Hacker News: mrspuratic

New comment by mrspuratic in "Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers"

mrspuratic — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:27:24 +0000

"updoc" is still my favourite joke name. A long time ago (predating E lang's updoc afaict) I wrote a toy markup for semi-technical docs, named so with the specific intention of dropping it casually into conversation. Still funny :D

New comment by mrspuratic in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

mrspuratic — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:40:35 +0000

showdead=no in user settings hides flagged & moderator killed posts

New comment by mrspuratic in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

mrspuratic — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:56:26 +0000

Smoke yes, but you're also turning a carbon sink into a carbon source. At ~16% of the island's surface area, peatland stores an estimated 53% of soil based carbon. (source: Irish Peatland Conservation Council)

New comment by mrspuratic in "Byte magazine artist Robert Tinney, who illustrated the birth of PCs, dies at 78"

mrspuratic — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:21:22 +0000

[dupe^2], previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897340

New comment by mrspuratic in "In Memoriam Robert Tinney"

mrspuratic — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:11:23 +0000

Robert Frank Tinney, artist for over 100 Byte magazine covers 1975-1990, passed away peacefully on February 1st, 2026, at the age of 78.

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607038

New comment by mrspuratic in "DNS Explained – How Domain Names Get Resolved"

mrspuratic — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:30:41 +0000

I grind my teeth every time I hear "I need an urgent DNS change" :/

New comment by mrspuratic in "Norway EV Push Nears 100 Percent: What's Next?"

mrspuratic — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:50:06 +0000

Hydro can help a lot with that. Grid stability is a big issue with non-synchronous power sources (SNSP).

New comment by mrspuratic in "ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss"

mrspuratic — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:16:14 +0000

> I couldn't quickly find a way to decompress them

    pdftk in.pdf output out.pdf decompress

New comment by mrspuratic in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

mrspuratic — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:21:13 +0000

Although it's not mentioned in those, it's going away at the end of the month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46701733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678710

New comment by mrspuratic in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"

mrspuratic — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:09:19 +0000

I got a Foxydry (Italy) wall-mounted rack a few years back, best €100 I spent that year. Bottom rack folds up flush to the wall, top rack raises nearly to the ceiling. Towels dry fine spread over extra bar or three to allow for better air circulation.

New comment by mrspuratic in "What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025"

mrspuratic — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:42:57 +0000

No fridge? That's a heat pump.

New comment by mrspuratic in "Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere"

mrspuratic — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:51:37 +0000

This. I have that type (regenerative MHVR) installed in the attic for upstairs, and a synced pair of in-wall ceramic (recuperative) types on opposite sides of main living area downstairs (eliminating ducting, albeit with reduced efficiency). I haven't attempted any energy/ROI calculations but fresh filtered air, lower humidity and good nights sleep are well worth the claimed single-digit watt power usage to me.

New comment by mrspuratic in "Aliasing"

mrspuratic — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:39:54 +0000

In old school FORTRAN (I only recall WATFOR/F77, my uni's computers were quite ancient) subroutine (aka "subprogram") parameters are call-by-reference. If you passed a literal constant it would be treated as a variable in order to be aliased/passed by reference. Due to "constant pooling", modifications to a variable that aliased a constant could then propagate throughout the rest of the program where that constant[sic] was used.

"Passing constants to a subprogram" https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-8.html

New comment by mrspuratic in "CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally"

mrspuratic — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 18:43:10 +0000

Ireland is lucky enough to have several suitable sites, but just one operational: Turlough Hill, which has been running for over 50 years and is in use daily. It's at least as useful in terms of grid stability and (relatively) rapid dispatch as capacity. Output ~0.7% of total daily (~120GWh), ~5% of daily peak (~6GW), wintertime figures. For comparison electricity usage has increased about 8-fold since it was deployed in 1974.

New comment by mrspuratic in "FVWM-95 (2001)"

mrspuratic — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:31:04 +0000

xmkmf. I feel your pain.

New comment by mrspuratic in "Microsoft is quietly walking back its diversity efforts"

mrspuratic — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:15:48 +0000

Total US Fed. Gov. contracts for 2024 was (according to gao.gov) $755B. That's a lot of drinking, never mind any anticipated AI spending boost next year.

New comment by mrspuratic in "Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data"

mrspuratic — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 17:57:41 +0000

Not problematic, minor pedantry. With much time spent reading (and occasionally writing) technical documentation it's octets, binary prefixes, and other wanton pedantry where likely to be understood/appreciated or precision is required.

FTR, ECMA-130 (the CD "yellow book" equivalent standard) is littered with the term "8-bit bytes", so it was certainly a thing then. Precision when simultaneously discussing eight-to-fourteen modulation, and the 17 encoding "bits" that hit the media for each octet as noted in a sibling comment.

Now, woktets on the other hand...

New comment by mrspuratic in "Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data"

mrspuratic — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:34:26 +0000

CD storage has an interesting take, the available sector size varies by use, i.e. audio or MPEG1 video (VideoCD) at 2352 data octets per sector (with two media level ECCs), actual data at 2048 octets per sector where the extra EDC/ECC can be exposed by reading "raw". I learned this the hard way with VideoPack's malformed VCD images, I wrote a tool to post-process the images to recreate the correct EDC/ECC per sector. Fun fact, ISO9660 stores file metadata simultaneously in big-endian and little form (AFAIR VP used to fluff that up too).

New comment by mrspuratic in "Large integer precision error in Bash command output rendering"

mrspuratic — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 11:12:31 +0000

It seems like it, but it can't be only that. A float64 representation of an int in the range 2^58 to 2^59 should be rounded to multiples of 2^6, i.e. 348555896224571968 as you found (3.48555896224571968E17) (the final digit 9 in the math.log2() expression was lost, it's 2^58 not 2^54) The unexpected output (according to the bugreport) arises from javascript, it does NOT round like everything else for reasons I don't understand. It seems to prefer rounding to arbitrary multiples of 10 in my limited testing.

New comment by mrspuratic in "Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban"

mrspuratic — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 17:23:17 +0000

The whole Tapo/Kasa interop thing was badly handled too a few years back. Put me right off, when most were dangling the seamless integration carrot to distract you from the vendor lock-in.