<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: indigo945</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=indigo945</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 01:53:55 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=indigo945" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><p><pre><code>    (I'm kidding, but I'm sure someone has a pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startup 
    about to disrupt topography using either AI, blockchain, or both.)
</code></pre>
Well, there was that plan to use scores of nuclear bombs to alter the geography of Egypt in such a way that the Mediterranean could be drained into the Qattara Basin [1]. I think the story is somewhat well-known now, but it proves, at least, that pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startups are not a phenomenon unique to the 21st century. And given that nuclear bombs essentially were the blockchain of the 1950s, that is altogether unsurprising.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project#Friedrich_Bassler" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project#Fri...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:15:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748752</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748752</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748752</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "DIY Soft Drinks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Late capitalism is when a traditional tea recipe is referred to as "homemade ClubMate (R)".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:07:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748682</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748682</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47748682</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For the use cases outlined in the OP, a 36% performance gain for an optimization that complex would be considered a waste of time. OP was explicitly not talking about code that cares about the performance of its hot path that much. Most applications spend 90% of their runtime waiting for IO anyway, so optimizations of this scale don't do anything.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:37:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737374</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737374</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737374</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Funnily enough, in the blog post you linked Scott Alexander also ruminates about how he never previously questioned journalistic attempts to dox Satoshi Nakamoto.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:06:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700613</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700613</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700613</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Signal insists on using your phone number too, refusing user ids or anything that will make analysis hard.<p>That is no longer true, you can use user IDs now.<p>For the other problem, you can enable self-deleting messages in group chats, limiting the damage when a chat does become compromised. Of course, this doesn't stop any persistent threat, such as law enforcement (is that even the right term anymore?) getting access to an unlocked phone.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 07:20:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792090</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792090</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792090</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Great tool that wrote the blog post in the OP also, so it's quite versatile.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:39:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757421</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757421</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46757421</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "The challenges of soft delete"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Right, but I think that the Recycle Bin is exactly what is causing the issue here. Users have been taught for decades that if they delete something, it is not really gone, as they can always just go back to their Recycle Bin or Deleted Items folder and restore it. (I have worked with clients that used the Deleted Items folder in Outlook as an archive for certain conversations, and would regularly reference it.)<p>So users have been taught that the term "delete" means "move somewhere out of my sight". If you design a UI and make "delete" mean something completely different from what everyone already understands it to mean, the problem is you, not the user.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:19:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704629</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704629</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704629</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "The challenges of soft delete"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even in MongoDB, you can can index `null` values, so I don't understand in what database system this would be a problem.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:11:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704558</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704558</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704558</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "The challenges of soft delete"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What you describe is basically event sourcing, which is definitely popular. However, for OLAP, you will still want a copy of your data that only has the actual dimensions of interest, and not their history - and the easiest way to create that copy and to keep it in sync with your events is via triggers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:03:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704476</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704476</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704476</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "The challenges of soft delete"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, Microsoft SQL Server has built-in Temporal Tables [1], which even take this one step further: they track all data changes, such that you can easily query them as if you were viewing them in the past. You can not only query deleted rows, but also the old versions of rows that have been updated.<p>(In my opinion, replicating this via a `validity tstzrange` column is also often a sane approach in PostgreSQL, although OP's blog post doesn't mention it.)<p>[1]: <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/tables/temporal-tables?view=sql-server-ver17" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/t...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:00:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704452</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704452</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704452</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "Claude Code On-the-Go"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Claude Code already <i>is</i> the purple unicorn. We're already there - the only problem is that regulatory systems are set up in a way that benefits a small minority of capitalists, rather than the majority.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 10:00:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497014</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497014</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497014</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've thought about doing that, but it seems to require multiple Google accounts - one for the "child" and one for the "parent", which is hard to achieve without also having multiple SIM cards with different phone numbers that can be used for the account registration. I assume the process is designed to be full of friction to prevent people from freeing themselves of the addiction.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 09:42:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496910</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496910</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46496910</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "The Garbage Collection Handbook"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I said "a GC", that is, "a garbage collector". Even if you consider reference counting as technically being garbage collection, purely reference counted systems do not have a distinct entity that can be identified as "a" garbage collector. So I'm technically correct here even in face of this pedantry.<p>Not that I think it's a reasonable approach to language to be pedantic on this. RC being GC is, of course, true from an analytic approach to language: a garbage collection system is defined as a system that collects and frees objects that are unreachable and thus dead; a reference counting pointer collects and frees objects that are unreachable and thus dead; therefore, reference counting is garbage collection.