Hacker News: Postosuchus

New comment by Postosuchus in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

Postosuchus — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 01:52:28 +0000

That's an excellent idea! It will work out absolutely great - much like Communism.

Meaning, when you forcefully standardize and regulate how phones are built, you might expect that companies will not compete on making better phones (since they are not very much differentiated) but on who produces the cheapest phone.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Tell HN: Russians may soon lose access to the global internet"

Postosuchus — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:36:41 +0000

This will not work for two reasons:

1. Thanks to the sanctions, it is virtually impossible for RF citizens to purchase anything abroad with Russian credit cards.

2. VPN was design not to obfuscate but to encrypt - that is, the protocol doesn't conceal the fact that VPN channel is being used, you just cannot peek into the content in this channel. Which means that more and more sophisticated tools are being used to block VPN communications.

New comment by Postosuchus in "An important update on our team"

Postosuchus — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:34:24 +0000

Oh no! Yet another "difficult but right decision" (tm) to self-fund further investment in AI.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Canadian government demands safety changes from OpenAI"

Postosuchus — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:07:21 +0000

Funny, how we reliably keep finding the boogeyman - first in computer games, then in "right wing extremists online" then in LLMs, while carefully avoiding the correlation of dysphoria and mental disorders with gender change...

New comment by Postosuchus in "EDuke32 – Duke Nukem 3D (Open-Source)"

Postosuchus — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 04:06:57 +0000

Indeed, they made Level Editor available. In fact, there was even a friggin' book on level design: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0782118690

Blast from the past indeed. Many many moons ago, I came up with a "bright" idea of designing a mod for Duke3D that modeled the office of my then-employer (large fintech company). At least I had enough sense not to boast about it - several months later a crazy guy brought a shotgun to HIS former employer and made national news, I don't think people would have taken my creation as lightly as I did back then. Still, working on it was fun.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5"

Postosuchus — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 03:41:56 +0000

Snapdragon X Elite laptops have been out for the last two years, if not more. How much has Qualcomm did over this time to make Linux work on those devices - almost nothing. As of 2 months ago, the best you could do was a special cut of Ubuntu that kinda sorta booted on those machines and required Windows to be present in order to pull some drivers.

So how about you give me a fucking break, Qualcomm? Call back when Snapdragon has first class support in major distros and you are serious about Linux.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Show HN: Gradle plugin for faster Java compiles"

Postosuchus — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 23:37:41 +0000

This. And speed aside, Gradle embodies everything that is wrong with modern software development. A giant, opaque, idiosyncratic black box. I develop for Android (Java and Flutter) and it has become a sad pattern from Hell: Android Studio update mandates upgraded Gradle, which breaks previously the build in most weird ways, forcing one to trawl StackOverflow looking for proper incantations to do in the myriad of files it has created with the single purpose of building the damn app. Sometimes I wish, creating new build systems was outlawed some time after gmake or cmake...

New comment by Postosuchus in "1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected"

Postosuchus — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:52:34 +0000

Pretty interesting. I guess it was way later, when they came up with the SUID semantics and appropriated the first character for symlinks (l) or setuid binaries (s)...

New comment by Postosuchus in "Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke"

Postosuchus — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 20:52:52 +0000

Nope. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New comment by Postosuchus in "GnuCash 5.9"

Postosuchus — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 23:59:32 +0000

Second that. Microsoft Money was _amazingly_ practical and useful - head and shoulders above Quicken. It is a real shame, Microsoft didn't find a better solution than to sunset it.

