Hacker News: koala_man

New comment by koala_man in "Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser"

koala_man — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 05:49:53 +0000

I would never have imagined a phone web browser capable of this in 1996 between playing Quake and testing out the hot new JavaScript powered mouse rollover image effects in Netscape Navigator 2.0

New comment by koala_man in "Analyzing Frontier Model Progress with My Favourite Game: Prince of Persia"

koala_man — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 16:02:59 +0000

Unsurprisingly it was buggy without the obligatory "Make no mistakes."

New comment by koala_man in "Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead"

koala_man — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:16:59 +0000

> Swap files have had the same performance characteristics as swap partitions for more than 20 years

I thought so too, then I benchmarked it on a (spinning rust) HDD and found it was significantly slower:

https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/blog/?p=1110

tl;dr: "In this test, using a swap file was surprisingly 50%+ slower than simply allocating a swap partition at the start of the drive, in spite of the low fragmentation and Linux’s bypass of the FS layer."

New comment by koala_man in "Python sets and dictionaries can have quadratic-time performance"

koala_man — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:13:52 +0000

> The costs just get bigger.

By a constant factor no less (until we get into theoretical physics)

New comment by koala_man in "Google Assistant is going away on Mobile Devices"

koala_man — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:57:19 +0000

I spent years not upgrading because when I'm in my car asking my phone to navigate somewhere, Gemini likes to say "As a large language model I can't navigate anywhere. Try using a map application on your mobile device."

It still does it, but these days you can reply: "yes you %@#$ing can, use a tool call!!" and it will

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"