Hacker News: captaincrowbar

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Modern C++ Programming: Busato"

captaincrowbar — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:20:23 +0000

"This open-access course is directed at those who are already familiar with C and object-oriented programming" ... but not C++

That's a very, very small target you're aiming at there.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "DeployTarot.com – Tarot card reading for deployments"

captaincrowbar — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:31:21 +0000

Has anyone got the hang of Thursdays yet?

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Typechecking is undecideable when 'type' is a type (1989) [pdf]"

captaincrowbar — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 20:38:37 +0000

This feels like a restatement of the trivially obvious observation that, if your type system is Turing complete, you're going to run into the halting problem.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf]"

captaincrowbar — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 16:14:06 +0000

Because making every jet engine in two different models would make them a lot more expensive. It would also cause maintenance issues because of non-interchangeable parts.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Show HN: I reverse engineered macOS to allow custom Lock Screen wallpapers"

captaincrowbar — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 23:14:15 +0000

I'm in Australia, you're Swedish (but I don't know if your business is based there), and most web sites show US prices by default. So I wouldn't like to guess whether it was meant to be AUD, USD, or SEK.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Show HN: I reverse engineered macOS to allow custom Lock Screen wallpapers"

captaincrowbar — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 18:51:14 +0000

I like this and would seriously consider buying it - except that the purchase page only has prices in something called "AA$". I have no idea what currency that refers to (AA is Aruba, but they don't use dollars), or how much that might come to in my local currency.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "The Color of Noise (2014)"

captaincrowbar — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 02:55:38 +0000

Non-paywalled version on one of the authors' site:

https://www.liyiwei.org/papers/noise-sig12/

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Borgo Programming Language"

captaincrowbar — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:40:00 +0000

That doesn't make it open source, just "source available".

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Playground Wisdom: Threads Beat Async/Await"

captaincrowbar — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 09:15:23 +0000

"The `await` keyword means "turn the rest of this function into a callback for the when the Task I'm waiting on finishes, and return the resulting Task"."

Oh my god thank you. I've been trying to wrap my head around the whole async/await paradigm for years, basically writing code based on a few black magic rules that I only half understand, and you finally made it all clear in once sentence. Why all those other attempts to explain async/await don't just say this I can't imagine.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Battleships Logic Puzzle"

captaincrowbar — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 07:06:47 +0000

Broken in Safari on Sequoia, unfortunately.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "macOS Sequoia is available today"

captaincrowbar — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 22:02:51 +0000

Does the command line to remove the quarantine flag (xattr -d com.apple.quarantine filename) still work?

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Gpu.cpp: A lightweight library for portable low-level GPU computation"

captaincrowbar — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 08:39:04 +0000

Put it this way: Can I build an executable using this, that I could confidently give to a Windows user who has never heard of WSL?

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Gpu.cpp: A lightweight library for portable low-level GPU computation"

captaincrowbar — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 23:43:14 +0000

This looks useful but I'm worried about portability. Are there any plans for native Windows support?

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Pi Gazing is a project to build meteor cameras using Raspberry Pi"

captaincrowbar — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 04:55:30 +0000

I'm disappointed that they passed up the opportunity to call the project Stargazy Pi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargazy_pie)

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Unix forking the universe by running IBM's free online quantum computer"

captaincrowbar — Sat, 11 May 2024 00:58:29 +0000

Just waiting now for someone to find a spectre exploit in quantum mechanics.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "How Mandelbrot set images are affected by floating point precision"

captaincrowbar — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 21:06:57 +0000

Some people, when they have a problem, think, “I know, I’ll use floating point.” Now they have 1.9999998 problems.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "Princess: Coding Like Royalty"

captaincrowbar — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 19:12:46 +0000

It can't be any harder to search for than C.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "The Itanic Saga: The History of VLIW and Itanium"

captaincrowbar — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 09:49:59 +0000

Well, what actually killed it historically was AMD64. AMD64 could easily not have happened, AMD has a very inconsistent track record; other contemporary CPUs like Alpha were never serious competitors for mainstream computing, and ARM was nowhere near being a contender yet. In that scenario, obviously mainstream PC users would have stuck with x86-32 for much longer than they actually did, but I think in the end they wouldn't have had any real choice but to be dragged kicking and screaming to Itanium.

New comment by captaincrowbar in "The persistence of tradition: the curious case of Henry Symeonis"

captaincrowbar — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 01:25:30 +0000

“Daft? Of course it’s daft - it’s traditional!” - Terry Pratchett

New comment by captaincrowbar in "The bash book to rule them all"

captaincrowbar — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 05:51:24 +0000

Thanks. Strangely I'd never heard of this site before.