Hacker News: mirpa

New comment by mirpa in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

mirpa — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:12:12 +0000

Yes, company Škoda is from Czech Republic where we have shared-use paths for cyclists and pedestrians. It is not "necessary". You should not be wearing noise canceling headphones while being in traffic - it makes you more liable in case of accidents.

New comment by mirpa in "Age Verification as Mass Surveillance Infrastructure"

mirpa — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:27:14 +0000

All you need is one authority which defines who can verify age threshold (government). Those who can verify age threshold need to know your age and identity (bank). Those who are bound to restrict access based on age only need to know in which country you live (website). Nothing else is needed eg. bank, identity and age is not known to the website, website is not known to your bank or government.

New comment by mirpa in "Common drug tests lead to tens of thousands wrongful arrests a year"

mirpa — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:42:54 +0000

Why do you have to wait in jail for lab result?

New comment by mirpa in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

mirpa — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:01:31 +0000

Non of which is necessary to verify you crossed age threshold. Websites are just lazy, maybe on purpose. Accepting this kind of low effort age verification would be foolish.

New comment by mirpa in "Gentoo Linux 2025 Review"

mirpa — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 17:31:46 +0000

I tried to list available packages on NixOS and nix-env consumed more than 6 GB Ram. Everyone told me not to use nix-env; everyone except NixOS manual. Trying to understand NixOS environment is a deep rabbit hole.

New comment by mirpa in "2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop"

mirpa — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 05:54:06 +0000

I had to edit windows registry to fix the worst misfeatures of start & context menu. I never found solution to random wake up after suspend or missing icons after wake up - MS support was useless. Linux desktop even with non-zero amount of issues can't frustrate me nearly as much as Windows. All games I ran so far on Linux worked as good or better as/than on Windows. I keep Windows installed just in case some game really won't work, but combination of SteamDeck (Proton) and Vulkan did wonders for Linux compatibility kudos to Steam/Valve. And I would not want to do software development on Windows, that is number one reason I am using Linux (not that I am using Unreal Engine). Recent MS fever dream with LLMs only adds to general frustration with Windows.

New comment by mirpa in "A year without caffeine (2013)"

mirpa — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 05:28:58 +0000

Stopping greatly reduced issues with my stiff neck and I also noticed that my hands are not nearly as cold as before. I drink black tea time to time, but it is nowhere near as addictive as coffee so I have no trouble with moderation.

New comment by mirpa in "Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark"

mirpa — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 20:35:25 +0000

I started using Proton recently and it is quite impressive. Some games have native support, some use Vulkan, others want to run on SteamDeck. I haven't booted Win 11 in more than a month. Not having to dual boot any time I want to switch work/fun is great - even if reboot doesn't take that long these days. I tend to play older, single player games, not everything is perfect, but I like it much more than being frustrated by Windows - using Fedora btw.

New comment by mirpa in "Hard Rust requirements from May onward"

mirpa — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 18:42:07 +0000

CVE-2024-3094 is it? You can argue that in C it is much easier to obfuscate your exploit. Implementing something in C is also a lot more work, so you might be also inclined to use 3rd party library.

New comment by mirpa in "John Carmack on mutable variables"

mirpa — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 09:09:51 +0000

That depends on your definition. Programming languages often deviate from mathematics when it comes to definition of variables, functions etc. That is by choice, Haskell tried to be as close to mathematical definition as possible.

New comment by mirpa in "In Defense of C++"

mirpa — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:27:40 +0000

It reminded me of Firefox attempts at rewriting part of C++ codebase and failing - because of C++ complexity; but succeeding later because of Rust https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-I...

New comment by mirpa in "Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon"

mirpa — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 10:11:38 +0000

While you might argue which drug is dangerous and which isn't, ban on drugs is not arbitrary decision. You can't do whatever you want with your body, because you might loose control and hurt others. Drug abuse affects others as well (financially, mentally, physically...). I am victim of someone's drug abuse. I never took any drugs. So if you are looking for victims of drug abuse, here I am.

New comment by mirpa in "Zed on Linux Is Here"

mirpa — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 01:42:28 +0000

I think you need extension which will integrate language server. I installed extension for Haskell and it works out of the box.

New comment by mirpa in "Zed on Linux Is Here"

mirpa — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 23:29:55 +0000

I can certainly tell difference between 60 and 120 Hz in fast paced games, but I would not notice it in UI.

New comment by mirpa in "Building a data compression utility in Haskell using Huffman codes"

mirpa — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 15:23:09 +0000

You might try: https://github.com/turion/rhine-koans it is tutorial for FRP library Rhine, well commented with tests

New comment by mirpa in "Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4"

mirpa — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 13:42:37 +0000

> I can ask ChatGPT extremely specific programming questions and get working code solving it.

I can do the opposite.

New comment by mirpa in "An icon taskbar for the Gnome Shell"

mirpa — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 10:15:00 +0000

Gnome has practically no learning curve. Everything you need is top left/right corner and win/esc key.

New comment by mirpa in "An icon taskbar for the Gnome Shell"

mirpa — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 10:03:25 +0000

Simplicity is feature on its own, you can't please everyone and you have other choices. Considering feature parity - I used small window managers in the past: Fvwm, Fluxbox, Pekwm... what made me eventually stick with Gnome was that It made things like Wifi, printing, mounting disk... seamless - on par with Windows. That is a lot more important for most users than customization, which can be overwhelming in environment like KDE (I haven't used it in years).

New comment by mirpa in "An icon taskbar for the Gnome Shell"

mirpa — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 09:49:06 +0000

I don't think UX is controversial, if you look at it from the perspective of average person. I was annoyed time to time by changes in Gnome UI. But I would not say I find KDE, XFce, Windows 11, Mac... more productive. I switched my old man from Windows to Gnome and had zero complains (which is rare). Having Gnome default makes sense as switching will not be a problem for advanced users. I personally don't have reason to switch.

New comment by mirpa in "Vala Programming Language"

mirpa — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:31:54 +0000

See Gnome on Linux.