'Uncertainty' Drives LinkedIn to Migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux

Postosuchus — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 22:05:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/linkedin_azure_linux/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41384942

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Postosuchus in "Emacs used as a message router in Germany's ATC systems in the 1990s (2021)"

Postosuchus — Thu, 23 May 2024 01:45:40 +0000

I don't think VAX emulators were the thing back then. :-) In fact, our target platform was a cluster of commodity DEC Alpha machines running an early version of RedHat Linux for AXP. I know for a fact, that we were the first system that employed Linux clusters in fintech.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Emacs used as a message router in Germany's ATC systems in the 1990s (2021)"

Postosuchus — Thu, 23 May 2024 01:43:29 +0000

Yes, absolutely. You will be shocked how complex CMOs might be just to calculate plain cashflow on a tranche (https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Mortgage-Backed-Securities-7... is a great standard treatise on the topic). Add to this interest rate modeling and prepayment modeling - and we are talking serious logical complexity. And this is the area where people get REALLY pissed when you have bugs.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Emacs used as a message router in Germany's ATC systems in the 1990s (2021)"

Postosuchus — Wed, 22 May 2024 20:41:24 +0000

Speaking of crazy applications of Emacs... Long long time ago, my team was tasked with rebuilding an MBS analytics system for one of the leading fintech companies. The original system ran on DEC VAX and was written in VMS Pascal (let's just say, a very unique flavor of Pascal). Rewriting it from scratch was not an option (it would take decades to implement all that complexity and to make sure it worked correctly). Instead, we utilized a combination of tools that first transformed the Pascal code into the form that was closer to more popular Pascal dialects (which included using a Scheme compiler and (drum roll) Emacs in batch mode), applied a set of hand-made patches, translated into C using p2c, and finally built on Linux. As crazy as it sounds, it worked well enough to be used as a foundation for the next gen of mortgage analytics.

New comment by Postosuchus in "How much faster are the Gnome 46 terminals?"

Postosuchus — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 21:41:40 +0000

Interesting timing (pun intended): apparently one of the recent Gnome updates in Ubuntu made terminal barely usable due to lagging - https://askubuntu.com/questions/1509058/input-delay-on-termi...

I've noticed this myself on my main rig running Ubuntu 22.04, which never ever had any perceptible lag. Now it is so bad I was forced to switch to Alacritty.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA)"

Postosuchus — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 21:53:30 +0000

> wants it to be a kind of media center only

Again, to accomplish this goal, one has to:

- Build a credible software stack - from UI kits to audio and video codecs

- Convince the streaming companies to build one more flavor of their apps (in addition to Android/FTV, AppleTV, Roku, and a bunch of SmartTV platforms)

- Build ad stack and also convince major ad platforms to build their respective ad SDKs for the new platform (believe me, even for established platforms this takes years)

And all of this - to accomplish precisely what??? To wean away from Android? Why? There are no licensing issues, Amazon has grown a tremendous expertise in Android, which underlies most of its devices. Why throw all of this away???

Unlike Amazon, Samsung is much more tethered to Google, because they cannot afford to diverge in Android experience for the phones. They tried to cut this Gordian Knot by building Tizen and they learned their lesson the hard way. But at least for them there was a strategic benefit of moving away from Android. There is no such benefit for Amazon.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA)"

Postosuchus — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 18:25:56 +0000

Doesn't make much sense. Building an ecosystem is far, far more difficult than throwing together a small embedded OS. Just ask Samsung and LG (and Google for that matter). Maybe Amazon has enough clout to force all streaming app developers (and game developers, which is the new frontier, and ad platforms) to suck it down and build support for the new platform but I doubt it - plus the ROI is just not there. Why destroy an active well working ecosystem - to accomplish what exactly?!

New comment by Postosuchus in "Tell HN: GoDaddy Stole My Domain"

Postosuchus — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 06:05:50 +0000

Exactly same scenario for me. They generously offered me to re-activate the domain for $55 "lapse" fee. I generously offered them to shove it and registered a slightly different domain with a more reputable registrar. Priceless lesson, as it was a tiny hobby website.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards"

Postosuchus — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 20:43:42 +0000

Technically Abraham, as he was the one, with whom G-d established the Covenant. Although I'm pretty sure there are lengthy disputes in Talmud arguing that it started with Adam and Hava.

New comment by Postosuchus in "Lithuania to introduce pre-paid SIM registration from 2025"

Postosuchus — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 20:50:26 +0000

I suspect that will do little good. They can just as well (and likely will) force you to register at some point under the threat of disconnecting your service.