme.

There will of course need to be a lot more work done for DNS, DHCP, syntax in programs, etc, but it would be a much easier and more gradual transition than IPv6 is demanding.

New comment by Asooka in "No strcpy either"

Asooka — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 15:44:40 +0000

Back when strncpy was written there was no undefined behaviour (as the compiler interprets it today). The result would depend on the implementation and might differ between invocations, but it was never the "this will not happen" footgun of today. The modern interpretation of undefined behaviour in C is a big blemish on the otherwise excellent standards committee, committed (hah) in the name of extremely dubious performance claims. If "undefined" meaning "left to the implementation" was good enough when CPU frequency was measured in MHz and nobody had more than one, surely it is good enough today too.

Also I'm not sure what you mean with C successor languages not having undefined behaviour, as both Rust and Zig inherit it wholesale from LLVM. At least last I checked that was the case, correct me if I am wrong. Go, Java and C# all have sane behaviour, but those are much higher level.

New comment by Asooka in "Flame Graphs vs Tree Maps vs Sunburst (2017)"

Asooka — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:15:56 +0000

I wish there was something as fast as WizTree for Linux.