Hacker News: Erwin

New comment by Erwin in "US repeals EPA endangerment finding for greenhouse gases"

Erwin — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:15:24 +0000

I enjoyed the 2009 book Ultimatum about this scenario -- what could you do to make a global polluter to stop if they were endangering the world? https://www.amazon.com/Ultimatum-Matthew-Glass-ebook/dp/B002...

New comment by Erwin in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

Erwin — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 18:44:01 +0000

I was in Belgium going to Antwerp and sometimes the French name -- Anvers -- was used. At least in e.g. Valais in CH cities that have dual names are shown with both, e.g. Sierre/Siders.

New comment by Erwin in "1300 Still Images from the Animated Films of Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli (2023)"

Erwin — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 19:36:26 +0000

Tales from Earthsea aka "Gedo Senki". Badly reviewed but I enjoyed it.

New comment by Erwin in "I don't care how well your "AI" works"

Erwin — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 20:31:55 +0000

Jeff Bezos has a 233 billion net worth. It's not because Amazon users overpaid by a 233 billion but because his share in Amazon is highly valued by investors.

My own Amazon investment in my pension has also gone up by 10x in the last 10 years, just like Jeff's. Where did the value increase come from?

Is this idea of the stock market good for us? I don't know, but it's paper money until you sell it.

New comment by Erwin in "Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers"

Erwin — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 07:24:22 +0000

Because the same thing has happened successfully in most other European countries. Nationalist parties talk about scary immigrants, ordinary parties tighten immigration rules, and the nationalist parties fail to gain power.

For example, Denmark created the highly criticized "Smykkelov" in 2016 which lets us confiscate any values asylum seekers have over 10.000 DKK (e.g. jewelry as the name says, but never actually used for jewelry just cash) in 2016. It has been hardly used (10 times in the first 3 years), but it had enormous press coverage. The largest left party (and the party of current PM) voted for it.

The previously largest nationalist party (DF) have never been in power, despite existing for 30 years and getting 20+% of the vote in 2015 -- at most they were a support party to the right-wing government.

New comment by Erwin in "Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy"

Erwin — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 21:58:14 +0000

Ah, this is like the "trickle down" theory of piracy.

New comment by Erwin in "Being fat is a trap"

Erwin — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 18:34:13 +0000

Spending some months with a TDEE spreadsheet can be helpful but requires logging a lot of CI and weights -- if you go to any online TDEE calc you might overestimate your activity level.

I was surprised that running 6h/week and 15k/steps a day gave me an TDEE activity level at barely above "Light Exercise" and I need about 2460/day.

The "Moderate" activity level is if you actually work construction and haul bricks all day!

New comment by Erwin in "101 BASIC Computer Games"

Erwin — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 09:37:07 +0000

I found the backslash as separator of multiple statements on one line curious. I guess that's because I was used to BASIC on the Commodore C-64/128/Amiga and later the magical Amos Basic, so there were more differences in some of the other dialects.

New comment by Erwin in "How Copyover MUD Servers Worked"

Erwin — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:08:42 +0000

That was an amusing post to see pop up here, as I believe I came up with the "copyover" name when I copied Melvin Smith (aka "Fusion") idea about "hot reboot" from his "MUD++" code base to the popular Diku-based MERC/Envy etc. bases -- that was 2000 or probably earlier. Whether Melvin originally got the idea from somewhere else I don't know.

That version just used exec, and closed all files but network descriptors already logged in, the mapping of fds -> login names was saved in a file. When the new copy started up, it would log the users on existing file descriptors. Today, using explicit file descriptor passing (so you don't accidentally keep files open) or a long-running proxy would be preferable.

Back then C/C++ were often used by the developers, and we were at best CS students. There were surprisingly few segmentation faults, but I remember a few mysterious memory corruptions...

New comment by Erwin in "First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years"

Erwin — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 23:42:55 +0000

That CS student was Luke Farritor -- now part of the infamous DOGE team.

New comment by Erwin in "FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices"

Erwin — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 19:58:38 +0000

In EU, you see the total and per-night inclusive all of fees and taxes when searching and comparing.

