Hacker News: dzdt

New comment by dzdt in "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove"

dzdt — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:12:07 +0000

I think the new model with music is they don't make a very serious attempt to keep a monopoly on the content. They only really care about a monopoly on convenience. If anyone would set up some convenient way to stream these concert recordings they would get sued to oblivion. But the recordings circulating as inconvenient downloads? Not a big target.

New comment by dzdt in "The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer"

dzdt — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:21:09 +0000

At least in the early 2000s, Bloomberg had strict requirements about this. Their financial terminal has a ton of math calculations. The requirement was that they always had live servers running with two different hardware platforms with different operating systems and different CPU architectures and different build chains. The math had to agree to the same bitwise results. They had to turn off almost all compiler optimisations to achieve this, and you had to handle lots of corner cases in code: can't trust NaN or Infinity or underflow to be portable.

They could transparently load balance a user from one different backend platform to the other with zero visible difference to the user.

New comment by dzdt in "What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential?"

dzdt — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:19:09 +0000

Guessing not knowledge but I expect it was called that from the accidental occurence of color on broadcast TV wben the image includes something with black-and-white stripes at the right spacing. So the name predates the intentional usage by the comphter system.

New comment by dzdt in "What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential?"

dzdt — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:24:35 +0000

I think in this alternate universe the Apple-II analog would be the first cheap computer that could run a spreadsheet. That really takes a 40 column display. So I think it would have waited for the 2mhz 6502 to handle the doubled line frequency.

New comment by dzdt in "New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike"

dzdt — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:21:46 +0000

I do think there is a strong possibility the people in charge in the US government believe an Iran state sponsored terrorism attack would be a political benefit to them. Such things boost support for the sitting President, and could also give political cover for additional authoritarian acts to help them retain power. Would they do the school attack on purpose? Maybe? But for sure they keep the war going until they generate the response they are looking for...

New comment by dzdt in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

dzdt — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:15:49 +0000

Is this something European style privacy laws would protect against? Though given the US political situation we are far from being able to enact any kind of anti-authoritarian protections...

New comment by dzdt in "Claude's Cycles [pdf]"

dzdt — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:09:39 +0000

I think it could be solved still pseudononymously: introduce a "vouch" button that allows a user to vouch that another user is human. This is consequential both for the vouched-for and vouching accounts. Run a page-rank style algorithm on the graph of vouches to generate a certainty score for the humanity of each account. For repeated posters this should converge to a correct answer fairly quickly. There is still a challenge for green accounts, but having degraded experience for new users is not a doom scenario for the site.

New comment by dzdt in "Allocating on the Stack"

dzdt — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:23:34 +0000

For purely historical reasons the C/C++ stack is "small" with exactly how small being outside of programmer control. So you have to avoid using the stack even if it would be the better solution. Otherwise you risk your program crashing/failing with stack overflow errors.

New comment by dzdt in "You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account"

dzdt — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:19:45 +0000

A related thing that bugs me is how many scam search results come up and are prioritised if you search for "uk eta" or similar. On google for me the real site is sandwiched in positon 4 after 3 and before 2 additional paid sponsored scam sites each with large block sections in the search results.

New comment by dzdt in "$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents"

dzdt — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 03:05:16 +0000

What percent of the kind of development that standardized tests measure do you think occurs within the context of the school building?

New comment by dzdt in "Ask HN: Chromebook leads for K-8 school in need?"

dzdt — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:30:06 +0000

In New York the biggest driver behind technology is the state testing regime. Make the case to your administration that the chromebooks are insufficient for the state testing program and they will come up with the funds for upgrades.

New comment by dzdt in "New York Just Killed Its Robotaxi Plan. The Real Problem Isn't the Technology"

dzdt — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 14:38:15 +0000

I had aasumed the plan was killed for cynical political motivations, the same as apparantly caused the hangup and Hochul's near killing of NYC congestion pricing. Its really hard to gather evidence about what is the motivation for things though...

New comment by dzdt in "C++26: Std:Is_within_lifetime"

dzdt — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:48:23 +0000

This continues the trend that the C++ language spec is too large for any person to understand, full of opaquely named things for obscure use cases. Maybe when most code is written by LLMs this kind of extension will be appreciated? Because the LLM can manage to get its large head around all of these obscure functionalities and apply them in the appropriate situations?

New comment by dzdt in "Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026"

dzdt — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:16:16 +0000

This would be a natural role for the Post Office to take on, to provide a neutral ad-free, privacy-respecting messaging platform accessible to all.

New comment by dzdt in "Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)"

dzdt — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:47:11 +0000

You can see on archive.org where it captured directory info for files which were not stored:

https://web.archive.org/web/20031218202130/http://www.sonic....

When you navigate those directory archives many of the files are missing. E.g.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030529230704/http://www.sonic....

Some design documents ARE there, e.g. "Specification of 3d display for starquest" : https://web.archive.org/web/20030719111039if_/http://www.son...

New comment by dzdt in "Reversed engineered game Starflight (1986)"

dzdt — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:55:57 +0000

Early in the 2000's one of the original authors of Sfarflight posted a massive dump of information online: design documents and source code. That is the "Technical Articles Saved from Oblivion" link in this repository. Sadly no one seems to have managed to save a full copy! This is one I kick myself about: I browsed this back when it was up but didnt think to download. These days I make a point to request Internet Archives to save things like this if I ever come across it.

New comment by dzdt in "OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission"

dzdt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:28:15 +0000

Hard shades of Google dropping "don't be evil".

New comment by dzdt in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

dzdt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:24:51 +0000

And people who like getting raises dont like leaving things alone...

New comment by dzdt in "I miss thinking hard"

dzdt — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:34:00 +0000

vibe-shoring

New comment by dzdt in "Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)"

dzdt — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:38:45 +0000

(2023)