Hacker News: koala_man

New comment by koala_man in "Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C"

koala_man — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 06:30:53 +0000

Matching decomp would require the same compiler and flags as the original game, right? How is that determined?

New comment by koala_man in "OpenBSD: PF queues break the 4 Gbps barrier"

koala_man — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 02:01:48 +0000

> OpenBSD devs making huge progress unlocking the kernel for SMP

Isn't this anachronistic for 2026? Am I misunderstand what this means?

Octopuses fall for the 'rubber arm' illusion, just like us (2025)

koala_man — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 05:03:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.science.org/content/article/octopuses-fall-rubber-arm-illusion-just-us

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043882

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by koala_man in "Scott Adams Dead: Dilbert Creator Was 68"

koala_man — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 16:31:04 +0000

I will try to remember him for his far too relatable Dilbert comics about corporate office life, and not his, uhm, later work.

One of my favorite strips was Dilbert in the 90s only being given a 286 PC for 3D rendering work, with the boss saying "besides, how often will you do 3D rendering in your career?"

Dilbert replies "Once, if I hurry"

New comment by koala_man in "Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?"

koala_man — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 14:12:51 +0000

I once saw a high resolution CPU graph of a video playing in Safari. It was completely dead except for a blip every 1/30th of a second.

Incredible discipline. The Chrome graph in comparison was a mess.

New comment by koala_man in "Lördagsgodis (Saturday Sweets)"

koala_man — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:22:09 +0000

> The intention was to prevent tooth decay by regulating candy intake.

Yes, but crucially not by reducing candy intake.

The result of the study was that the amount of sugar didn't particularly matter, but frequency of intake and stickiness did.

New comment by koala_man in "What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding"

koala_man — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 17:31:31 +0000

I'm Norwegian and concluded that she meant when ordering, such as for a choice of potatoes or pasta.

This makes sense since the context is translation for tourism.

Otherwise, the normal, casual way would be "kan du sende potetene?" i.e. "could you pass the potatoes?", lit. "can you send the potatoes?"

(This assumes it wasn't physically possible to simply reach across people to grab it yourself with what's known as "the Norwegian arm")

New comment by koala_man in "Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time"

koala_man — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:18:54 +0000

> Meta went from 2K to 10K+ from 2018 to 2025

Facebook rebranded to Meta in October 2021

New comment by koala_man in "How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes"

koala_man — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 18:18:35 +0000

Good call. O(N^2) is the worst time complexity because it's fast enough to be instantaneous in all your testing, but slow enough to explode in prod.

I've seen it several times before, and it's exactly what happened here.

New comment by koala_man in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

koala_man — Sat, 17 May 2025 17:26:53 +0000

My bad. I had been reading about how there's a frustration in the community that allistic people refuse to explain why such statements are wrong, and instead just repeat "you know what you did!" to people who genuinely don't.

I tried to be the one who didn't do that, but missed the mark. I'd delete it if I could.

New comment by koala_man in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

koala_man — Thu, 15 May 2025 23:53:20 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by koala_man in "You can't git clone a team"

koala_man — Mon, 05 May 2025 19:40:01 +0000

The article starts off saying that if you want people with real full stack experience, from kernel to UX, you need to grow it.

It goes on to say that it's hard to find and develop expertise for low level software like hypervisors.

What's the connection between the topics? It feels like two different rants.

If it's difficult to find kernel developers then wouldn't it help to not require them to also know web UX?

Ask HN: What are your fun tech anecdotes?

koala_man — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 16:31:00 +0000

It's Friday and I'm hoping for your fun tech related anecdotes!

For example, I once came into the office to see the entire team standing around one computer, chuckling.

The guy at the keyboard said "now watch this!", hit some keys, and the group erupted in raucous laughter.

I went around to see what they were laughing about.

It was an assembly dump on Godbolt.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43364237

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by koala_man in "S1: A $6 R1 competitor?"

koala_man — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 17:18:11 +0000

It feels like we're back in 1900 when anyone's clever idea (and implementation) can give huge performance improvements, such as Ford's assembly line and Taylor's scientific management of optimizing shovel sizes for coal.

New comment by koala_man in "Branchless UTF-8 Encoding"

koala_man — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 21:46:11 +0000

I'm surprised there are no UTF-8 specific decode instructions yet, the way ARM has "FJCVTZS - Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero"

New comment by koala_man in "Fighting spam with Haskell at Meta (2015)"

koala_man — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:15:22 +0000

I worked on this project for a week during the FB team matching process.

I had previous Haskell experience, but what struck me was how irrelevant that was.

To their immense credit, they had managed to use Haskell to write an entirely entreprise focused, "boring" business rule backend serving millions of QPS, and people who were not Haskell fans could easily use its sensible DSL to accomplish their goals.

Way too many Haskell projects are about Haskell itself, so this was really fascinating to see.

New comment by koala_man in "A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones"

koala_man — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 16:54:16 +0000

> doesn't use enough anesthetic

My school dentist always botched the anesthesia, and afterwards I had to grind my teeth for three days to make them fit together again.

I never told anyone because adults kept saying dentistry hurts so I assumed it was normal. I didn't realize how fucked up this was until I went to college and experienced a competent dentist for the first time.

New comment by koala_man in "Optimizing the Ion compiler back end"

koala_man — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 21:01:28 +0000

> extremely large functions > quadratic behavior

*High five*

I fixed several of these during my time as a compiler engineer too.

It's true what they say, quadratic is the worst possible time complexity. Fast enough to work on all your test cases, slow enough to explode in prod.

New comment by koala_man in "Why Gov.uk's Exit this Page component doesn't use the Escape key"

koala_man — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 16:18:11 +0000

> one website

I'm guessing gov.uk is hoping that this will become some kind of standard, at least for British resources.

New comment by koala_man in "The best $4 ever spent"

koala_man — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:58:03 +0000

Tbh if you've never done either, I can absolutely see why getting on and riding a machine 1000x your size is a bigger deal than seeing various animals from a distance.