Hacker News: Xirdus

New comment by Xirdus in "SDL Now Supports DOS"

Xirdus — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:42:26 +0000

Well, the "ASM port of something that could run this" would be the OS...

New comment by Xirdus in "SDL Now Supports DOS"

Xirdus — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:27:32 +0000

Well, if you treat DOS as a bootloader for Windows 98 - which it was actually - then modifying autoexec.bat would count as setting up the bootloader.

New comment by Xirdus in "SDL Now Supports DOS"

Xirdus — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:24:46 +0000

No, I set it up. My parents were non-technical. I had a CD-ROM re-release of Worms for DOS from one gaming magazine or another. I guess the installer set it up somewhere somehow but I remember it wasn't easy to get it installed and there were further problems trying to launch it. It's possible the installer itself was a DOS program, not a Windows program.

New comment by Xirdus in "Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing"

Xirdus — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:37:16 +0000

For the humanity? Yes, it's generally good. For that particular researcher's career? Not really. Who wants to pay for research into something that's already known?

New comment by Xirdus in "SDL Now Supports DOS"

Xirdus — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:31:48 +0000

I basically had this setup back in the day. I don't really know how I ended up with it, I was 7 at the time and none of it was intentional - but my bootloader had two entries: I could boot into Windows 98, or I could boot into Worms.

New comment by Xirdus in "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark"

Xirdus — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:45:56 +0000

Residential vs. business. If the graph was hourly and per country, you'd see the same rise every morning and drop every evening (likely by more than 5pp).

New comment by Xirdus in "Ads in ChatGPT"

Xirdus — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:48:53 +0000

Umm... remember how people in late last century used to pay $30-50/month for cable TV that was at least 25% ads by volume? And that's in last century dollars, comparable to $100 today.

New comment by Xirdus in "LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer"

Xirdus — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:04:31 +0000

Firefox on Android has approximately 0.5% market share on mobile, less than Opera. I really doubt it's enough to spark any sort of industry-wide change.

New comment by Xirdus in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

Xirdus — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:57:27 +0000

Good abstractions translate directly into how quickly the devs can fix bugs and add new features.

New comment by Xirdus in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

Xirdus — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:59:46 +0000

As if `minimumReleaseAge` in `[install]` section of `.bunfig.toml` doesn't require the same kind of memorization.

New comment by Xirdus in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

Xirdus — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:57:19 +0000

Lol sure.

New comment by Xirdus in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

Xirdus — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:13:17 +0000

I'm old enough to remember computers being pitched as devices that can do tedious math for us. Now we have to do tedious math for them apparently.

New comment by Xirdus in "Android Developer Verification"

Xirdus — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:11:01 +0000

The term jaywalking was invented (or possibly hijacked) by automotive lobbyists as part of a campaign in 1910s and 1920s to convince the public and the lawmakers that crossing streets outside designated points is bad and should be made illegal. Before then, it was generally considered basic human right to walk anywhere on a street. Whether you agree that jaywalking is bad or not, that's the history of the term.

Grandparent is saying that the term sideloading was invented in a similar fashion to delegitimize a previously completely normal way to use an electronic device.

New comment by Xirdus in "Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)"

Xirdus — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:46:58 +0000

I always assumed contributing to RFCs is about as easy as contributing to C++, which I always assumed is virtually impossible without a billion dollars or a billion citations of your academic papers.

New comment by Xirdus in "Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)"

Xirdus — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:10:20 +0000

This one is even worse IMO

> Servers MAY return 402 when:

> * Offering optional paid features or premium content

This implies that a successful GET request to a resource that user already does have access to, might still return 402 instead of 200. This makes 402 basically unworkable.

New comment by Xirdus in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

Xirdus — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:29:01 +0000

You're assuming wanting to watch something always leads to being satisfied after seeing it. Which is increasingly not the case. People are doomscrolling for hours, and then regret doomscrolling for hours rather than doing something meaningful instead.

New comment by Xirdus in "Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft"

Xirdus — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:32:01 +0000

Or maybe it shouldn't take 10+ years to certify aerospace software.

New comment by Xirdus in "OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub"

Xirdus — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:15:57 +0000

A cursory glance at Wikipedia tells me the technology to make drones (I assume by drones you mean quadcopters) was well known all the way back in the 50s. You could say the technology ultimately ended as nothing but a toy, rather than started as one.

New comment by Xirdus in "OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub"

Xirdus — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:10:20 +0000

Do you have any examples of 20th or 21st century breakthrough technologies that started out as toys? I can only think of 3D printers.

New comment by Xirdus in "OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub"

Xirdus — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:00:55 +0000

If engineering is about implementing the simplest thing then why do we call implementing the most complicated thing overengineering and not underengineering?