<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: edwcross</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=edwcross</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 24 Oct 2026 14:08:33 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=edwcross" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Which I never used because it requires permission to see my location, and at home, my ISP gives a location far from where I live anyway. So even if I allowed it, it would be meaningless.<p>So, unless there is some way to manually enter a town name or ZIP code that I missed, the feature is unusable, which is a shame.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Oct 2026 06:53:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205305</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205305</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205305</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "A train simulator game for console hackers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The only Youtube video I found on this game is a 1 minute-long video from 12 years ago. Are there more recent videos showing gameplay?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Oct 2026 18:45:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185632</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185632</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50185632</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>errno is global, but also _Thread_local, to help mitigate issues in a multithreaded environment. A kludge over a kludge...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:58:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052344</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052344</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052344</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Shredding JSON columns gave Logfire up to 1000x faster queries"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Whenever I call some client support service to complain about their website being broken, incorrect, malfunctioning, or something similar, and I explicitly ask them to notify their IT system about it, I feel like some weird alien or raging boomer asking for something impossible. They don't even understand it, and my complaints just become useless. There are no more e-mails to contact, nothing that can be done to improve the situation. It's enshittification all the way down, and too bad for those of us who had known a better state of affairs, we just have to become blind to it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:53:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052300</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052300</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052300</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Computers Cannot Make Decisions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yet decisions are still made by abstract entities such as "companies" and not the individuals working for them. So that blame can be diluted and deflected in a very convenient manner for CEOs. Just find someone to fire, but keep doing the same thing.<p>Instead of "Anthropic submits false tip to police", I'd prefer "Anthropic employee John Smith deploys an agent that submits false tip to police". Of course, John Smith will be able to then say "I did so as ordered by my superior, Ms Sue", and so on, with a very clearly established chain of liability.<p>A corporation and an AI are not very different in many aspects, except one of them is very favourably treated by law, almost as a living person.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:45:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50031572</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50031572</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50031572</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Unless you're in country A and ordered from country B (both in Europe), in which case the consumer protection agency from country A may just tell you "well they're not in our country so we can't do much, try contacting the European consumer agency, which after spending 30 minutes finding their form, and checking that you do qualify (which you won't, for some stupid reason like "did you try calling them nicely and sending a letter and waiting for 30 days?"), they will just say "ok cool we sent them an e-mail, we'll tell you how all of this will work out".<p>Or maybe I'm just in a bad European country who pulls this kind of demotivating stints every time I have this kind of problem.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 07:22:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49812738</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49812738</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49812738</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Möbius-Strip Crosswords"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For anyone trying to solve the examples, the toroidal crosswords example image has a copy-paste error from the post author (not present in the original): the numbers for Down are 1, 3, 5 and 6 (and not 1, 2, 4, 7).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:55:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217215</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217215</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217215</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes but for local political points, they left Twitter last year, because "it was trendy". Besides, lots of old people living here, so they can't leave Facebook, otherwise the old people won't get their news!<p>As if they cared, most news are only useful for working people and families anyway... but oh well, they vote, they have time to complain loudly, and they have all the houses around here (because of course, why would they move to a better-suited flat place, and leave their now-too-large-for-a-couple houses so that families could move instead?), so the mayor has to be on Facebook, and not on Bluesky or Mastodon or somewhere else.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:51:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819504</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819504</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819504</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Law forbids my local administrative entities from engaging with porn and gambling. Yet they force me to use Facebook if I want to see events that are happening (and paid with my taxes).<p>So, sorry, but the liberal ideal paradise of "let loose and people will choose" does not work in practice, at least where I live. I need some laws to force my less tech-savvy nearby citizens to make the right choices.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:05:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818070</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818070</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818070</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Half-Life 2 in a Browser"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It requires a paid account though, doesn't it?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:56:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675323</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675323</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675323</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Does it affect the photo quality? It used to require letting go of the default photo app and thus a downgrade in photo processing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:31:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565376</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565376</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565376</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Why the smart home bubble popped"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I worked in a building that had that kind of "smart" controls. It was anything but.