Hacker News: b3orn

New comment by b3orn in "Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need"

b3orn — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:01:04 +0000

German here, this is the right definition, trying to improve something but ending up making it worse.

New comment by b3orn in "Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird"

b3orn — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:02:19 +0000

You wouldn't expect ... = 42 to work syntactically.

New comment by b3orn in "The SpaceX Sham"

b3orn — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:01:16 +0000

There are a lot of people who want to see them fail. Have some patience, it's not even been a year.

New comment by b3orn in "Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief"

b3orn — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:45:29 +0000

If it's a custom industrial installation then the source code is part of the documentation just like the electrical schematics, specifically so that any trained electrician can maintain it. On the other hand Joe from shipping wouldn't even know what a PLC is and if you let untrained staff maintain electrical systems I think you have some more serious problems.

New comment by b3orn in "Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it"

b3orn — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:55:45 +0000

And it's not immediately obvious how to close a pop-up again.

New comment by b3orn in "Germany Records Historic 12B KWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026"

b3orn — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:04:55 +0000

You skipped GWh.

12B kWh = 12M MWh = 12k GWh = 12 TWh.

New comment by b3orn in "Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%"

b3orn — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:45:28 +0000

EU chip industry: best I can do is power electronics.

New comment by b3orn in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

b3orn — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:02:53 +0000

There was a post about something similar here a few days ago, it called it a "dirt notebook" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48954149

New comment by b3orn in "Programming language file extensions that match ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes"

b3orn — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:09:00 +0000

Yeah, should be .rb for Ruby. Also .mm isn't Objective-C, but Objective-C++.

New comment by b3orn in "Why malloc always does more than I asked for?"

b3orn — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:30:59 +0000

There are two types of load/store instructions, one type requires alignment (vmovdqa), the other can load unaligned data (vmovdqu), in the case of AVX-512 the required alignment is 64 bytes. I assume aligned loads and stores are faster/have lower latency. For SSE/AVX you can look up the alignment requirements in Intel's intrinsics guide [0].

[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/intrinsics-guid...

New comment by b3orn in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

b3orn — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:14:05 +0000

15 years ago people would've called it spyware.

New comment by b3orn in "EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0"

b3orn — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:32:57 +0000

The EU parliament has 720 representatives (at the moment 719, one seat is vacant apparently), so 113 representatives didn't show up for the vote. The absolute majority would've been reached with 361 votes.

New comment by b3orn in "24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)"

b3orn — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:50:54 +0000

If it has been transmitted via hollow-core fibres it will obviously sound hollow.

New comment by b3orn in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

b3orn — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:38:04 +0000

You don't get double taxed, you get taxed on your salary and your company gets taxed on whatever profit remains after paying salaries.

New comment by b3orn in "Cyberdecks, going analog, and convivial technology"

b3orn — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:03:39 +0000

> we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.

Almost every larger city has a more or less active subreddit these days, on platforms like Twitter you can look what people post with a city name tag. And then there are Mastodon and Lemmy/Piefed with instances for geographic regions.

New comment by b3orn in "MicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C"

b3orn — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:03:56 +0000

Almost all of these immediate mode UI libraries for C/C++ come without a rendering backend. Usually there are "example" implementations for libraries like SDL that you can use, or you implement your own backend. A lot of these libraries are popular for debug UIs in games and you probably need a custom backend for whatever graphics engine you use in your game.

New comment by b3orn in "Starfling: A one-tap endless orbital slingshot game in a single HTML file"

b3orn — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:28:19 +0000

I implemented a very rudimentary copy of it at https://fac3.org/slingshot.html

Drag on the red circle to set angle and velocity, let go to launch it, try to hit the green circle, avoid the blue circles (planets with gravity). To try again hit "r" or reload the page to create a new random set of planets. Doubt it works at all on mobile, only tested it in desktop firefox.

New comment by b3orn in "Starfling: A one-tap endless orbital slingshot game in a single HTML file"

b3orn — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:25:58 +0000

Reminds me a little of an old game called Slingshot[0], I think it implemented the idea much better as you actually had to slingshot and consider gravity. Someone should turn it into a browser game, would be much more fun than this.

[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/slingshot-game/

New comment by b3orn in "Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why"

b3orn — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:33:25 +0000

Probably not possible. Their Wi-Fi access point is inside the capsule, the capsule is made from metal and probably shielding the signal somewhat. Maybe even quite a lot if it's intended to provide some radiation shielding. Also it's low power as it only needs to work inside the capsule, at the given distances signal attenuation will make it almost impossible to pick up anything.

New comment by b3orn in "Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars"

b3orn — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:46:09 +0000

I would take low voter turnout more as indifference than as lack of enthusiam. To take the parking fee for SUVs example, I would assume a lot of people affected by it and complaining about it aren't even living in Paris, so they can't vote against it.