Hacker News: ktpsns

New comment by ktpsns in "ReactOS 0.4.16"

ktpsns — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:51:33 +0000

I am just delighted by the screenshots. I love this Win9x like interface aesthetica for being dense in font size/information, very stringent in optics. Even if this is not exactly the colors and shadows of Win9x, this aspect remains. There were a few Web toolkits in the past which also had this, but since the dawn of mobile UI sickering into the desktop, we somehow lost this art. Even the rather consistent KDE/Gnome UIs don't feel so "home" for me as these (frankly nostalgic) Win9x.

New comment by ktpsns in "GitHub Has an Availability Problem. Is It Time to Look Elsewhere?"

ktpsns — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:40:45 +0000

For portfolio and service only, virtually any GH alternative discussed here will do it. Even a self-hosted cgit or static page git browser will do it for read-only.

New comment by ktpsns in "Show HN: A free curl API for IP data (we scan the IPv4 space in <24h)"

ktpsns — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:17:05 +0000

What about IPv6? (SCNR)

New comment by ktpsns in "Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory"

ktpsns — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 14:36:28 +0000

Another thing is the stdlib integration of goroutines. We see this in Python where various generations of paradigms kind-of coexist. Golang built their goroutines into the heart of the stdlib which puts it IMHO in a special position.

New comment by ktpsns in "The CAPTCHA arms race: from distorted text to browser identity"

ktpsns — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:08:39 +0000

This is the reason why I implemented rather dumb but individual, hand-crafted captchas for my own websites in the past. Things like input fields which must be left empty, silly multiple choice questions only humans could properly answer at that time, etc.

I have seen communities to implement their own captchas with domain knowledge. For instance, math/STEM people showing captchas with rather easy calculus tasks (such as solving a definite integral). This can be fun to solve and as a human you feel valued. It is this handmade feeling of the "old internet".

The problem with self-made captchas is that even them are rather easy to solve nowadays with LLMs and thelike. Therefore I don't believe that decentralized individualized captchas are the solution as they tend to be rather simple.

New comment by ktpsns in "Excessive nil pointer checks in Go"

ktpsns — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:57:04 +0000

Thank you for this valuable comment!

I remember having read somewhere that zig now requires to pass the Io argument around, which one can interpret again as "colored functions". IMHO it is a missed opportunity not to implement a more polished syntax and make a message passing paradigm a "first class citizen" in zig. Anyway, I like the fact that zig is iteratively "improved" and not a virtually "dead" language compared to golang :-)

New comment by ktpsns in "The new HTTP QUERY method explained"

ktpsns — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:50:09 +0000

HTTP QUERY was discussed many times in the past here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48568502 (4d ago, 173 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794838 (4y ago, 125 comments)

New comment by ktpsns in "Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components"

ktpsns — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:50:14 +0000

It's unfair to compare an idling deep sleep device with a cold boot.

However, there is a shortcut: Just don't boot a full OS (thinking of custom firmware which boots in fractions of seconds, standard in the Microcontroller world). Or boot an optimized Linux user space. I am confident with a bit fiddling one can bring down a standard SBC Linux to a few seconds from cold to ready.

New comment by ktpsns in "A New Book on Plagiarism"

ktpsns — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:38:24 +0000

In other terms: The "recent" success of AI is mostly the commercialization of industrial scale stochastic plagiarism. Compare it to piracy, done by individuals for the benefit of themselves and their friends. If they ever thought about selling their stolen goods, what could they have done for economy!

New comment by ktpsns in "Excessive nil pointer checks in Go"

ktpsns — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:05:17 +0000

Honest question, what is the zig version of goroutines these days? They removed async from the spec.

Honestly the only reason why I stick to golang for some projects are goroutines.

New comment by ktpsns in "Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)"

ktpsns — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:35:52 +0000

This is in fact useful for people who demand you to print out and sign contracts. Did so many times in the past, using some ghostscript+imagemagick scripting to avoid the cargo culturing.

New comment by ktpsns in "Please, Use a Link"

ktpsns — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:20:08 +0000

It's incredible how we said the same argument in pre-web 2.0 days. People loved to write code like

bla

I haven't seen these obscenities for a long time.

New comment by ktpsns in "Show HN: I applied Lyapunov stability theory to detect when LLM agents spiral"

ktpsns — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:15:21 +0000

Lyapunov sounds a good tool but the README reads so LLM-generated and with little love that I am not bothered to look further into whether this is solid or not.

New comment by ktpsns in "Linux latency measurements and compositor tuning [KWin Wayland]"

ktpsns — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:30:10 +0000

Teensy is a great choice because it has a high processor frequency for a rather cheap price (IIRC 600mhz for 20€)

New comment by ktpsns in "Get-a-Waymo: How a burglar used a robotaxi to flee the scene"

ktpsns — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:55:33 +0000

Add »hacking the self-driving car« to the equation and you get the perfect classical-cyber hybrid crime. Afterwards, the poor waymo cannot remember what even has happened. That's spy film material :-D

New comment by ktpsns in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

ktpsns — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:20:17 +0000

There is lots of discussion on this old API here on hacker news, for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31739794

New comment by ktpsns in "Go Experiments Explained"

ktpsns — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 05:54:20 +0000

I find the arena experiment very interesting. If done right, whole programs can be structured as as a set of arenas. I've read some things on arenas here such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37670740

New comment by ktpsns in "Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda"

ktpsns — Sat, 23 May 2026 05:08:15 +0000

Long-distance shipping is even a pain in the (so-called) developed world, for instance from Europe to the US. As soon as your shipping value exceeds a treshold (IIRC about 1000€), you have to electronically declare the customs. There are agencies specialized to do this for sth like 20€ per shipping just because it is not reasonable to get all the accounts if you do it only once in a while.

However, in my experience, "ordinary" parcel shipping (like DHL) won't do this shipping either any more: You have to switch to the express ones (like DHL express, UPS, FedEx) even if you don't intend to do any express. The difference is easily 40€ vs 400€ for shipping a shoe box!

If you ship anything slightly larger then a shoe box and slightly more expensive then a notebook, think twice whether you don't want to accompany the freight with a seat in the commodity class in some airplane. It can easily be cheaper.

New comment by ktpsns in "sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library"

ktpsns — Sat, 23 May 2026 04:50:19 +0000

Exactly. This shows that "extremely portable" is actually marketing for "It supports a number of platforms. In my opinion, this number is big".

New comment by ktpsns in "Cleve Moler has died"

ktpsns — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:29:07 +0000

Matlab inspired the scilab ecosystem, which is based on numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas. This was a major driver for the data science industry for a decade before AI kicked in and tensorflow, etc. was also built ontop of these libraries.

While I personally try to avoid contemporary matlab at any cost, the open source ecosystem is great and matlab would be my go-to tool if they would not exist.