Hacker News: Xylakant

New comment by Xylakant in "Rosettes and Other Hidden Traces of Hamburg's Tram"

Xylakant — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 21:30:26 +0000

The comparison to Berlin is interesting because notably Berlin only has remainders of it Team network due to the east/west split. West Berlin did as Hamburg did and ripped out all tracks, replacing them with buses. East Berlin kept the tram. If you look at today’s public transport network you’ll still see the split.

New comment by Xylakant in "Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking"

Xylakant — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:54:05 +0000

That’s pretty easy - all major providers have public lists of IP ranges, usually as json files.

New comment by Xylakant in "Tesla's Robotaxis Blow Through School Zones, NHTSA Petition Alleges"

Xylakant — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 07:55:30 +0000

The other thing is the squared taper-off of speed when braking and I used to not think about this until someone showed the math. If you're going 30km/h and a kid jumps out 10 meters in front of you, you can just barely come to a stop. If you're going 50 km/h, you'll run them over with 30km/h remaining speed and come to a stop about 10m further down.

New comment by Xylakant in "Tesla's Robotaxis Blow Through School Zones, NHTSA Petition Alleges"

Xylakant — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 07:45:19 +0000

No. They are driving unsafely, not you. Even if the speed limit doesn't seem to make sense for you, it may be there for a reason that's not obvious to you. It may also be there for non-safety reasons, such as noise reduction for the people living close by.

New comment by Xylakant in "Tesla's Robotaxis Blow Through School Zones, NHTSA Petition Alleges"

Xylakant — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:46:36 +0000

This is a very weird argument. How can a car be dangerously slow if all the other cars stick to the speed limit as well? Any danger can only come from a difference in speed. So the danger is actually not the car observing the speed limit, it is the other cars that do not. Notably, any reduction in danger that flows from breaking the speed limit is only for the car and other cars breaking the speed limit, in no case it is for pedestrians, cyclists or other non-vehicle participants in traffic.

New comment by Xylakant in "Tesla's Robotaxis Blow Through School Zones, NHTSA Petition Alleges"

Xylakant — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:04:18 +0000

Certainly, as long as it’s on the car and there’s enough of it.

New comment by Xylakant in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

Xylakant — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:59:27 +0000

It’s really hard to loosen supply side restrictions on “this somehow became a hip neighborhood.” You can in general make more housing available, but not prevent rising prices in specific neighborhoods.

New comment by Xylakant in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

Xylakant — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:51:55 +0000

A major problem with property taxes on owner-occupied housing is that the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house. An owner occupied house is not primarily a financial investment in most cases. Any increase in housing value (and thus property taxes) is mostly an increase in the cost of living. Any gain in value cannot easily be realized since it’s not a liquid asset. This leads to a fear of being driven out just because the value of the surrounding neighborhood rises doesn’t mean that the owner’s income rises in lockstep.

One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.

New comment by Xylakant in "I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video]"

Xylakant — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:17:17 +0000

Or pay for a nebula subscription and watch there.

New comment by Xylakant in "Separate the Cord from the Device"

Xylakant — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:33:53 +0000

My Ankarsrum Assistent mixer has a detachable power cord with a standard C13 connector.

It seems to be possible, but it’s likely cheaper to have fixed connectors.

New comment by Xylakant in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

Xylakant — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:23:05 +0000

> equation because deteting errors

should be

> equation because detecting errors

Thanks for the catch, did the edit.

New comment by Xylakant in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

Xylakant — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:59:20 +0000

Quite to the contrary to what you write, many people pushing for Rust explicitly recommend to be very restrictive about touching existing, battle tested code and only rewrite it if you're substantially refactoring it anyways, or if it is a critical exposed piece of functionality - such as media codecs for example, which have a long history of being broken. The winning strategy that for example the google android team pursues is to not rewrite existing code, but write all new code in Rust, because real-world data shows that vulnerabilities in existing code follow a decay curve - most issues are detected in the early life of the code. That's the strategy that Firefox uses, too. (Though I'm curious about how LLMs change that equation because detecting errors in rarely used code path' seems to be what they're doing well)

And indeed, this is very much what Rust was designed to do with the ability to interface with existing C/C++ code in both directions. So this is the strategy that the designers of the language had in mind from the early days. It's a deliberate choice to offer this, and not an emergent property that was later discovered.

New comment by Xylakant in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

Xylakant — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:28:57 +0000

In any practical application there'll be a known set of errors and I'm generally fine merging code that has known deficiencies. But personally, I'd not condone merging anything that causes UB. It undermines such a fundamental guarantee of the language that it should be detected and eliminated. And bun certainly rises to the level of software where I'd expect that the project runs all available tooling to detect such cases. Especially if you LLM - code it. "Do not cause UB" should be part of the test harness.

New comment by Xylakant in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

Xylakant — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:43:33 +0000

That is not Rusts guarantee. The guarantee is that safe rust cannot in itself introduce UB - UB can only ever be introduced in unsafe blocks, but it can then materialize in safe code.

New comment by Xylakant in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

Xylakant — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:40:27 +0000

Indeed. My point is that just using the standard tools in the Rust ecosystem - like miri - would have trivially uncovered this error before it made it to the mainline.

New comment by Xylakant in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

Xylakant — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:32:47 +0000

That kind of error was entirely avoidable. There are well-known tools in the Rust ecosystem that detect this kind of error and while the tools do not detect all instances of UB caused by mistakes in unsafe blocks, it's still considered good practice to run them.

New comment by Xylakant in "3.4M Solar Panels"

Xylakant — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 20:54:14 +0000

With a liquid cooler you could theoretically have the heat exchanger in a separate room or outside.

New comment by Xylakant in "German men 18-45 need military permit to leave country for longer than 3 months"

Xylakant — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:59:14 +0000

That doesn’t mean it’s unenforceable. You don’t need a permit to leave Germany to any country as long as your planned stay is shorter than 3 month. The only way this could be enforced is by checking if people are in country, that is in case of drafting them. The paragraph essentially ensures that any person that gets drafted needs to present themselves in person within 3 month of the draft notice.

New comment by Xylakant in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

Xylakant — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:48:00 +0000

I’m not convinced that Iran has damaged their relationship to the gulf states any more than the US and Israel have damaged theirs. The US has clearly demonstrated that they are willing to use their bases in an allied state to start a war of at least questionable legality that has the entirety predicted outcome of massively damaging the allies economy, possibly for decades to come. All the gulf states will soon re-evaluate their security relationship with the US. On the side, the US has also severely damaged NATO, to the point that NATO states have closed their air space to US planes involved in the war. On top of that, some European states have blocked flights transporting weapons for Israel. Not to mention the fact that Iran and the rest of the world has been demonstrated again that negotiations or agreements with the US do not mean anything. China will look appealing as a guarantor or peace soon to a lot of people.

I believe the long term damage this has caused in immeasurable and the only way to remedy this would be that both Israel and the US find some way to investigate who and why started this war - and possibly prosecuting any war crime that may have occurred.

Also, the EU needs to grow a spine, fast.

But alas, I have no hope of that happening. We’re all worse off for that.

New comment by Xylakant in "Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week"

Xylakant — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:50:14 +0000

Philadelphia is a cheese brand in Germany, maybe they just like that. Or the movie.