Hacker News: GnarfGnarf

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Electrical transformer manufacturing is throttling the electrified future"

GnarfGnarf — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:03:02 +0000

Perhaps, but municipal water runs by gravity whereas your well pump doesn’t operate during a power failure.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:20:16 +0000

SBC = Single Board Computing Betriebsblind

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Banned C++ features in Chromium"

GnarfGnarf — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 20:05:04 +0000

Agree. I love UDLs, use them in my code for improved legibility. I hadn’t realized how badly you can screw up if you don’t define all the operators correctly.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Banned C++ features in Chromium"

GnarfGnarf — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:11:41 +0000

I thought User-Defined Literals were a great idea until I saw all the pitfalls listed in the Google style document. Dangerous indeed.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)"

GnarfGnarf — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:34:13 +0000

The UK was not part of the Euro economy.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Linux is good now"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 21:24:21 +0000

I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty.

(My customer demographic is seniors & casual users).

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source"

GnarfGnarf — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 13:48:31 +0000

I'm a Windows/macOS developer, but I strongly feel that all national governments need to convert to Linux, for strategic sovereignty. I'm sure Microsoft, under orders from the U.S. government, could disable all computers in any country or organization, at the flick of a switch.

Imagine how Open Source Software could improve if a consortium of nations put their money and resources into commissioning bug fixes and enhancements, which would be of collective benefit.

Apart from a few niche cases, the needs of most government bureaucracies would be well served by currently available OSS word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and graphics software.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Qt Creator 18 Released"

GnarfGnarf — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 11:48:16 +0000

Qt has many good features, but it is not as robust as Visual Studio. It can lock up while debugging. will take you to the extern in the same module, not the actual definition. Variable expansion during debugging is slow. You can’t display a.b.c, you have to expand all of ‘a’, then all of ‘a.b’

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "The Beauty of Programming (2001)"

GnarfGnarf — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:34:33 +0000

Totally describes my experience, since 1965.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 13:29:55 +0000

I appreciate how lower-case ‘L’, digit ‘1’ and upper-case ‘I’ are differentiated. Also alpha ‘O’ and zero.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Modern CI is too complex and misdirected (2021)"

GnarfGnarf — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:52:42 +0000

CI = Continuous Integration

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Financial lessons from my family's experience with long-term care insurance"

GnarfGnarf — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 16:14:33 +0000

There are three things a nation needs to accept about universal health care:

(1) It’s expensive (2) Everybody has to pay (3) The government’s gotta run it

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Open Source Maintenance Fee"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 19:38:31 +0000

The WiX installer is a byzantine incomprehensible mess. Its only appeal was that it was free. If I have to pay, I'd rather have a commercial product that is supported and easier to use.

Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services. I guess that's not enough.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela"

GnarfGnarf — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:15:10 +0000

What makes the author think we are entitled to free search? How much would you pay for ad-free search? The “golden era” of free search was just setting us up for the plucking.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:34:59 +0000

Would this also apply to a vendor’s encrypted file format?

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal"

GnarfGnarf — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 19:50:38 +0000

There would be a broader area affected.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else"

GnarfGnarf — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 17:55:42 +0000

Yeah, SPF, DKIM and DMARC are incomprehensible. The only people with the time, motivation and expertise to understand and apply them, are professional spammers. Most of the legitimate email I get, fail one or more of these tests.

If I recall, SPF limits the number of domains you can enumerate in your DNS records.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Recursion kills: The story behind CVE-2024-8176 in libexpat"

GnarfGnarf — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 13:49:10 +0000

I write a genealogy app (family history). Recursion is the foundation of the code, and permeates everywhere. The call stack can go 200 deep or more (~4,000 yrs). The code has been successfully running on millions of desktops for thirty years, and has never caused a crash or infinite loop because of recursion.

The secret is to check at every step that there is no "he's his own grandpa" loops in the user's tree, where (s)he inadvertently makes one of a person's descendants, also his ancestor. This happens sometimes because re-using the same names can cause confusion.

Recursion is like magic :o)

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Virtual Punch Card Creator"

GnarfGnarf — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 11:38:28 +0000

It is possible to store three decimal digits as three groups of four bits, in every 12-row column.

You can insert and delete when duplicating cards, by pressing with your fingers on the source or target card while typing on the keyboard.

New comment by GnarfGnarf in "Goethe's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" – power over wisdom"

GnarfGnarf — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 16:11:01 +0000

This is about the root of humanity’s problem: the inability to avoid misusing knowledge and technology. All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end (Thoreau)