Hacker News: btbuilder

New comment by btbuilder in "In the UK, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars, thanks to Chinese competition"

btbuilder — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:39:09 +0000

~1.5 billion train journeys a year is “functional”.

New comment by btbuilder in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

btbuilder — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:45:46 +0000

0C = Frozen!

New comment by btbuilder in "The future of Python web services looks GIL-free"

btbuilder — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 16:41:23 +0000

It’s hard to answer without specifics but languages shouldn’t require you to determine whether it’s safe to use an api in an async context or whether it will hang your app. I imagine some of the sharp edges you might have run into are because go has real parallelism and you have to address data sharing.

New comment by btbuilder in "The future of Python web services looks GIL-free"

btbuilder — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 15:36:22 +0000

This is fantastic progress for CPython. I had almost given up hope that CPython would overcome the GIL after first hitting its limitations over 10 years ago.

That being said I strongly believe that because of the sharp edges on async style code vs proper co-routine-based user threads like go-routines and Java virtual threads Python is still far behind optimal parallelism patterns.

New comment by btbuilder in "We found a bug in Go's ARM64 compiler"

btbuilder — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:32:32 +0000

Right, in a 3rd-party library.

New comment by btbuilder in "We found a bug in Go's ARM64 compiler"

btbuilder — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 21:26:45 +0000

Segfaults with no use of “Unsafe” equivalents in managed languages can give immediate indication it’s not a code problem.

New comment by btbuilder in "FP8 is ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cutlass" in it"

btbuilder — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 15:35:49 +0000

I believe the driver silently swapped the textures to lower quality ones that looked worse but gave a performance boost.

New comment by btbuilder in "BS 1363 British Plugs and Sockets"

btbuilder — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 21:48:39 +0000

That’s not my experience but it’d be interesting to from others on the matter.

New comment by btbuilder in "BS 1363 British Plugs and Sockets"

btbuilder — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:18:48 +0000

TR in the US makes sockets harder to use, but I have never heard anyone complain about TR in the UK, as the earth/ground pin is always present, and is physically longer than the live and neutral, so mechanically it is reliable and unnoticeable.

“Just baby proof” means remembering to keep those little plastic covers in place in every outlet. That doesn’t seem like superior usability.

New comment by btbuilder in "BS 1363 British Plugs and Sockets"

btbuilder — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 02:40:48 +0000

The shutter prevents someone (including children) shoving something metal into the live/hot. I have never heard of it failing. Newer US outlets (TR/tamper resistant) are way more finicky because of the optional ground pin. Sticking the little plastic covers over the outlet is a workaround.

The reason for a fuse is because of the high current capacity of ring circuits vs branch/radial. The fuse protects the power cable of appliances catching fire as they can’t handle the current available on the circuit .

Ring circuits are a thing due to minimizing copper usage when rebuilding after ww2.

New comment by btbuilder in "Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units"

btbuilder — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 18:28:15 +0000

The switching of command and service in the argument order from the init script days still catches me out.

foo restart vs restart foo

New comment by btbuilder in "M4 Macs can't virtualise older macOS"

btbuilder — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 18:40:46 +0000

It at least has the virtualization framework now. There’s a product called Anka that plugs into Jenkins and lets you deploy macOS VM images as build agents on top of physical Apple hardware. While slower than containers, and limited to 2 VMs (?!?) you can have reproducible and sane build environments via VM images.

New comment by btbuilder in "We Built a Self-Healing System to Survive a Concurrency Bug at Netflix"

btbuilder — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 07:55:39 +0000

I mean, it worked for Boeing[1] too.

1 - https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...

New comment by btbuilder in "We're excited about our new roundabout"

btbuilder — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 02:26:01 +0000

There’s a link in the article but here it is with a time code for the start of the simulation.

https://youtu.be/07_m7HHiZRw?t=39

New comment by btbuilder in "Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC"

btbuilder — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 04:56:24 +0000

Assembly of the phone or device using the processor.

New comment by btbuilder in "Apple mobile processors are now made in America by TSMC"

btbuilder — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 04:42:51 +0000

Do the chips get shipped to China for assembly?

New comment by btbuilder in "Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison"

btbuilder — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 19:57:37 +0000

  input_string = "VMS"
  output_string = ''.join([chr(ord(char) + 1) for char in input_string])
  print(output_string)

New comment by btbuilder in "EV Motors Without Rare Earth Permanent Magnets"

btbuilder — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 15:21:30 +0000

Pump filling times should be compared with DC-fast charging times as L2 is normally what you do at home when you don’t care too much about how long it takes. F150 will DC fast charge 15% -> 80% in “around 32 minutes”. Level 2 takes 10 hours as you point out.

New comment by btbuilder in "Java string interpolation feature has been cancelled"

btbuilder — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 19:21:40 +0000

While it’s more how they are used, imo optional is abused to the point it adds complexity. You don’t avoid handling null, but now you have to deal with present or not. Therefore you’ve gone from 2 states to 3. Use of value or null is simpler to me and use of optional can be via Optional.of() rather than parameters and properties for the vast majority of cases.

New comment by btbuilder in "GDPR: Is It Worth It?"

btbuilder — Fri, 17 May 2024 13:55:37 +0000

I always choose the “essential cookies only” option. This is normally harder than accepting all cookies, but it is getting easier over time. I rarely see a site that has essential-only.