Hacker News: guenthert

New comment by guenthert in "The Internals of PostgreSQL"

guenthert — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 10:52:43 +0000

Yeah, I love those time-travellers' blogs. Wished only he'd tell us about next years' market movements instead of issues in Oracle's DB.

New comment by guenthert in "We should be more ambitious with the software we build"

guenthert — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 13:31:12 +0000

Lol, yes. This also demonstrates why tests ought to be written by an independent party.

New comment by guenthert in "Meta VR Glasses"

guenthert — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:55:28 +0000

> Everything in modern computing is slow

Nonsense. Embedded systems, often event driven, improved as did the rest of the computing landscape (perhaps at a tad slower pace). HST has been a major driver on low latency computing in the data center. And then there are of course robotics and military applications ...

New comment by guenthert in "Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake"

guenthert — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:55:39 +0000

> .deb is a really good package manager, and is arguably more sophisticated than RPM.

Perhaps. I wouldn't argue either way, but dpkg still maintains its "data base" of installed and available packages/files as plain text files rather than using a DB format like sqlite (which one might chose for such today) or Berkeley DB (back when). The performance difference is negligible today on fast hosts with NVMe backed storage, but fairly annoying when using lesser machines with slower storage, e.g. RPi with root fs on a SD card.

New comment by guenthert in "Small programming tricks"

guenthert — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:12:40 +0000

> I (a)sync everywhere by pushing git lfs commits to my home server.

Don't let IT hear that unless you work on FOSS.

New comment by guenthert in "A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX"

guenthert — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 08:00:40 +0000

"real-time GPS-driven moving map display"

Not the IMHO more interesting analog tech which lifts signals out of thermal noise.

New comment by guenthert in "Devil's Arrows: Ancient builders hauled 55k-lb stones 11 miles for UK stone row"

guenthert — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:47:32 +0000

They could have said 3300 stones stones ...

New comment by guenthert in "The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire"

guenthert — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:49:54 +0000

I thought that was an invention out of necessity during the WW times, but no, it's much older: https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Muckefuck

New comment by guenthert in "A 386 PC for Your RP2350"

guenthert — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:21:20 +0000

Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU?

I recall VICE emulating the Brotkasten on 386 PCs some thirty years ago, later UAE doing it for Amiga. How long til my currently running system (anno 2016) is being emulated?

New comment by guenthert in "Far-right AfD wins historic victory in German state election"

guenthert — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:53:56 +0000

Well, the Budesamt für Verfassungsschutz (office for the protection of the constitution -- not generally known for their left-leaning point of view) classified the AfD as proven right-extreme. On that ground outlawing that party has been considered; this hasn't been done yet, partly due to the popularity of the party in some regions -- there's the danger to further alienate the populace there, many of which are already disenchanted with the earlier established parties. Some consider it best to let them govern for a while and thereby demonstrating that they can't solve intractable problems either. Others fear that they will cause irreparable damage even in their first days in office, e.g. cancelling the contract for public broadcasting service.

New comment by guenthert in "Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers"

guenthert — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:45:48 +0000

> prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.

That did Fry's in, didn't it? People coming in viewing, touching hardware in store and then buy it on-line (elsewhere) so that they could save 2.5%. Or worse, buying it in store and returning it two weeks later when they found a better deal or didn't need it anymore.

New comment by guenthert in "GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet"

guenthert — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 09:25:24 +0000

iiuc, this is differential GPS (DGPS) and not only airports are doing that. At least in Europe there are quite a few such transmitters, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_DGPS-Sendern

New comment by guenthert in "Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope"

guenthert — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:03:37 +0000

Meanwhile it did launch and separated from launch vehicle.

Most recent status update can be found at https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/

New comment by guenthert in "Creating Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (Or, "Size Is Everything") (1999)"

guenthert — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 08:14:24 +0000

Oh, ELF file manipulation. I thought this would be about getting Linux to run on a Teensy.

https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/linux-on-teensy-4-x...

New comment by guenthert in "Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI""

guenthert — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 14:56:45 +0000

If they can't be bothered to write the code, can they be bothered to maintain it?

New comment by guenthert in "Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War"

guenthert — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:53:57 +0000

> Creating the world's first dual instruction set CPU.

World's first? What about the VIA C3 (or earlier NEC V20)? I'm sure there are more / earlier ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Instruction_Set

New comment by guenthert in "Everyone says assembly is untyped—everyone is wrong"

guenthert — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:11:27 +0000

Most architectures perform best in combination with a compiler of a statically typed language. SPARC at least still had rudimentary support for tagged data types.

New comment by guenthert in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

guenthert — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:40:45 +0000

> This manipulation of word choices virtually guarantees AI will always sound like a robot.

You make it sound as if that were a bad thing.

New comment by guenthert in "Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga"

guenthert — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:14:26 +0000

How does Clamiga compare with the most recent CLISP which did support AmigaOS?

CLISP's maintenance status is mentioned, but I can't help wondering in which way that would be relevant.

New comment by guenthert in "Asus Bike Booster"

guenthert — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:50:33 +0000

> Have you ever ridden a bike with a geared derailleur, and forgotten to shift into low gear at an intersection, or had to suddenly stop before you had a chance to shift into low gear, so it's more difficult getting started again?

Yes, it's an annoyance, not an insurmountable obstacle. If one is bothered by it, there's the hub gear, invented more than 100 years ago.