Hacker News: Fwirt

New comment by Fwirt in "South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones"

Fwirt — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 08:05:49 +0000

Not only that, but why buy diamonds when Moissanite exists? Not as hard as diamond (by a tiny amount) but much less brittle and much more sparkle. Also even more “rare” than diamond since the only natural occurring ones are microscopic. Plus they come in colors! It took a while to talk my wife down off of the diamond industry’s hype, but she loves lab grown stones now.

New comment by Fwirt in "Car touchscreens are cheap, not good"

Fwirt — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:47:57 +0000

Actually it's an odd split. The temperature and fan adjustment are physical buttons, but the A/C, recirculation, and heated seat controls are on the screen. I'm thinking this is for two reasons: If a lower trim level lacks heated seats then they just exclude them from the firmware, and the AC and recirc controls require lighted indicators, which is probably a lot more expensive than just a button, so those were much cheaper to integrate into the display. That being said, I've heard digitizer failures can be an issue on this model so I dread that happening.

It also irritates me that there are 3 of those blank button placeholders on the dash and I wish they were actual buttons that were just mapped to A/C and recirc...

New comment by Fwirt in "I Like Small Keyboards"

Fwirt — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:00:50 +0000

I've been daily-driving a Planck with a custom layout for years now. I developed my own layout (QWERTY based but with punctuation and function keys on thumb-driven layers) and it took me a few weeks to get speed parity with my old 104 key, which was rough. But now I can't go back to a standard layout, it's just so much less hand movement that it feels so much better to type on. For gaming it's still a tossup, as most games expect you to have all the same keys in the same places. I've experimented with a "gaming" layer, but lacking a 5th row on the Planck still causes issues with some games.

It still baffles me that the standard layout isn't ortholinear after all these years. There's no reason for staggered rows other than path dependence. But when you have billions of people relying on years of muscle memory on the same layout, it's just not a tradeoff most people are willing to make.

New comment by Fwirt in "Car touchscreens are cheap, not good"

Fwirt — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:13:11 +0000

Touch screens don't have to be modal, that's a UI choice. The 2020 Bolt we just got leaves the climate controls on screen at all times, even when CarPlay is open. I was also pleasantly surprised by the number of buttons it has, including both a volume knob and a temperature knob.

That being said, the touchscreen software is abysmal and laggy. CarPlay works great, but any time I have to navigate the car's built-in software is a headache.

New comment by Fwirt in "Wireless LAN SD"

Fwirt — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:18:46 +0000

What I’ve always wished is that I could take pictures with a nice DLSR or bridge camera and have a way to quickly load the RAWs into my phone for culling and processing. You could get the best of both worlds, better sensors and lenses, and simple developing within seconds. I know there are cameras with built-in WiFi that do this but camera manufacturers seem to let their software become outdated quickly.

New comment by Fwirt in "Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees (2020)"

Fwirt — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:49:41 +0000

It’s exploiting the natural tendency of trees to create “waterspouts” through a technique called pollarding. When a tree suffers an injury it creates a bunch of new twigs that tend to grow straight upwards if the injury is on the upper branches. The waterspouts grow more slowly and so in this species of cedar they develop those desirable properties.

New comment by Fwirt in "Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components"

Fwirt — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:30:36 +0000

No, because the criteria here is state transition from not-in-use/power saving to in-use/"on". The Pi Zero has no meaningful sleep state, as I lamented above, thus the only valid "off-on" state transition for the Optocam Zero is a full boot. Sure, if you were to leave it on in your bag then there's no boot time, but then you're limited to 70-80 minutes of runtime. Then you get "instant-on", but you're limited to the photos you can take within an hour off the charger, which also renders it useless as a camera, and compares unfavorably to the iPhone . If it had a sleep state then we could compare apples to apples. Since the iPhone's default "off" state is sleep, that's what counts for "turning it on".

New comment by Fwirt in "The Traditional Vi (2007)"

Fwirt — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:10:13 +0000

Yep, those are the ones! There's also the oddity of the [[ and ]] motions. In the POSIX standard, those are the only two-character motions. I was using a state-machine to implement motion commands, and that single command threw a wrench in the works. Of course, vim took two character commands and ran with it, so in vim [ can be followed by a whole host of characters that all do different things. Since g was not mapped in vi they also did the same thing there.

New comment by Fwirt in "The Traditional Vi"

Fwirt — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:49:52 +0000

I started writing a more fleshed out vi compatibility mode for TextAdept earlier this year. As someone who understood the basics after going through :vimtutor multiple times but always struggled with the more "advanced" commands, there's no better way to actually grok vi than to just try to recreate it. It's pretty amazing how much Bill Joy managed to pack in. Of course, if you're implementing POSIX vi, there are quite a few features that have aged poorly, like roff/troff macros and line-editing, but there are also quite a few commands that I had never paid attention to (like _) that have subtle behaviors that sped up my editing even more. The hardest part about becoming proficient in vi is committing commands to muscle memory so you don't habitually fall back on hjkl.

New comment by Fwirt in "Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components"

Fwirt — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:07:26 +0000

It's a shame that, being based on a full-blown Linux SBPC, it has an absolutely unacceptable boot time for a camera. 22 seconds. I can have my iPhone camera out and ready to capture an ephemeral moment of child's play in under 3 seconds, most commercial cameras boot in seconds as well. A film camera can be ready to go the second the lens cap is off. 22 seconds is an eternity in the world of photography. It's a shame that the SoC the Raspberry Pi line is based on has no kernel support (or IIRC hardware support) for S3 or anything similar.

