Hacker News: b3orn

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.

New comment by b3orn in "Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust"

b3orn — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:50:49 +0000

Considering that Korean is an SOV language it would've been interesting to see that factor into the design of this programming language.

New comment by b3orn in "/e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem"

b3orn — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:56:52 +0000

I wouldn't call Android user hostile. What makes most Android phones user hostile is Google Play Services.

New comment by b3orn in "ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030"

b3orn — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:37:46 +0000

Which isn't easy considering they explode tin droplets in the machine. I think that's the point the other commenter wanted to make.

New comment by b3orn in "Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings"

b3orn — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:04:20 +0000

Especially in autumn and winter.

New comment by b3orn in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

b3orn — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:20:18 +0000

The largest "but" is that they only look at electricity generation, not energy in general. There's a lot of heating with natural gas and of course most cars still have internal combustion engines which burn petrol or diesel.

New comment by b3orn in "Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie"

b3orn — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:52:23 +0000

But that only works if you already know the exact movement and you basically end up playing a film on the background screen walls. You can't change anything of this on set anymore. Using real-time rendering with Unreal or whatever gives you more flexibility in exchange for visual quality.

New comment by b3orn in "UK offshore wind prices come in 40% cheaper than gas in record auction"

b3orn — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:49:27 +0000

Carbon tax is not about offsetting emissions, it's about disincentivising fossil fuels.

New comment by b3orn in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

b3orn — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 12:53:27 +0000

Announcements in English aren't done for every station. Usually only for central stations and airports.

New comment by b3orn in "Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC"

b3orn — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 21:29:56 +0000

> Airbus would have been a terrible idea: no one had built commercial airliners before, and only the US had the know-how.

That's just plain false, Airbus started as a cooperation between a lot of european aerospace companies, which had different a lot of know-how in different fields. For example Sud Aviation (later Aérospatiale, now Airbus) was the French part of the Concorde, they also had the Caravelle.

New comment by b3orn in "Rouille – Rust Programming, in French"

b3orn — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 14:52:13 +0000

I would use "sei" instead of "lass" for "let" to be more in line with notation in mathematical proofs.

New comment by b3orn in "Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?"

b3orn — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:07:11 +0000

Imports being slow is annoying, but only matters to short running code.

New comment by b3orn in "Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?"

b3orn — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:01:50 +0000

It's two different computers with different CPUs, so different runtimes are expected and has nothing to do with the OS.

> Framework laptop running Ubuntu Linux 24.04 (Intel Core i5 CPU)

> Mac laptop running macOS Sequoia (M2 CPU)

New comment by b3orn in "Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels"

b3orn — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 12:08:19 +0000

> What is done when electricians power down the apartment or worse, the building to work on something?

Well, I hope that any competent electrician will measure if there's still any voltage on the circuits after pulling the breakers.

New comment by b3orn in "Apple A19 SoC die shot"

b3orn — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 09:02:58 +0000

Lithography is one of many steps, but probably the most important one. You use it to expose a photoresist to create a mask for further processing. After exposing the photoresist you need to develop it, remove either the exposed or unexposed photoresist. The remaining photoresist then is the mask and you either etch or dope the surface that is not covered by the mask or you deposit material on top. And then you need to remove the mask and start all over again for the next layer. The high water usage comes from repeatedly needing to clean the surface to remove chemicals and photoresist.

New comment by b3orn in "Novel hollow-core optical fiber transmits data faster with record low loss"

b3orn — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 05:57:10 +0000

For submarine cables there are two things here. The first is lower attenuation which allows for fewer amplifiers along the route making it overall cheaper. The second is lower latency. There have been cases where high frequency trading people went wireless to get lower latency because of the higher propagation speed of EM-waves in air. For really long distances you can go theoretically use satellite links to get lower latency than a submarine cable even if the total distance increases.

New comment by b3orn in "Crimes with Python's Pattern Matching (2022)"

b3orn — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:25:53 +0000

No, at least in Erlang a variable is assigned once, you can then match against that variable as it can't be reassigned:

    NotFound = 404,
    case Status of
        NotFound -> "Not Found";
        _ -> "Other Status"
    end.

That snippet will return "Other Status" for Status = 400. The Python equivalent of that snippet is a SyntaxError as the first case is a catch all and the rest is unreachable.