Hacker News: cfstras

New comment by cfstras in "Asahi Linux on M3"

cfstras — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:01:07 +0000

It‘s going to be a godsend for people with M1 macs when Apple or App vendors decide to drop support for them.

The hardware is super capable and will make a great fileserver, TV box or HomeAssistant instance once I‘m done using it as daily driver.

Similarly, because of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I can keep using a 15y old Samsung notebook with a modern firefox, whereas Windows 8 already broke Samsung‘s display brightness driver and thermal management, and 10&11 are entirely unusable.

New comment by cfstras in "Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys"

cfstras — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:22:41 +0000

Demand would go down, so meat companies would reduce breeding to reduce output. Or start an ad & lobbying campaign to increase demand again.

New comment by cfstras in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

cfstras — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 16:33:41 +0000

A couple years ago, I was at a station waiting for a (delayed) ICE train. I couldn't buy a ticket at the machine or with the app, since the train had already departed (if it had been on schedule). The ticket machine also wouldn't take VISA / MasterCard, only the more common Girocard (most people still call it EC)

Later, in the train, when I asked the conductor to buy a ticket with my Girocard, he said "That's not a commonly used payment method" and asked for VISA, or cash (not having any to provide change, obviously).

New comment by cfstras in "An appeal to Apple from Anukari"

cfstras — Tue, 06 May 2025 17:11:34 +0000

If my math is right, that gives you 83 clock cycles to calculate a single sample. on a 16 core, theoretically 1333 cycles. that‘s not a lot, considering you don‘t nearly 100% of the cpu all the time.

New comment by cfstras in "Let's talk about animation quality"

cfstras — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 19:46:41 +0000

That same graph had me jump towards the sampling theorem - playing back an animation with linear interpolation creates hard edges, e.g. frequency spikes. I‘m not sure if the movement space is comparable to audio here, but I can‘t see why not.

so; if the sampling theorem applies; having 2x the maximum movement „frequency“ should be enough to perfectly recreate them, as long as you „filter out“ any higher frequencies when playing back the animation by using something like fft upscaling (re-sampling) instead of linear or bezier interpolation.

(having written this, I realize that‘s probably what everyone is doing.)

New comment by cfstras in "Better HTTP server routing in Go 1.22"

cfstras — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 17:37:38 +0000

Most languages with macro or templating should be able to define this behavior as a library. Rust and C++ come to mind, for example.

New comment by cfstras in "Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)"

cfstras — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 18:51:57 +0000

is this satire? I honestly can’t tell.

New comment by cfstras in "Adding capacity to the electricity grid is not a simple task"

cfstras — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 06:27:49 +0000

Fellow German here, I’ve experienced a total of ~2 hours, in one single outage, about 20 years ago. Not even a single brownout since.

New comment by cfstras in "Single binary executable packages"

cfstras — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 20:47:03 +0000

Hmm… That makes sense. Though if you are building from source, the only gain you have over regular go tooling is downloading from your favorite mirror rather than github&co. I hope it doesn’t install these source-packages for prebuilt binaries…

New comment by cfstras in "Single binary executable packages"

cfstras — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 20:18:32 +0000

What are the golang- packages about in OpenSUSE? Go doesn‘t support dynamic linking (except for non-go-pieces like glibc or via cgo). Do they contain source-code? Or pre-built .a‘s? Both would have a hard time not conflicting with go‘s own build tooling, right?

New comment by cfstras in "Send text messages for free using Python"

cfstras — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 07:37:22 +0000

If you want to use this as a toy, sure. But please don’t rely on it for messages you want to actually get delivered: These gateways frequently drop messages for random reasons, or block your IP if you send more than a few messages at a time. Also, in countries other than the US, expect the gateways to be long gone, or completely unreliable.

New comment by cfstras in "NFT Replicas: An app to mint a replica of virtually any NFT"

cfstras — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 17:06:08 +0000

> The price for a replica starts at 0.001 ETH. Each time a particular NFT piece is replicated, its next replication cost will double. So be sure to replicate popular pieces early!

So who gets the replication fees? Is this just a cash grab by the authors of the site?

New comment by cfstras in "My Custom CSS Reset"

cfstras — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 12:46:13 +0000

I cannot stress this enough:

    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased

Looks _horrible_ on non-retina (read: most external) monitors with macOS. Browsers have sane defaults for every OS! Please retain them rather than making me install TamperMonkey just to read your blog.

New comment by cfstras in "S.F. is considering downtown 'congestion pricing'"

cfstras — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 15:37:30 +0000

I'm not convinced congestion pricing will actually fix the problem. Once public transit exists and is more useful than your own car, people will use it.

I consistently notice this when visiting larger cities in Germany. Good public transit => I'll take the bus/tram/subway every day. Slow or unreliable => I'll gladly take an Uber or buy my own car.

Maybe surge pricing could be use to finance investments into public transit. Just make it a function of the horsepower-to-people ratio. Anything below 90HP/person is free. If you can afford a nice car with lots of power and don't carpool, pay up.

New comment by cfstras in "Signal Desktop is corrupting its database"

cfstras — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 14:36:35 +0000

You could probably use something like https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream to backup your signal db.

New comment by cfstras in "Actually Portable Executables"

cfstras — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 14:32:50 +0000

Yes, as they require a significantly less amount of stuff you need to deal with. WINE needs to implement vast amounts of Windows APIs to make something like .net work, while cosmopolitan limits you to low-level C (and things built on it, like lua) at compile time.

New comment by cfstras in "A 1000-processor chip powered by an AA battery (2016)"

cfstras — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 13:01:12 +0000

Java has this since 8:

    Arrays.asList("hello", "world").parallelStream()
        .forEach(s -> System.out.println(s));

If you want to calculate stuff, you can

    List suffixed = Arrays.asList("hello", "world").parallelStream()
         .map(s -> s + "_suffix")
         .collect(Collectors.toList())

New comment by cfstras in "Timezone Bullshit"

cfstras — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:37:32 +0000

ah, that makes sense. Looks like the gdate I'm using only links against libsystem, and I don't have a glibc anywhere. So it's the darwin libc that doesn't have this bug.

Testing with https://hub.docker.com/_/busybox, it seems like musl also has this problem. uclibc is not affected.

New comment by cfstras in "Timezone Bullshit"

cfstras — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 13:25:26 +0000

The part about "using the text of the invalid timezone" seems to be fixed in latest GNU date (8.32):

  $ TZ=EDT gdate
  Wed Feb 10 13:22:23 UTC 2021
  $ gdate --version
  date (GNU coreutils) 8.32
  ...

8.30 (shipped in debian buster) still has the problem.

The BSD version of date shipped with MacOS 10.15 also does not seem to have this bug.

New comment by cfstras in "Docker fails to launch on Apple Silicon"

cfstras — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 08:42:44 +0000

Docker on Mac and Windows both use virtual machines to run a Linux OS, which then runs Docker normally.