Hacker News: pilaf

New comment by pilaf in "Extinct Media Museum Tokyo"

pilaf — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:31:46 +0000

Been there. The place is tiny, but very well curated, and packed floor to ceiling with interesting gadgets, some of which you are even allowed to touch. They also sometimes organize small flea markets, the one time I visited they had one for vintage headphones going on.

New comment by pilaf in "Blender 5.2 LTS"

pilaf — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 08:26:12 +0000

Soccer is hard because it's competitive though. Kicking a ball around and putting it between two posts is easy enough, but it gets hard as soon as you have someone trying to do the same in the opposite direction better than you.

Tools should be as easy as they can afford to be without making serious compromises. I have no idea how much room Blender has for becoming easier, but if there is any it should be taken.

New comment by pilaf in "Show HN: What was the world listening to? Music charts, 20 countries (1940–2025)"

pilaf — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:34:16 +0000

Very nice project! That browser tab is staying open for days.

I found a small mistake, the Argentina 2000 list [1] shows "Babasónicos - Ella usó mi cabeza como un revolver", but the actual song by Babasónicos (the one that plays) is titled "Cómo eran las cosas", and "Ella usó mi cabeza como un revolver" is a song by Soda Stereo.

1: https://88mph.fm/ar/2000

New comment by pilaf in "Don't create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead (2023)"

pilaf — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 08:36:52 +0000

This Rails commit from May 2010 mentions gitkeeps and it's a few months older than your SO post, so it seems you're absolved from guilt:

https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/785493ffed41abcca0686b...

New comment by pilaf in "List animals until failure"

pilaf — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:27:09 +0000

I entered plankton, which technically isn't an animal and so it rejected it like any other random word, but then after I lost it offered me a link to the Wikipedia article on plankton. Very thoughtful.

New comment by pilaf in "List animals until failure"

pilaf — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:22:56 +0000

It pulls its data from Wikidata, which is very thorough, so I'd be more surprised if you managed to enter an animal it didn't know.

New comment by pilaf in "430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found"

pilaf — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:39:58 +0000

Perhaps the key word is "wooden"? Which is not to say much older wooden tools didn't exist, but it's likely extremely rare that they would be preserved this long.

New comment by pilaf in "Level S4 solar radiation event"

pilaf — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 03:46:51 +0000

Hokkaido got some back in November: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16155623

New comment by pilaf in "Can Bundler be as fast as uv?"

pilaf — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 03:12:57 +0000

https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/comparison-to-asdf.html

> mise can be used as a drop-in replacement for asdf. It supports the same .tool-versions files that you may have used with asdf and can use asdf plugins through the asdf backend.

> It will not, however, reuse existing asdf directories (so you'll need to either reinstall them or move them), and 100% compatibility is not a design goal. That said, if you're coming from asdf-bash (0.15 and below), mise actually has fewer breaking changes than asdf-go (0.16 and above) despite 100% compatibility not being a design goal of mise.

> Casual users coming from asdf have generally found mise to just be a faster, easier to use asdf.

New comment by pilaf in "Some Epstein file redactions are being undone"

pilaf — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 02:42:04 +0000

Why into Word specifically?

New comment by pilaf in "Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1"

pilaf — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 08:27:01 +0000

> You might have noticed that there aren’t any vowels in the alphabet

Then in the next table:

> 𓄿 is pronounced “ah” as in “yacht”

> 𓇋 is pronounced “ee” as in “feet”

> 𓅱 𓏲 is pronounced “oo” as in “blue”

Are those vowel-sounding hieroglyphs only used in special occasions?

Also, does anyone know what the reason for omitting vowels altogether may have been?

New comment by pilaf in "Mozilla's New CEO Confirms Firefox Will Become an "AI Browser""

pilaf — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:06:08 +0000

I'm also still a FF user, but I'm eyeing Waterfox [1] and Floorp [2], both FF forks. Waterfox has the stronger privacy focus out of the two, but Floorp doesn't strike me as being any less private that vanilla FF.

1: https://www.waterfox.com/

2: https://floorp.app/

New comment by pilaf in "GNU Unifont"

pilaf — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 02:11:48 +0000

That's awesome, what size did you print it?

Are the random sparse Chinese characters floating around the main spiral a natural part of Unicode, or did you put them there for effect? I like how the whole thing looks like a galaxy and those characters like background space debris.

I also like how emoji fall neatly around the outer rim. I had fun finding the Earth emoji.

New comment by pilaf in "Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio"

pilaf — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:33:07 +0000

Weird, I had no issues playing it on FF.

New comment by pilaf in "Willis Whitfield: Creator of clean room technology still in use today (2024)"

pilaf — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 08:38:29 +0000

It looks pretty but it's so low resolution I can barely make out any words. Found a higher res version though (embedded in a PDF, page 7):

https://www.sandia.gov/app/uploads/sites/194/2022/01/GIANTS_...

It's interesting that all lines in the sketch are straight, and circles are perfect, so it seems Whitfield took a ruler and a compass on that plane.

New comment by pilaf in "Compiling Ruby to machine language"

pilaf — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 01:29:26 +0000

If you want to compare it against other languages you could look at The Computer Language Benchmarks Game [1], which is an ongoing comparison of various programs written in various popular languages. You should always take all these benchmarks with a pinch of salt though since they are never truly apples-to-apples. That said, Ruby seems to measure slightly faster than Python and Lua, slightly slower than PHP, and maybe 1 order of magnitude slower than Node.js, just to compare it with other similar languages.

Compared to itself from 10 years ago I think it's made great progress. Can't put a number to it but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2x or 3x faster, especially with the "new" JIT (YJIT) enabled. The JIT comes with a memory usage penalty though. You can see some benchmarks over time (although not going back as far as 10 years) at https://speed.ruby-lang.org

1: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

New comment by pilaf in "3M Diskette Reference Manual (1983) [pdf]"

pilaf — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 01:22:00 +0000

I get a 403 error. Any mirrors?

New comment by pilaf in "Milei Wins Mandate for Free-Market Revolution in Argentina's Election"

pilaf — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 05:51:34 +0000

It was a legislative election, Milei's party won 26 new seats between senators and deputies, which compared against the next most popular party (peronists) which had a net loss of 18 seats, landslide seems appropriate.

New comment by pilaf in "MAML – A new configuration language"

pilaf — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 23:27:59 +0000

Also Ruby doesn't have triple quotation marks (""") string literals.

New comment by pilaf in "Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests"

pilaf — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 08:38:46 +0000

Last I heard they were planning to move to Swift [1] partly because of the safety features. Apparently there are still some blockers [2] preventing that move though.

1: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

2: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933