Hacker News: nspattak

New comment by nspattak in "I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years"

nspattak — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 07:56:54 +0000

I guess that there are "content creators" who are not interested by video or click-bait as well as those "content consumers" who are looking for geniously interesting content written in a concise and clear way. Substack seems a good site for this but in general it seems to me that this is sth that is missing in today's internet.

New comment by nspattak in "Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep"

nspattak — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 10:21:09 +0000

can someone please explain to me why is this a HN front page material? this seems to be a long abandoned project

New comment by nspattak in "Myths About Floating-Point Numbers (2021)"

nspattak — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:07:08 +0000

i am laughing and crying at the same time...

a couple of decades ago, I was still a lowly applied mathematics (and aspiring programmer) student when i proposed to a professor to change the compiler options from O2 to O3 to gain performance (reducing run time by a significant percentage like 50% or more...) only to be disregarded by saying "no, compiler optimizations break numerical accuracy".

New comment by nspattak in "Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'"

nspattak — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:33:28 +0000

so let me get this straight, do they like free markets or not ?

New comment by nspattak in "Bluesky now has 30 million users"

nspattak — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 14:40:41 +0000

Supporting is on thing, being build on top of it is another thing. And on top of that, AFAIK on bluesky there is no "algorithm"

New comment by nspattak in "Bluesky now has 30 million users"

nspattak — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 12:06:39 +0000

half the comments so far talk about bluesky being similar to x ie private companies.

However AFAIK the use of the "AT protocol" seems to me to be a major difference https://bsky.social/about/faq.

I am really curious to know how I am wrong in that.

As a long time X user and now on bluesky i can tell that there is a huge difference in the content which makes it clear that the platform was pushing accounts with specific political views (or muting others)

New comment by nspattak in "Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?"

nspattak — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 08:40:01 +0000

Again, I very much agree with you, very sound advice. The reason I stick with merlin/Asus is that I do not want to spend too much time, I want to buy sth, configure/deploy/forget.

New comment by nspattak in "Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?"

nspattak — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 08:34:51 +0000

You are right, these are what matter and thanks for the suggestions.

I am not particularly on a budget but I don't either require wifi7, I am not willing to pay 3* more than I should. I am lazy and searching for something that is supported by merlin and I will look into the used market as well.

New comment by nspattak in "Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?"

nspattak — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 22:43:51 +0000

Are you sure you are not mistaken with used ones?

New comment by nspattak in "Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?"

nspattak — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 21:57:04 +0000

The question is why are they able to inflate the prices like this and get away with ?

Ask HN: Why have WiFi routers become so expensive?

nspattak — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 21:52:31 +0000

In February 2022 I bought an Asus RT-AC86U for 85€. Its price has nothing but increased. Today it costs 245€ almost 3X more!!! A 5 year old model that doesn't even support the latest wifi standards. All the Asus modems I occasionally check (as I would like to test mesh) follow a similar pattern. Anyone has an explanation why even Nvidia lowers it's prices but not wifi routeurs?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061732

Points: 8

# Comments: 18

New comment by nspattak in "My personal C coding style as of late 2023"

nspattak — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 08:44:03 +0000

i love this blog, i hold Chris Wellons to a very high estime BUT i utterly disapprove the usage of macros so much, especially to wrap cstd types, functions, etc.

New comment by nspattak in "When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think"

nspattak — Mon, 15 May 2023 06:41:31 +0000

a manual transmission car does not require more focus and thought as very soon changing gears becomes a reflex, ie it doesn't require the driver's prefrontal cortex. The same can not be said for repetitive work in programming (eg as in programming in assembly or C)

IMO, this opinion deserves some thought even though it is not as bad as it sounds

New comment by nspattak in "Graviton 3, Apple M2 and Qualcomm 8cx 3rd gen: a URL parsing benchmark"

nspattak — Thu, 04 May 2023 09:28:15 +0000

The author very clearly and explicitely says in the post that this is "purely to help us think".

New comment by nspattak in "Red Hat 30th anniversary"

nspattak — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 08:42:46 +0000

I still have my first linux cd somewhere.

They came together with the `SAMS RedHat Linux 7.0 Unleased` book I bought as I did not want to go through the same pain I went with my 33600 pstn downloading slackware 7's cd#1 in 14 days.

Cheers RedHat :)

New comment by nspattak in "Ask HN: How would you build a budget CPU compute cluster in 2023?"

nspattak — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 13:23:15 +0000

cpu cost is only a small fraction of overall cost: for every cpu, there is a power supply, ram, motherboard and case. You also haven't mentioned anything about data: do they need local storage or will it be only temporarily stored locally?

it sound like minipcs can be an excellent solution for you.

For how long will you be using this? AWS may be preferable in the short term while local hardware may be cheaper in the long term/a lot of cpu hours.

there is also the question of your application performance on different cpus. there are older servers available for very cheap prices but is it worth it to buy a 12/20core xeon cpu that consumers 200-300W if its performance is similar to a 5900 at 150W ?

New comment by nspattak in "3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous"

nspattak — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 08:54:33 +0000

if this is an argument about MS forcing DX and killing OGL, I remind you that Vulkan had/has Apple's support.

New comment by nspattak in "Can sanitizers find the two bugs I wrote in C++?"

nspattak — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 08:53:20 +0000

Amen.

New comment by nspattak in "Nvidia Security Team: “What if we just stopped using C?”"

nspattak — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 15:39:09 +0000

In my opinion, the problem is that we failed to create some additional layers on top of C. an extended std lib with data structs and algorithms as well as a style/practices for everyday use (ie non compiler writers).

i adore C, it was my first language and i still like its simplicity very much. Still, I have come to believe that only strictly vetted licensed people should be allowed to use it :)

New comment by nspattak in "Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?"

nspattak — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 08:10:50 +0000

I bought my first motorcycle in 2004 and my 2nd in 2007. I rode 45k km with the first one over these 3 years (mostly on my island) and 80k km with the 2nd one between 2007-2015. I can confirm that the amount of bugs crashing on my helmet's visor is definitely less. I used to clean it after riding for an hour but now I can do 4-5-6h and still have no real need to clean it.