Hacker News: hommelix

New comment by hommelix in "The 'else' keyword is probably a literal translation from German (2020)"

hommelix — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:18:29 +0000

Else can be found in English text prior to computer existence. Else can't be found in a German dictionary as a conjunction [1]. The first suggestion in Duden is the name for alder tree in lower German. Second suggestion is a firstname. If a word would come from German, it seems the first step would be to look up in a German dictionary.

While the look up for history of computer language is interesting, the conclusion is completely wrong.

[1] https://www.duden.de/suchen/dudenonline/Else

New comment by hommelix in "The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI"

hommelix — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:04:14 +0000

Sequential implies a sequence, ie many tasks. One single task can't be sequential or parallel. Or you are talking about a feature that is broken in multiple sequential tasks.

New comment by hommelix in "A new way to think about borrow checking (in reverse)"

hommelix — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 19:43:15 +0000

> > It seems we are getting closer to the "final language", and languages become a solved problem. > > A final language? I like the sound of it. No more picking complexity, latency, simplicity, expressiveness, portability and other tradeoffs.

This sound to me like havin a single tool. Only a hammer and every problem looks like a nail...

New comment by hommelix in "Rabbits were a medieval royal luxury in England until the Black Death"

hommelix — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:04:41 +0000

Rabbit used to be the meat of the poor where I grew up. If you could not afford meat (beef/pork), you could always raise 5 to 10 rabbits in boxes in your garden and feed them with the grass from the road sides.

New comment by hommelix in "AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs"

hommelix — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:05:46 +0000

This. CRA only means that you need to assess with 24/72h that you are affected or not by a published CVE.

Then there is no time limit to provide a mitigation. It should just be worked out without unnecessary delays. Once a mitigation is published, a report should be submitted with 14 days.

New comment by hommelix in "Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe"

hommelix — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:47:56 +0000

Just an hypothesis:

A supermarket may have 30 freezers. You don't want them to beep loudly if someone forgot to close the door. Instead you connect them to a central monitor. A local employee can see on the monitor which freezer has a problem and go see the issue.

The monitoring is as well a proof that the cold chain was kept.

This network was local to the market. Then one day it was found better to collect these data to a modern dashboard, and so the local network ends on corporate network.

New comment by hommelix in "Turn a WiFi 7 Router into a 320Msps Software Defined Radio Receiver"

hommelix — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:29:54 +0000

Is this your garage?

New comment by hommelix in "Apple/macOS removed from official Unix registry"

hommelix — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:45:15 +0000

Who is running Xinu today?

New comment by hommelix in "ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder: evidence and implications for chronotherapy (2025)"

hommelix — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 06:15:24 +0000

Thanks for the link to this wiki. There are so many traits I feel related to, I can now procrastinate the whole day there.

New comment by hommelix in "ETH-68: Ethernet Audio Interface for Linux"

hommelix — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 03:59:37 +0000

Unrelated question: what is the keyboard on the last picture of the post?

New comment by hommelix in "The art of defusing a second world war bomb"

hommelix — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 03:49:28 +0000

> You never know piece of trivial information may prove vital down the road. You also don't know how long in the future a current piece of critical information will stay critical.

When our house was built, the water company workers spend a day digging on the side of the road to search for the fresh water pipe, but they could not find it. A retired neighbor walked by and told them, that the road has been straightened and one bend removed 10 years ago. As their map was not updated, the actual pipe was 5m from where they were digging. Trivial piece of information missing.

New comment by hommelix in "The art of defusing a second world war bomb"

hommelix — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 03:41:48 +0000

In France and Belgium it is common for farmers in the area of former battle of WWI to collect unexploded ordinance while ploughing in autumn. Sometimes the bombs have been dropped and not exploded. Sometimes it is an old stock along the line that was not used as the line moved.

New comment by hommelix in "House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k"

hommelix — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:49:32 +0000

> Thank you. I definitely read this as million.

A small letter `m` would be for milli, aka 10^-3, if it is suffixed by a unit. A `m` alone is the SI unit for length. A capital `M` is the prefix for Mega, aka 10^6.

Please use the normalized units. The starting price for this auction is 300 k£ or about 400 kUS$.

New comment by hommelix in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

hommelix — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:02:51 +0000

> If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind. >

Just some napkin maths. The best combined cycle gas powerplant (Nat gas + steam) have an efficiency around 60 %. So 9 GW of electricity requires enough natural gas for 15 GW (9/0.6 = 15). Natural gas is about 10 kWh/m^3, so in 1 hour, we need 15E9/10E3 = 15E6 m^3 of natural gas. In BTU this is 5.118E10 BTU. A year has 8760 hours, 4.483E14 BTU or 4.483E8 MMBTU in a year.

According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56380&src=%E... the average Nat gas residential consumption in USA is around 80 MMBTU. So these 9 GW of electricity for datacenter s represent the average Nat gas consumption of 5.6 million home in USA.

New comment by hommelix in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

hommelix — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:08:24 +0000

> 1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.

1 GW is about a single nuclear rector of the Zaporizhzhia powerplant in Ukraine. Other nuclear powerplants in Europe have about 600 to 900 MW per reactor. The newest generation have reactor of 1.4 GW. Just to give an order of magnitude. Every time a 1GW data center is built, to have a continuous supply and CO2 free, it would require to build one nuclear reactor. I find this insane.

New comment by hommelix in "Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust"

hommelix — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:10:27 +0000

> The updater device then sends 64 byte chunks spread over 9 CAN 0x384 frames

Classic CAN uses 8 bytes long frame, so 64 bits. Is it a typo in the post, vor is it using CAN-FD?

New comment by hommelix in "Nearly impossible? How Fairphone built the ethical, repairable Fairphone Gen 6+"

hommelix — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:48:37 +0000

I still have various spare parts of my fp2: screen, camera, battery. This was in 2015 and it was modular and repairable. For the fp1, it was possible to replace the battery.

New comment by hommelix in "Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding"

hommelix — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:10:20 +0000

Oh. I know Hoyerswerda from the film Gundermann, not for the neo-nazis.

New comment by hommelix in "Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding"

hommelix — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:27:48 +0000

It's closed, but the planned events are on-going till 31st of December 2026. If there is an event in the list that suits you're agenda, you can still see the museum.

https://zuse-computer-museum.com/angebote/veranstaltungen/

New comment by hommelix in "507 Mechanical Movements"

hommelix — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:34:15 +0000

If you ever happened to go through Karlsruhe, Germany, there is a collection of mechanical transmission models from Redtenbacher. Some models were on display in the mechanical engineering building at the university.

I could only find this link (in German) about the collection. https://redtenbachersteyr.com/redtenbacher-in-karlsruhe/

One student from Redtenbacher was Reuleaux and there is another collection of transmission from Reuleaux at Cornell university. https://engineering.library.cornell.edu/kmoddl/