If you search for an area without dates, it comes up with some arbitrary dates and applies the fees and displays per night cost accordingly.

So it's technically possible. They just don't want to.

New comment by Erwin in "Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative"

Erwin — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 10:07:40 +0000

Here in Denmark we have an online lexicon which is managed by (barely paid) scientists and experts. For every article you can see which scientist was involved in making it, what expert is responsible for the area etc. https://denstoredanske.lex.dk/

New comment by Erwin in "XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta"

Erwin — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 14:37:44 +0000

I'm curious whether their "Locality Groups" concept can be implemented using stock AWS. Imagine you have 1000 type of tasks that can be called millions of times by users; each node can do any task but resource usage would be better if same task was performed on a node that already has done it. Sticky sessions is not it, as the same task can be initiated by different users.

New comment by Erwin in "48-nation bloc to crack down on using crypto assets to avoid tax"

Erwin — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 16:34:26 +0000

https://koinly.io/ is a popular recommendation here in Denmark. Denmark may have the worst possible taxation for crypto: every time you sell, use or convert your crypto, that's an event where you have to calculate your gains or losses. Gains are taxed like personal income (so up to 53% tax), but losses can only be deducted at 26% they do not offset the gains directly. A school teacher speculating in crypto ended up losing his investment and owing $400,000 in tax.

New comment by Erwin in "The Svalbard fibre optic cable connection (2022)"

Erwin — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 20:07:52 +0000

Svalbard is larger than I thought, but not as large as the projection tricks you to: it's 1/6th the area of Norway shown below. On thetruesize.com you can drag Svalbard around and compare it to other countries, it's roughly the size of all of Ireland.

New comment by Erwin in "Humane AI Pin"

Erwin — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 20:42:13 +0000

Black Mirror's "The Entire History of You" S1E03 episode has one take on what would happen if we could effortlessly record -- and replay -- everything. As with most Black Mirrors, there are some dark but believeable ideas.

Incidentally, it was written by Jess Armstrong who later created "Succession".

New comment by Erwin in "In Germany, 27 are in 'preventive detention' b/c they might do climate protests"

Erwin — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 20:57:04 +0000

The Danish Church is allowed to veto buildings of wind turbines if they were within the 28x the height of the turbine. This is quite a long distance if you consider the 160m tall 14MW Siemens (though I think that may be offshore only).

There are more than 2000 churches in Denmark. Only the minister of the interior could override that veto.

New comment by Erwin in "Diablo"

Erwin — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 21:11:04 +0000

The complex ARPGs have some unlikely competition: rogue-lite bullet-heaven games. The "rougue-lite" gives you short playing sessions where you die, but can still progress for the next game. The "bullet-heaven" turns your character into a source of powerful and explosive attacks, where your actions during the game may be limited to just moving around and selecting upgrade paths.

These lo-fi 5 EUR games give a lot of the monster-slaying fun of Path of Exile, Diablo etc. but with less grind -- and extreme variety. Yet the same idea of killing thousands of monsters with visually and mechanically varied attacks remains. Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Bio-Prototype and Halls of Torment are some of the ugly-looking but addictive games which make me question returning to another only slightly different season of Path of Exile.

New comment by Erwin in "Llama.cpp: Full CUDA GPU Acceleration"

Erwin — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 11:34:47 +0000

Virtual envs are actually quite simple -- they contain a bin/ directory with a linked python binary. When the python binary runs, it checks it sibling directories (it knows it was executed as e.g. /home/user/.venv/bin/python) for what to load. You don't need the activate shell scripts or anything, just running that binary within your venv is enough; the shell script is just for convenient of inserting the bin directory into the $PATH so just "python" or "pip" runs the right thing.

New comment by Erwin in "Mojo might be the biggest thing to happen in programming for decades"

Erwin — Thu, 04 May 2023 17:53:04 +0000

I think the 1977 Icon language is where the generator concept originated. It had many other cool features I have not seen in other languages since: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_(programming_language)#