<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: VorpalWay</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=VorpalWay</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:44:08 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=VorpalWay" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even better would be if the website provided the age rating in a HTTP header, and the browser could locally check if the account is allowed to see it. That way you avoid exposing the age of the user.<p>And yes, even sending an age bracket exposes the age over time as you can observe a repeat visitor changing brackets and compute the actual age from that. With the server sending the info instead you can't really tell if the browser blocked it, or if the user just didn't navigate further on the page. (The browser still need to fetch all the CSS and other resources though, otherwise that would be possible to tell apart.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:32:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47846149</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47846149</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47846149</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Nothing stops them from adding a gasket and some screws though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:16:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836428</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836428</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836428</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Slop Cop"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think that is in line with what I said: a balance is best. I have seen the opposite of what you described: long messages with no paragraph breaks. Not great either.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:59:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817996</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817996</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817996</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A tip here, if your wick is symmetric you can turn it upside down and get some more life out of it. My humidifier has rectangular wicks mounted at an angle, and only the top back tends to get a lot of minerals. I can thus turn them around and over in 4 different orientation.<p>Plus I have very soft water, so all combined I can get through an entire winter with just one set of wicks.<p>Still, I wish they made washable wicks out of fabric instead, so you could just put it in a bath of vinegar or citric acid for a few hours and then put them in the washing machine. In theory I see no reason they couldn't last for years.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:38:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817234</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817234</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817234</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To be fair, I migrated a VPS from Linode to Hetzner a few years ago. Minor downtime is a non-issue: personal website and email server. I approximately halved the monthly cost, and I haven't had <i>any</i> downtime except what I caused myself when rebooting to upgrade the kernel every now and then.<p>As a bonus, Hetzner is European.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:18:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817056</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817056</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817056</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Slop Cop"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is such a thing as balance. For some reason it tends to be very easy to go overboard in either direction.<p>Also, any metric ceases to be a good metric the moment it becomes a goal.<p>I have observed both of the above statements in many different contexts, they seem to be (somewhat) universal rules for human society.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 09:43:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47814549</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47814549</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47814549</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> but they're saying something broadly mirrored by security researchers.<p>You might well be right, it is not an area I know much of or work in. But I'm a fan of reliable sources for claims. It is far to easy to make general statements on the internet that appear authorative.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:05:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785943</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785943</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785943</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "How Wake-On-LAN works (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have measured the powered off energy usage of my desktop computer at the wall, and it hovered about 5-6 W (resolution of the power meter was just whole watts). That would be split between losses in the PSU and WoL, and possibly other circuits. But I don't have any other such wakeups enabled (but that doesn't mean that the motherboard is designed super well to disable it fully if not needed). Turning off WoL made a difference of about 2 W (meter hovered around 3-4 W).<p>One thing I noticed is that if I connect to a gigabit upstream port, that the connection drops to 100 mbit/s when the computer is off, but if I connect to a 2.5 Gbit port, it stays at full speed. This is based both on LEDs on the connector as well as the OpenWRT dashboard on the router. If it made a difference it was too small to reliably measure with my simple meter.<p>If it makes a difference (potentially does for conversion losses I would guess), this is on 230 V mains.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:00:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785896</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785896</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785896</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Those aren't exactly common here, since municipal water is high quality and everyone drinks it as is. It is not like some parts of the world where the tap water is full of chlorine and barely drinkable (I ran into that when I went to Athens).<p>And if you have your own well, you generally do a cheaper filter targeted at whatever impurity you have (such as an iron filter), rather than a reverse osmosis filter.<p>With reverse osmosis the water also gets too pure for drinking and you need to add back minerals to it for safety, it is not healthy to drink ultra pure water for any prolonged period of time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:36:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785596</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785596</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785596</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Fixing a monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Distilled water is somewhat expensive, and humidifiers chew through water in the winter (at least here). I quickly switched away from ultrasonic for that reason, 6-8 litres of distilled water per day for a medium sized apartment is not sustainable. Evaporative with tap water and biocides is the way to go.