<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: barchar</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=barchar</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:43:42 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=barchar" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Why Japan has such good railways"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The central sections of link were expensive because they're built through the center of the earth with really huge stations, some of this is to avoid impacting cars but much is just to get elevation changes. The connection over lake Washington required a lot of money and work too, as it's a floating bridge.<p>The less complex sections were mostly on-par with other us cities.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:22:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822960</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822960</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822960</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Show HN: Is Hormuz open yet?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think sentinel-1 has a SAR instrument, it's very easy to see ships with that data</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:35:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699003</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699003</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699003</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is a fee implicit in the market spread. It's formed out of the time value of money w.r.t. the cost of NOT trading as well as the adverse selection faced by those with standing offers.<p>Increased insider trading will increase spreads.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:52:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536871</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536871</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536871</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In that case you limit your upside as well as an insider, and have to deal with liquidity and slippage coming and going.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:50:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536846</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536846</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536846</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Polymarket "odds" I think are just the price of the contract * 100 right?<p>That's not actually the predicted odds by the market because every single bet is also a bet on interest rates.<p>A contract that literally 100% always would resolve to "true" in 1 year would have a non-zero price for the "false" side because selling that option (and thus taking the "false" side means you get ~$97 today and then pay $100 in a year.<p>Polymarket's 4% chance of jesus returning by 2026 actually represents a market consensus of basically a 0% chance.<p>For trump losing office there might be some bets predicated on his losing office being correlated to a higher interest rate outcome, too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:39:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536747</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536747</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536747</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In theory this should limit the damage insiders can do, since as the probability of encountering an insider rises the market makers will need to widen the spread.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:10:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536479</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536479</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536479</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Uhhh what? If they take control of the server they have control over the box.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:57:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448287</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448287</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448287</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Cockpit tends to be less ad-hoc than others ime. Often it'll use dbus on the backend.<p>It's also socket activated, which is nice.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:53:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448234</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448234</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448234</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Aliens.gov ~ domain registered 17MAR2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's because of the time value of money. Buying no is much like buying a bond.<p>It doesn't mean there's a 16% chance.<p>It's probably more attractive to gamblers when presented like this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432948</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432948</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432948</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in ""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Mice can do that because they require so little bandwidth. Bluetooth has a latency/bw tradeoff (this is why Bluetooth microphones are so horrible, though the handsfree profile is also neglected generally).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:38:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406579</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406579</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406579</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "AirPods Max 2"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you're using Android there's global eq available (mostly). I use an app called wavelet that lets you search for your headphone model and download a pre-made profile.<p>iPhone users are kinda out of luck, but the autoeq database can show you how to set Music's equalizer to approximate a flat response</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:33:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406540</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406540</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406540</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "AirPods Max 2"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are many. QCY makes a pair for ~$50, I think there are some other Chinese brands too. You really are paying for the brand.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:23:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406440</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406440</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47406440</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Plus it's not like there aren't cobol environments for more commodity hardware. Hell GCC just got a new cobol frontend last year!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:53:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130180</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130180</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130180</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Vm.overcommit_memory=2 is the right setting for servers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yep. If you aren't overcommitting on fork it's quite wasteful, and if you are overcommitting on fork then you've already given up on not having to handle oom conditions after malloc has returned.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:48:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333911</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333911</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333911</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Vm.overcommit_memory=2 is the right setting for servers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am aware reserving excess memory doesn't commit said memory. But it does reserve memory, which is what we were talking about. The point was that because you can have a lot of threads and restricting reserved stacks to some small value is annoying all systems overcommit stack. Windows initially commits some memory (reserving space in the page file/ram) for each but will dynamically commit more when you touch the guard. This is overcommit. Linux does similarly.<p>Idle threads do increase the amount of committed stack. Once their stack grows it stays grown, it's not common to unmap the end and shrink the stacks. In a system without overcommit these stacks will contribute to total reserved phys/swap in the child, though ofc the pages will be cow.<p>> Windows employs a distinct process/thread design, making the UNIX concept of a process foreign. Threads are the primary construct in Windows and the kernel is highly optimised for thread management rather than processes. Cygwin has outlined significant challenges in supporting fork(2) semantics on Windows and has extensively documented the associated difficulties. However, I am veering off-topic.<p>The nt kernel actually works similarly to Linux w.r.t. processes and threads. Internally they are the same thing. The userspace is what makes process creation slow. Actually thread creation is also much slower than on Linux, but it's better than processes. Defender also contributes to the problems here.<p>Windows can do cow mappings, fork might even be implementable with undocumented APIs. Exec is essentially impossible though. You can't change the identity of a process like that without changing the PID and handles.<p>Fun fact: the clone syscall will let you create a new task that both shares VM and keeps the same stack as the parent. Chaos results, but it is fun. You used to be able to share your PID with the parent too, which also caused much destruction.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:42:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333898</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333898</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333898</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Performance Hints"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is not always true. Compilers are quite good at register allocation but sometimes they get it wrong and sometimes you can make small changes to code that improve register allocation and thus performance.<p>Usually the problem is an unfortunately placed spill, so the operation is actually l1d$ traffic, but still.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 03:25:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333394</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333394</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333394</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Vm.overcommit_memory=2 is the right setting for servers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Unless you reserve on fork you're still over committing because after the fork writes to basically any page in either process will trigger memory commitment.<p>Thread stacks come up because reserving them completely ahead of time would incur large amounts of memory usage. Typically they start small and grow when you touch the guards. This is a form of overcommit. Even windows dynamically grows stacks like this</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 03:15:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333357</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333357</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333357</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Vm.overcommit_memory=2 is the right setting for servers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Fwiw you can use pressure stall information to load shed. This is superior to disabling overcommit and then praying the first allocation to fail is in the process you want to actually respond to the resource starvation.<p>Fact is that by the time small allocations are failing you are almost no better off handling the null than you would be handling segfaults and the sigterms from the killer.<p>Often for servers performance will fall off a cliff long before the oom killer is needed, too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 03:04:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333327</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333327</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333327</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Vm.overcommit_memory=2 is the right setting for servers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even besides the aforementioned fork problems not having overcommit doesn't mean you can handle oom correctly by just handling errors from malloc!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 02:49:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333257</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333257</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333257</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by barchar in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They really don't, and if they did then would it be so bad if people who didn't "need" them took them?<p>Obviously if there's safety issues but for stimulants unsafe doses will 100% always decrease performance, because they'll affect sleep.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 20:30:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152617</link><dc:creator>barchar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152617</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152617</guid></item></channel></rss>