<p>One problem with this is the vagueness: now, the use of a call stack is garbage collection; after all, returning from a function collects and frees the objects in the stack frame. Leaking memory all over the place and expecting the operation system to clean up when you call `exit()` likewise is "garbage collection".<p>But more importantly, it's just not how anyone understands the word. You understood perfectly well what I meant when I said "you would be hard-pressed to find a modern AA game that does not already use a GC"; in other words, you yourself don't even understand the word differently. You merely feel an ethical imperative to understand the word differently, and when you failed to do so, used my comment as a stand-in to work through the emotions caused by your own inability to live up to this unfulfilled ethic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:11:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46368323</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46368323</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46368323</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "The Garbage Collection Handbook"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you would be hard-pressed to find a modern AA game that does <i>not</i> already use a GC. The major game engines Unreal and Unity are garbage collected - although they use manual memory management for some of their internals, the exposed API surface (including the C++ API) is designed with garbage collection in mind.<p>Notably, the popular-with-hobbyists Godot Engine does not use a garbage collector. It uses reference counting with some objects, but does not provide cycle detection, thus requires all objects to be laid out in a tree structure (which the engine is built around).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:03:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364629</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364629</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364629</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "The Garbage Collection Handbook"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The problem there is probably that Java cannot pass objects by value [1]. That incurs an additional layer of indirection when accessing the individual members of the struct, tanking performance.<p>That's not a necessity, though - you can use a GC in languages that allow you to control whether structs get allocated on the heap or on the stack, and then you don't have this issue. For example, in Go, structs can be allocated on the stack and passed by value, or they can be allocated on the heap and passed by reference, and this is under the control of the application programmer [2].<p>[1]: Actually, according to the Java spec, Java does not have pass-by-reference, and objects are always passed by value. However, that's just strange nomenclature - in Java parlance, "object" names the reference, not the actual range of memory on the heap.<p>[2]: The language spec does not guarantee this, so this is technically implementation-defined behavior. But then, there's really only one implementation of the Go compiler and runtime.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:57:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364589</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364589</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364589</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "Deliberate Internet Shutdowns"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet shutdowns during important political events, or even just national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins the great prize here?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:34:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359982</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359982</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359982</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "Super Mario 64 for the PS1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes. Although people like to point out that on the N64's CPU the external data bus is restricted to 32 bits, that's irrelevant in practice. The real limitation is the RDRAM's data bus, which is only 9 bits wide (of which the CPU uses 8 bits). The problem is that the rest of the system simply cannot match the overspecced CPU.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:59:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233908</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233908</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233908</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "Super Mario 64 for the PS1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How is that relevant? "Resources" really just means money, which can be allocated between different items on the BoM at-will. The N64's chips are all (more or less) bespoke, so the functionality of each individual part is completely under Nintendo's control. Spend less on the CPU, and you suddenly have money left to spend on the RSP. (And on the RDP, which contains the TMEM -- it lives on the same chip as the RSP, but is a distinct thing. I assume you know this, but just to add to the discussion for readers - the RSP is the N64's SIMD coprocessing unit, which most games use to perform vertex shading, whereas the RDP is the actual rasterization and texturing hardware.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:54:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233818</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233818</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233818</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "Super Mario 64 for the PS1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The N64's CPU, with pretty much every single game released on the platform, is just sitting there idling along at maybe 30% load tops, and usually less than that. It's a 64 bit CPU, but Nintendo's official SDK doesn't even support doubles or uint64!<p>Of course, Nintendo clearly cared about the CPU a lot for marketing purposes (it's in the console's name), but from a purely technological perspective, it is wasteful. Most of the actual compute is done on the RSP anyway. So, getting a much smaller CPU would have been a big corner to cut, that could have saved enough resources to increase the texture cache to a useful resolution like 128x128 or so.<p>It should be noted, though, that the N64 was designed with multitexturing capabilities, which would have helped with the mushy colors had games actually taken advantage of it (but they didn't, which here again, the Nintendo SDK is to blame for).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2025 06:38:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46228349</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46228349</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46228349</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by indigo945 in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Ask HN: How do you prevent ad-injection in AR glasses", comments:<p><pre><code>    visual_noise_complaint 7 hours ago
    Is anyone else experiencing the 'Hot Singles in Your Area' glitch where it projects 
    avatars onto stray cats? It's terrifying.
      cat_lady_2035 6 hours ago
      Yes! My tabby cat is currently labeled as 'Tiffany, 24, looking for fun'. I can't 
      turn it off.
</code></pre>
"Europe passes 'Right to Human Verification' Act", from the article:<p><pre><code>    "For too long, citizens have been debating philosophy, negotiating 
    contracts, and even entering into romantic relationships with Large Language 
    Models trained on Reddit threads from the 2020s. Today, we say: enough. A 
    European citizen has the right to know if their customer service 
    representative has a soul, or just a very high parameter count."
    — Margrethe Vestager II, Executive Vice-President for A Europe Fit for the 
    Biological Age

    [...]

    Ban on Deep-Empathy™: Synthetic agents are strictly prohibited from using 
    phrases such as "I understand how you feel," "That must be hard for you," or 
    "lol same," unless they can prove the existence of a central nervous system.</code></pre>
As far as I'm concerned, that law can't come soon enough - I hope they remember to include an emoji ban.<p>For "Visualizing 5D with WebGPU 2.0", the link actually has a working demo [1].<p>I'm sad to say it, but this is actually witty, funny and creative. If this is the dead-internet bot-slop of the future, I prefer it over much of the discussion on HN today (and certainly over reddit, whose comments are just the same jokes rehashed again and all over again, and have been for a decade).<p>[1]: <a href="https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90099800.html" rel="nofollow">https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90099800.html</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:31:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46215798</link><dc:creator>indigo945</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46215798</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46215798</guid></item></channel></rss>