<p>The air outside is extremely dry (<5% relative humidity once heated to indoor temperatures), and the air is quickly replaced by the ventilation. I have anecdotely heard that in the US they have much lower requirements of rate of air replacement than here in Sweden though, so maybe that could work there, but then you would also have stale air, which doesn't sound great.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 20:27:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784793</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784793</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784793</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Let's talk space toilets"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Couldn't you have two centrifuges next to each other spinning in opposite directions, cancelling most of the effect out? I believe some helicopters work like that, with two sets of rotors on longer troop transport helis. A few even have two sets on top of each other. And many planes have the props on opposite wings rotate in opposite directions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:21:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771689</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47771689</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Most applications spend 90% of their runtime waiting for IO anyway, so optimizations of this scale don't do anything.<p>Again, depends on what you are doing. If you are doing web servers, electron apps or microcontrollers, sure. If you are doing batch computation, games, simulation, anything number crunchy, etc: no. As soon as you are CPU or memory bandwidth bound, optimisation does matter. And if you care about battery usage you also want to go to sleep as soon as possible (so any phone apps for example).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:42:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47740308</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47740308</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47740308</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I agree that the rust community frowns a little too much on the use of Arc/Cloning/Box<p>As usual, this depends heavily on what you do. I had written a program where Arc reference counting was 25 % of the runtime. All from a single instance as well. I refactored to use borrows and annotated relevant structs with lifetimes. This also enabled additional optimisation where I could also avoid some copies, and in total I saved around 36% of the total runtime compared to before.<p>The reason Arc was so expensive here is likely that the reference count was contended, so the cacheline was bouncing back and forth between the cores that ran the threads in the threadpool working on the task.<p>In conclusion, neither extreme is correct. Often Arc is fine, sometimes it really isn't. And the only way to know is to profile. Always profile, humans are terrible at predicting performance.<p>(And to quite a few people, coming up with ways to avoid Arc/clone/Box, etc can be fun, so there is that too. If you don't enjoy that, then don't participate in that hobby.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:27:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736957</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736957</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736957</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored.<p>As far as I know that has only been decided in US so far, which is far from the whole world.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:19:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728965</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728965</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728965</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Wouldn't you want to completely disassemble the laptop first anyway, at which point the electronics would be disconnected from the metal parts anyway?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:11:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728265</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728265</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728265</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Investigating Split Locks on x86-64"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> So to be honest I don't see the merit of this study. This study is essentially how fast is your interconnect so it can survive bad software that allowed to run untrammelled.<p>It seems like a worthwhile study if you want to know what CPU to buy to play specific old games that use bus locks. Games that will never be fixed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:06:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728237</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728237</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728237</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I disagree on this, the colour bleeding is visible and causes me actual headaches. I know not everyone is affected by that, but if you google this, a small but significant number of people can't use cleartype because of that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 06:56:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714512</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714512</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714512</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Income and effective cost of things like desktop monitors vary wildly across the world, that argument doesn't really fly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:49:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709830</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709830</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709830</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Every screen I have has been Retina for a long time. I greatly appreciate that text is now as legible as it is in books. No distracting jaggies.<p>Not all of us are in that position, and modern font rendering has gotten really bad on non-high DPI monitors, so using a bitmap font has been a way to get rid of the blur and get back to sharp crisp text.<p>For me, I'd rather have jagged text than a blurry <i>literally</i> headache inducing mess.<p>That said, the issue here isn't that one is better than the other, but that for some people one or the other is easier to read, and the <i>right</i> answer is that all of this need to be configurable. Just like light and dark mode.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:40:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709655</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709655</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709655</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by VorpalWay in "Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Couldn't disagree more, I get headaches from blurry text, so I daily drive Terminus TTF, and have done so for years. Modern font rendering really has becole quite terrible unless you own a high DPI screen, even when using full hinting.<p>And no, subpixel anti-aliasing doesn't help, the colour bleeding is even worse.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:34:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709567</link><dc:creator>VorpalWay</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709567</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47709567</guid></item></channel></rss>