Hacker News: bzzzt

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

bzzzt — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:55:17 +0000

They are not so different: it's the same private/public money dynamic but money flowing in different ways. For consumers it doesn't really matter if it's a tax or 'mandatory levy'. For instance: in the EU it's mandatory to pay for disposal of consumer goods, which is priced in with every purchase. That's as close as a 'disposal tax' as you can get.

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

bzzzt — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:37:25 +0000

> A new EV can drive 400-700km on one charge.

Only when it's one of the more expensive 'long range' models, weather is good and it doesn't exceed 100km/h.

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

bzzzt — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:30:59 +0000

Some countries literally subsidize gasoline, but even if your country does not it probably supports oil companies with tax breaks ('creating jobs'). There also are lots of untaxed externalities like global warming and exhaust pollution.

New comment by bzzzt in "Apple accelerates eco progress with highest-ever recycled materials"

bzzzt — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:59:11 +0000

First advice when confronted with memory or stability issues was 'reseat the DIMMs' for years.

New comment by bzzzt in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

bzzzt — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:50:56 +0000

Yes. You're paying at least $9,99 per month which means that after the 5 or so years when the battery starts going bad you've already paid for multiple batteries.

New comment by bzzzt in "Apple accelerates eco progress with highest-ever recycled materials"

bzzzt — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:51:19 +0000

I consider soldered-in RAM a reliability win. It's more shock resistant and a connector that doesn't exist can not fail.

New comment by bzzzt in "Apple accelerates eco progress with highest-ever recycled materials"

bzzzt — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:48:41 +0000

There's nothing wrong with planning for a certain device lifespan, provided it's long enough. But there's a bell curve here: it doesn't make sense to plan for 20 years of support if 99% of the devices are broken or replaced by their users by then.

Also, Apple repair prices are high, but not outrageous. There will always be someone claiming they can do it for less, but not many that will give the same guarantees Apple does.

New comment by bzzzt in "Some iPhone Apps Receive Mysterious Update 'From Apple'"

bzzzt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:09:23 +0000

Look at the supported formats lists. It includes so many parsers, mostly written in C, which means there probably are a few dozen ways to exploit the player.

New comment by bzzzt in "Three hundred synths, 3 hardware projects, and one app"

bzzzt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:04:31 +0000

I'm not sure there's much to be gained by mapping values. Maybe envelope time is comparable since seconds are seconds, but not every synth interpolates ADSR values in the same way (some use just linear or logarithmic interpolation, some high end synths are heavily configurable). Also, other values like filter cutoff impact the sound in dramatically different ways depending on the kind of filter...

New comment by bzzzt in "Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11"

bzzzt — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:44:47 +0000

QEMM386 for DOS did not have a memory compression feature. Only one of the later versions for Windows 3.1 did.

New comment by bzzzt in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

bzzzt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:08:33 +0000

Those things could save some lives of course, but it's a small drop. And then there's the issue of people trusting on those safety systems and driving more reckless than before. It also helps not to live in a country where everyone is driving trucks ;)

New comment by bzzzt in "OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1"

bzzzt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:12:00 +0000

Building stable software for all varieties of PC hardware was part of the challenge of course. Lots of demos had problems with all kinds of hardware varieties.

Lots of low-level optimizations also made their way into compilers that sometimes do a better job than a human. There's not much to be gained by writing everything in assembly which means it doesn't interest people as much as in the 90s.

New comment by bzzzt in "Eclipse GlassFish: This Isn't Your Father's GlassFish"

bzzzt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:41:26 +0000

There's nothing to be gained by picking a winner, especially if it doesn't really matter because the important APIs are the same.

Newer frameworks like Quarkus are specifically built for container usage and applications built with it are a bit faster and smaller than Spring boot.

New comment by bzzzt in "First Western Digital, now Sony: The tech giant suspends SD card sales"

bzzzt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 10:00:09 +0000

> In Europe they started rationing fuels

They are rationing in Slovenia to prevent 'gasoline tourism' (people taking advantage of lower taxes), not due to shortages.

New comment by bzzzt in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

bzzzt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:15:10 +0000

The innovations that mattered were seat belts and airbags. After that you have to correct for all the electronic gadgets that also actively distract or make drivers over-confident. Real numbers are not available, but governments keep mandating all kinds of questionable safety features that increase the price of vehicles (and insurance) and reduces competition in the market.

New comment by bzzzt in "Eclipse GlassFish: This Isn't Your Father's GlassFish"

bzzzt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:04:02 +0000

Spring and JEE (or Quarkus) are very similar, from the viewpoint of an application developer both have the same JAX-RS REST and Hibernate/JPA API's.

IMO the kind of person who only knows Spring and doesn't understand modern JEE is exactly the kind of person you don't want to recruit.

New comment by bzzzt in "Can the world get its supply of oil by bypassing the Strait of Hormuz?"

bzzzt — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:05:58 +0000

Why not? Put them in the ground instead of on the ground. Or put a heap of sand on them to absorb the blast.

New comment by bzzzt in "Six ingenious ways how Canon DSLRs used to illuminate their autofocus points"

bzzzt — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:07:03 +0000

Full frame DSLRs are heavy because of the big mirror box. Mirrorless full frame cameras are a lot lighter. An APS-C Canon R7 is bigger than my full frame Canon RP. Coupled with a light prime it's almost indistinguishable from a compact camera and delivers better image quality than most of those.

New comment by bzzzt in "The Neo cannot scale with macOS behind on the basics"

bzzzt — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:54:36 +0000

That's not been the case here (the Netherlands) for years since the 'hidden loan' of the phone was outlawed. Yet everybody under 20 aspires to have an iPhone.

New comment by bzzzt in "The Neo cannot scale with macOS behind on the basics"

bzzzt — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:29:02 +0000

While I agree the missing MST support complaint is valid it seems very far fetched to me it's a deal breaker preventing Mac adoption. Most people only use 1 screen, a fraction of people dual screen (especially laptop users) and only a tiny fraction have or really need more screens.