Hacker News: Conan_Kudo

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT: what breaks and what does not"

Conan_Kudo — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 22:00:05 +0000

Yeah, I think SGML HTML as the first pass was a mistake. All my early websites were XHTML until people called them "bad"...

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information"

Conan_Kudo — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:51:47 +0000

It hurt for me too. I stopped reading it because it gave me a serious headache.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Rune is now open source"

Conan_Kudo — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:14:04 +0000

Since it's written in Go, you might want to reach out to the Fedora Go SIG and see if they can help you. :)

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link"

Conan_Kudo — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:41:20 +0000

Yes, but unsurprisingly most people don't understand that distinction well enough.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card"

Conan_Kudo — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:25:56 +0000

There's a mindset difference. People are more willing to pay to reduce inconvenience for customers there, whereas here the inconvenience to the merchant sometimes matters more.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Why some US restaurants are banning tips"

Conan_Kudo — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:02:46 +0000

I remember a few American restaurants experimenting with this when I was a kid. I remember the experience being a little inconsistent. I imagine the feedback wasn't particularly good.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs"

Conan_Kudo — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:08:26 +0000

It's not the first. It's not even the first in Europe: the first was the UK, Belgium and Switzerland came after. There are and have been others around the world throughout history too: the CSA, the first USA, the USSR, the UAE, and the Arab League (just to name a few).

Most systems like the EU don't work well after a certain size. I don't know if we can say whether the EU has reached the point where it's unworkable yet.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

Conan_Kudo — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:42:30 +0000

OpenSPARC is under the GPL, which is probably why it didn't go anywhere directly. OpenPOWER is under permissive creative commons licenses, and people are iterating on the open source cores released by them. But the arrangement with efabless didn't go anywhere, and the company shut down last year without warning. So there's nowhere to experiment with producing chips.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

Conan_Kudo — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:34:48 +0000

It's not obscure. The reason is because a whole class of racist laws use the term. Nobody has seriously tried to reclaim the term, so it is stuck with the connotation it had developed a hundred years ago.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

Conan_Kudo — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:01:02 +0000

PowerPC at least still has a living ecosystem, even from the bootloader level. GRUB can boot from an OpenFirmware system. There's also yaboot if you hate yourself. ;)

I would personally love to see more Power Systems based projects. Everything is out there, just someone has to want to do something with it.

Fedora Linux even fully supports POWER8+ little-endian systems, and Fedora KDE offers a live ISO you can install on something like a Talos Workstation.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

Conan_Kudo — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:51:58 +0000

I'll also point out that we've always had better starting points for open source high performance cores. SPARC and POWER both have open ISAs and open-source cores with useful performance. The UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors were open sourced under the OpenSPARC project. POWER has the OpenPOWER project governing the Power ISA, and IBM itself created Microwatt, Chiselwatt, and the A2I/A2O cores as open source that people can build their own PowerPC systems from.

OpenFirmware came out of OpenSPARC and is also used by POWER too. Parts of it are used in ARM and RISC-V today (mostly DeviceTree, though arguably quite badly).

Nobody actually wants to make good cores for cheap. Nobody wants to make compatible systems unless forced to. That's why ARM and RISC-V are fragmented messes.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

Conan_Kudo — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:23:20 +0000

There are 386 and 486 open source reimplementations in Verilog (see z386 and z486). As far as I know, existing commercial 386/486 chips still manufactured (yes they exist!) are descendants of Cyrix work, not Intel or AMD. Consequently, VIA may be contractually holding those back rather than Intel/AMD doing anything there.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

Conan_Kudo — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:20:48 +0000

We aren't the only ones, but we are the loudest about it, because erasure sucks.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents"

Conan_Kudo — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 02:58:06 +0000

No, the git test suite is about testing the git codebase. If you want something like that, you need a conformance suite, which does not exist for git.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents"

Conan_Kudo — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:33:43 +0000

It probably would have been less bad if he had chosen MPL-2.0 or LGPL-2.1-or-later. But he chose MIT, which cuts at the core of the intent of licensing the project with a share-alike license.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Stop Advertising in Your Commits"

Conan_Kudo — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:28:54 +0000

There's a Generated-by trailer for that sort of thing.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Stop Advertising in Your Commits"

Conan_Kudo — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:27:47 +0000

Claude hijacking Co-authored-by was a big influence on Fedora saying "AI thingies can't claim authorship or co-authorship".

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

Conan_Kudo — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:07:02 +0000

And for comparison, today you can do an economy round-trip flight with Delta Air Lines for roughly $1.6k (SEA-HND). A Delta One flight is roughly $8.5k. That's the apples-to-apples comparison.

Deregulation also allowed international carriers to sell to us too. An ANA round-trip on economy class is a couple hundred dollars cheaper. Their business class is similarly cheaper than Delta One.

Air travel is so much cheaper than it was back then that it is affordable for most people to take one international trip a year if they really want to. Even to exotic places in Asia or Southern Europe.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "Why Japan has such good railways"

Conan_Kudo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 01:50:54 +0000

The interstate system only succeeded because the federal government took the very rare step of steamrolling all the states and individual landowners. It was done in service of putting people to work and stimulating the economy. But it was not a well-liked project.

Today, it is well-regarded, but when it was being done? No way.

New comment by Conan_Kudo in "The secrets of the Shinkansen"

Conan_Kudo — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:35:58 +0000

It's rarely that simple. The question has to be asked "who owns the land?" because usually the rail lines get to belong to who owns the land, even if someone else builds them.

The interstate automobile road system got built through judicious use of eminent domain. That avoided all of these issues. Amtrak doesn't have the ability to do that.