New comment by Fwirt in "Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation"

Fwirt — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:48:32 +0000

The point they were trying to make was that if you take appreciation of assets into account, if your billion is appreciating by a relatively modest 5% per year, you are passively earning 50 million/year. Whereas someone with one million passively earns 50 thousand/year. One is enough to live in luxury anywhere in the world for several lifetimes, the other is enough to live comfortably in some parts of the US (or like a king in many parts of the world) but not enough to throw 6 figures at a programming language foundation for fun.

New comment by Fwirt in "Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use"

Fwirt — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:39:34 +0000

We just bought our first (used) EV, and charging stations are the Wild West right now. Any random station you pull up to might charge close to the local cost of electricity, or some wild sky-high amount. And hopefully they’ll tell you what that is before you have to swipe your card. There the economics can swing towards gas cars depending on how absurd your local charging station prices are. For people filling their tank every couple days because of a 2 hour commute or something an EV may still not make sense financially. But if you’re putting in under 40 miles and have even a modest 120v 12 amp circuit you can plug into at home (e.g. a dedicated washing machine circuit) you’ll likely only need a charging station on rare occasions such as a road trip. As a matter of fact I am writing this from our first EV road trip. The inconvenience has been comparatively minor and our “fuel” costs should end up being about half of what they would have been in our hybrid SUV.

New comment by Fwirt in "3D-printed book turns its own G-code into raised lettering"

Fwirt — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:48:08 +0000

G-code is like assembly language for CNC. It’s human readable, you can write it by hand if necessary, most machines will compile it internally to machine instructions, and there are a million different flavors with incompatible macros, etc. The flavor I’m most familiar with is Klipper’s interpreter, which will let you write macros, but that would technically be cheating since you could just stuff an entire program into a macro.

New comment by Fwirt in "3D-printed book turns its own G-code into raised lettering"

Fwirt — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:53:48 +0000

I'm sure the idea here was a physical quine, although since it only contains 2.5% of its own G-code it's not really a quine, any more than a "Hello World" program is a quine since the string "Hello World" is in the program text. It would be trivial to generate something like this depending on which part of the G-code you pick.

New comment by Fwirt in "Are You Enjoying Our Linguine? (2025)"

Fwirt — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:19:34 +0000

I think ultimately the conclusion the author reaches is an interesting one, that the real "disease" of tourism is like sepsis. It comes not from without, the tourists themselves, but from within, the changes made by locals to try to capture the opportunities for wealth that the tourists create.

The paradox of the tourist is fascinating. All at the same time, a locality experiencing a flood of tourism will welcome the sudden wellspring of foreign currency pouring forth from the rock, and loathe the disruption the flood causes to the steady pace of life. Anyone who has been a tourist knows what the tourist wants, a break from the monotony of their own culture, a desire to know the other and tread in their footsteps, in some cases a wholesome longing to break down cultural barriers and prejudice. And yet anyone who has been on the other side of the interaction with a tourist feels the heady mix of emotions that comes with the experience of being the toured. The discomfort that comes from the wall being torn down unexpectedly. The inconvenience of disruption in routine. No tourist wants to do harm, but even the most sensitive and well-meaning tourist creates a breach in routine that is disruptive. Nobody likes change.

New comment by Fwirt in "EV Stupidity Checklist"

Fwirt — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:49:50 +0000

Houses are big, the air mass inside is big, convection and recirculation maintain a fairly consistent temperature throughout the house, and the thermostat is centrally located so it averages the temperature of the air. The air coming out of the vents is still often colder or hotter than the set temperature, so sitting next to a vent can be less comfortable. Cars have a much smaller air mass, much poorer insulation, a thermostat that is usually installed in the ventilation rather than in the cabin where the people are, so the perceived temperature inside of a car can vary wildly if you don't live in an extremely mild climate, even as a sibling commenter mentioned, between the back seat and front seat, or between the passenger seat and driver seat.

New comment by Fwirt in "What Is Date:Italy?"

Fwirt — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:05:43 +0000

It also prevents all kinds of clients who (for various reasons) can't implement SSL from visiting your website. I'm sure this is a "small web" blog, whose author wants to be visited by e.g. a Commodore 64, an OS 9 iMac, or somebody who just wants to telnet in. If the sensitivity of the information on this page was critical or you were going to be submitting information then by all means yes, SSL is important, but if you're going to be reading a personal blog about calendars then http is probably fine. Of course the ideal solution is offering both and letting the client choose.

New comment by Fwirt in "Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)"

Fwirt — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:55:39 +0000

For anyone who was also curious what Justin Frankel got up to after the speculation at the end of the article, he founded Cockos Software and is the lead developer on the excellent REAPER DAW.

New comment by Fwirt in "Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated"

Fwirt — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:18:10 +0000

It's a shame, he's a genuinely cool guy! If I wasn't convinced that my kids would find a way to break it when I wasn't looking I'd definitely have an Acme Klein Bottle by now.

New comment by Fwirt in "SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format"

Fwirt — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:18:52 +0000

The question is, do the same firms ban Excel? Excel spreadsheets often end up as shadow databases in unlikely places.