Hacker News: GeertB

New comment by GeertB in "Radio-tagged Monarch butterflies"

GeertB — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 03:19:18 +0000

The article made it seem that the tags way on the order of half a gram, but that would be about the butterfly's weight. Even at 60 mg it's a significant additional burden for the butterfly, I'd expect. Even if you only take the heaviest Monarch butterflies that weigh in about 600 mg, it is 10% of their body weight. Like an 6 kg backpack for a human weighing 60 kg.

New comment by GeertB in "“I just chose words carefully”"

GeertB — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:42:15 +0000

I've definitely been guilty of wording my multi-line doc comments in a way that would ensure they'd flow without awkward right margins. I would have a macro in vim that would call the fmt program to reflow the comment to 79 (later 98) characters, and then would iterate on word choice until the comments looked good. Not exactly right-justified, but no very ragged edge either.

New comment by GeertB in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"

GeertB — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 02:34:12 +0000

Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).

Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the software stack. Acquiring HF fits in perfectly. The play is long term.

New comment by GeertB in "Faster floating point math with Rust's new API"

GeertB — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:55:10 +0000

Signed integer addition is only associative when overflow is defined to wrap around like unsigned arithmetic. This condition is matched here, because only debug builds panic on overflow. However, it's a bit of a gray area that the article completely ignores.

New comment by GeertB in "Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM"

GeertB — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 04:17:17 +0000

I remember that EMACS meant Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, a reference to the Emacs editor requiring a system with 8 MB of memory and then still swapping. It was considered an exaggeration. Even Windows 95 could run OK-ish on a system with 4 MB of memory, with 8 MB being plenty. We have gained some things in the meantime, and lost some too.

New comment by GeertB in "AttoChess, a complete, playable chess program for 16-bit x86 DOS in 278 bytes"

GeertB — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:24:34 +0000

The program terminated just a few moves into the game when there were plenty of legal moves left. Also, it is surprisingly hard to play chess as a human when there is no checkered board.

New comment by GeertB in "A CPU that runs entirely on GPU"

GeertB — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:10:10 +0000

I don't quite understand how multiply doesn't require addition as well to combine the various partial products.

New comment by GeertB in "The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph"

GeertB — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:56:48 +0000

The article makes it sound like the Tesla Semi is physically infeasible. Yet, it is in active use on a sufficient number of long-haul routes that ignoring this proof of existence undercuts some of the central points the post tries to make.

The combination of higher efficiency, regenerative breaking, and some regulatory wiggle-room such as slightly higher allowable gross-weight (2000 lbs in the US, and 2000 kgs in the EU), together with reduced maintenance cost and time significantly affect the economics of trucking.

As regulatory frameworks price in more externalities of internal combustion engines, such as the climate and health effects of their emissions, burning diesel will no longer make economical sense. All road transport will end up being battery-electric. The declining cost of owning and operating electric vehicles compared to internal combustion ones will reach this point even without regulatory changes, just at a slower pace.

New comment by GeertB in "Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser"

GeertB — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:33:12 +0000

monochrome

New comment by GeertB in "Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser"

GeertB — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:30:49 +0000

Can't help myself: whenever I see Windows 3.11, I have to compute the difference between it and Windows 3.1. So, I fire up the calculator from the Accessories folder, and compute 3.11 - 3.1. The result: 0.00. Try it! :-)

New comment by GeertB in "Show HN: Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB"

GeertB — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 14:35:21 +0000

How did you handle games where Stockfish would castle or promote?

New comment by GeertB in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

GeertB — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 05:01:41 +0000

For these devices the microcontroller needs to be super cheap. Microcontrollers like the Puya PY32 Series (e.g., PY32C642, PY32F002/F030) can cost in the $0.02 - $0.05 range for the kind of many-million volumes applicable for disposable vapes. These are 32-bit ARM Cortex M0 MCUs, running at a 24 MHz clock or similar, some with 24 KB of ROM and maybe 3 KB of RAM!

To put into context: this is 3x the ROM/RAM of the ZX81 home computer of the early 1980s. The ARM M0 processor does full 32-bit multiplication in hardware, versus the Z80 that doesn't even offer an 8-bit multiply instruction. If we look at some BASIC code doing soft-float computation, as was most common at the time, the execution speed is about 3 orders of magnitude faster, while the cost of the processor is 2 - 3 orders of magnitudes less. What an amazing time we live in!

New comment by GeertB in "Starlink satellites being lowered from 550 km to 480 km"

GeertB — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:56:16 +0000

I wonder if this will improve latency and signal strength

New comment by GeertB in "Apple expects to notify 100M people that they have hypertension in a year"

GeertB — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 03:59:49 +0000

The title here says 100M, but the actual presentation says 1M?

New comment by GeertB in "Introduction to Ada: a project-based exploration with rosettas"

GeertB — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 02:39:25 +0000

That one has a special place for me. I was a consultant then and invited to join the chorus even though I wasn't at the more professional level the other cast members were. We did a performance in London and one in St Louis. Still, it was a lot of fun, and how I got to meet my spouse 25-ish years ago.

New comment by GeertB in "Show HN: King Thirteen: 2048 with chess pieces, in under 13 KB"

GeertB — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 11:37:16 +0000

This game is so fun! I spent entirely too much time playing it just once last night, and got to the 1024 piece in the first run. I don't know how long it took me, but it was long. With 2048 my runs are far quicker.

Show HN: Printing Chess Boards in a Terminal

GeertB — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 19:13:04 +0000

I'm doing some fun chess-related programing during my sabbatical, and taking the opportunity to dive down rabbit holes I'd avoid for in a work setting. Found out interesting stuff from old ANSI DEC escape sequences to sixel graphics that are useful today.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41259371

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by GeertB in "Compilers are too smart"

GeertB — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 05:03:58 +0000

A smart compiler would have used the test (x & (x - 1)) == 0 to verify that x (assumed non-zero) is a power of two. Don't know why Clang didn't do that here.

New comment by GeertB in "Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US"

GeertB — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 13:10:31 +0000

This article really confuses the problems that legacy car manufacturers have with switching to EVs, with EVs in general. EVs work, just look at countries farther ahead in the transition, or ask the 1.8 million people who bought a Tesla last year. The transition is in full swing.

Tesla's excellent supercharger network is already more than sufficient for roadtripping in the USA and Europe, and now is open to non-Tesla EVs. This piece of writing is just a poorly researched bit of trash.

New comment by GeertB in "NASA’s tech demo streams first video from deep space via laser"

GeertB — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 14:12:29 +0000

That's quite the bandwidth-delay product at 3.3GB.