Hacker News: PlunderBunny

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

PlunderBunny — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 21:40:03 +0000

I worked on a Win32 app that used space-padded strings, i.e. the destination string was padded with spaces, but there was still a null on the last byte. You had to use special versions of the string functions for length, copy etc.

I’m not sure why this was - the source base was so old it might have had its origins in Pascal struct behaviour.

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"

PlunderBunny — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:52:27 +0000

"open wide..."

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Thiel moves family to Milei's libertarian Argentina"

PlunderBunny — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:13:54 +0000

Yeah, but Peter Thiel skipped the line for his NZ citizenship:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/334094/us-billionaire-sp...

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min"

PlunderBunny — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:12:23 +0000

I have similar feelings. When I started working at my first job, we were trying to make our enterprise product so easy to use it would be like 'a piece of software you'd buy on a CD at the supermarket.' (this was the late 1990s). We really did spend time on polish that made the product better and easier to use (it was sold as a product, with optional support), and I loved re-writing bits of UI and refactoring on my own time to make it great. But over the decades that followed, the new features became subscription based, and metrics were introduced, and were gamed... Now I'm quite cynical about the industry. I'm 54, and the company I work for is about to announce a restructure. I'd consider doing something else for a similar last few working years too, but I'm not sure what else I'm good at!

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Thiel moves family to Milei's libertarian Argentina"

PlunderBunny — Sat, 30 May 2026 23:55:24 +0000

As a New Zealander, I'd like to hope he 'did nothing' to get that citizenship, but I'm afraid it probably wasn't nothing.

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling"

PlunderBunny — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:51:45 +0000

I've wondered about this because I've heard the same thing from my partner - in Engineering school in Spain, she was told that waste aluminium as a building material should be avoided because it was so expensive to recycle. But we recycle aluminium here in New Zealand - perhaps it's something to do with being able to use green energy at night (New Zealand has abundant hydro power)?

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Japan’s robot wolf sells out as record bear attacks drive demand"

PlunderBunny — Sat, 16 May 2026 22:28:35 +0000

See also headlines that refer to “shark infested waters” instead of “human infested waters”.

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Virtualisation on Apple Silicon Macs is different"

PlunderBunny — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 22:33:39 +0000

I use VMWare Fusion, (version 13.6.4 because 25H2 has a bad scrolling bug that makes it unusable for me) and it does implement bi-directional copy/paste, and you can also drag files in and out of the VM (there's a few tricks required to make it work sometimes) but I've only tested this for Windows 10 and Linux as a guest, not macOS as a guest.

Re: Downloading, I have the same issue. What I do is note the note the SHA2 for the file on the official download site, then find a copy somewhere else on the internet [0], and verify the SHA2 of that file matches the one on the Broadcom web site.

Fusion feels very much like it's on life support.

0. For example, https://www.techspot.com/downloads/2755-vmware-fusion-mac.ht...

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Virtualisation on Apple Silicon Macs is different"

PlunderBunny — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:20:39 +0000

So if I wanted to run Windows ARM on an Apple Silicon Mac, what's the best option(s) that make full use of the hypervisor? I'm aware of UTM [0] but the second paragraph of the article makes it seem like UTM is a software emulator (that doesn't take advantage of the hypervisor?)

0. https://mac.getutm.app

New comment by PlunderBunny in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

PlunderBunny — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:55:00 +0000

Yeah, I thought Cook would stay on until the end of the Trump-admin in order to keep ‘swallowing the dead rats’ so that the next CEO would have a clean plate.

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user"

PlunderBunny — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:48:48 +0000

Even if he did have a Mac with the continuity feature enabled, I suppose the lock-screen won’t accept a paste from the clipboard of a Mac. (If it did, he could enter the correct passcode in any text editor on his Mac, copy it to the clipboard on the Mac, then paste it into the lock-screen on his iPhone)

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Obsolete Sounds"

PlunderBunny — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:23:03 +0000

I remember when the hard drive on my PowerMac 7200/90 started to fail (I was told that some of the ball bearings the platter rotated on were broken [0]). When the drive detected a 'wobble' on the platter, the entire computer would just power down with no warning at all - it was like the sound of a vacuum cleaner powering off. Silence and a blank screen that looked like a power cut, followed by that "oh sh!t" moment.

0. Note sure how true this was!

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Windows native app development is a mess"

PlunderBunny — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 01:51:40 +0000

I recall there used to be a problem if you edited a (win)form in Visual Studio on a computer that didn't have the DPI set to 100% - did they fix that?

The work around was 'simply' to switch to 100% DPI scaling before opening Visual Studio. On my macBook Pro built-in monitor, this was not cool.

New comment by PlunderBunny in "PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading"

PlunderBunny — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:03:43 +0000

Lighthouse can sometimes find RSS feeds for pages that don’t show an RSS button on the page:

https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Woman in Labor at Florida Hospital Brought in Zoom Court for Refusing C-Section"

PlunderBunny — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 02:05:40 +0000

Please consider using the Donate link at the bottom of the article to support good, independent investigative journalism!

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Bumblebee queens breathe underwater to survive drowning"

PlunderBunny — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 23:17:23 +0000

Edit: I’m wrong - ignore this please.

Bumblebees don’t sting, but they can bite, as I discovered after many years of picking them up when I saw them on the ground in a vulnerable spot.

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?"

PlunderBunny — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 05:43:22 +0000

In the early 1980s I read an Usbourne (sp?) introduction to programming book for kids that had a picture of a robot walking through a brick wall while following its programming to ‘take a letter to the letterbox’.

At this rate, it looks like we’ll solve that problem by not having letters/letterboxes.

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Urea prices"

PlunderBunny — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 06:47:11 +0000

There was a time when leather tanners used to collect the urine from bars - I guess the tanners paid for it.

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Defeat as Method"

PlunderBunny — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 05:18:24 +0000

"Disce Pati" (Learn Suffering)

New comment by PlunderBunny in "Two insider cases we've recently closed"

PlunderBunny — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:56:43 +0000

Polymarket and Kalshi have just been declared gambling under New Zealand law, and therefore 'investing' in them is now illegal for New Zealanders. Both companies have been ordered to stop providing services to New Zealanders [0]

0. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/587993/why-betting-on-to...