<p>In practice, it started opening and closing shutters for no reason, when clouds obscured the sun, and then went away. Or even when some sort of reflection hit some sensor, somewhere in the building.<p>I'm sure it's doable, but unlike factories, where automation is related to income and thus profits, most commercial buildings are built by the cheapest of cheaters, and so they will skimp on sensor, on intelligence, on integration, or whatever, just to follow the minimally-compliant features. So you get all kinds of erratic behavior, lack of redundancy, stupid intelligence that ends up overridden by humans.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 05:36:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275422</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275422</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48275422</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Nostalgic Kits Central (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Are there modern kits that connect similar to this one? Instead of requiring breadboards and cables?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 08:10:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204614</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204614</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204614</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Interestingly, the mobile version of the website contains a hamburger menu with an "Equipe" (Team) link that returns a 404 error (<a href="https://soberania.ai/equipe" rel="nofollow">https://soberania.ai/equipe</a>).<p>This link is absent from the desktop version.<p>Isn't it a bit odd that the team responsible for it is nowhere to be credited?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 05:18:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104475</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104475</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104475</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "I keep tripping over "true, false, true""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>OCaml has had labeled arguments for decades, so I assumed other languages would have added something similar by now. In C-style, it would be like:<p><pre><code>  createUser(user, ~isAdmin:true, ~sendWelcomeEmail:false)
</code></pre>
Even though in OCaml's functional style it is actually like this:<p><pre><code>  createUser user ~isAdmin:true ~sendWelcomeEmail:false
</code></pre>
Using the fact that a variable named exactly like a labeled argument is automatically assigned to it, we can make the call more concise (especially if reusing existing variables):<p><pre><code>  let isAdmin = true in
  let sendWelcomeEmail = false in
  createUser user ~isAdmin ~sendWelcomeEmail</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 May 2026 13:52:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48095028</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48095028</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48095028</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "I want to live like Costco people"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It must be an issue with the European implementation, but I have a Costco not very far from home, and yet I never stepped inside.<p>Because simply asking to <i>see</i> what it sells requires me to subscribe upfront.<p>It's not like I cannot <i>buy</i> without a membership card; that is perfectly understandable. But I cannot even see what's sold inside, which prevents me from knowing if I actually want to become a member. They do have a "catalogue" of sorts... showing the prices of about 30 products or so. That's all. And the website describing the general aisles, with a few pictures.<p>So, they want me to subscribe to something before I can even see what they have to offer? What the heck is with that?<p>On the other hand, you can just walk straight to the food court and buy pizza, soda, and cookies, without being a member.<p>Is this how things work in the US as well? If so, how is that justified?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 00:01:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48056724</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48056724</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48056724</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Over 8M Thermos jars and bottles recalled after 3 people lost vision"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I promise I won't be a dumbass with them<p>That's not very empathic of fellow people who might just have mistakenly forgotten food in the container.<p>It's not like they were intentionally using this for brewing some illegal substance or misusing it in a way specifically forbidden in the manual or obviously unsafe (e.g. removing a magnetron and all of its protections from a microwave to make pretty wood carvings).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 11:19:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48007233</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48007233</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48007233</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Kefir C17/C23 Compiler"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>c-testsuite is not made by the author of Kefir.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Apr 2026 05:42:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47844996</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47844996</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47844996</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "Picasso’s Guernica (Gigapixel)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Relevant ACOUP (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Bret Devereaux's military history blog) post: <a href="https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/" rel="nofollow">https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:20:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777042</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777042</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777042</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by edwcross in "How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Great! I'll finally be able to buy all commerce spots in Berlin (cheapest city) to avoid any competition, and _then_ open a restaurant.<p>I used to deal only with "ice cream" (illegal weapons) trading, buying in one city and selling them on another, to quickly earn lots of money, and then buying commercial spots but never opening them (too much hassle, having to micro-manage shops).<p>But after having bought about 200 or so, the game would inevitably crash a few weeks after my save file, so in the end I stopped playing it. I never got the exact details about the bug, but I hope this remake won't have it!<p>Besides that, the most fun thing was trying weird pizza recipes and seeing that the taste algorithm was a bit weird. I could put lots of chicken, or pineapple, and mix a few ingredients, and have some age groups rate them very highly.<p>But sabotaging the competition was still funnier than handling a normal business.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:50:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704523</link><dc:creator>edwcross</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704523</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704523</guid></item></channel></rss>