Hacker News: plorkyeran

New comment by plorkyeran in "Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs"

plorkyeran — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:55:07 +0000

K-lite originally was a giant mess of stuff that gradually got pruned down as the libav-based things got better and covered more of what was needed. These days it's just mpc-hc plus lavfilters and a few incidental tools.

New comment by plorkyeran in "SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible"

plorkyeran — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:16:18 +0000

I have written software which needed to support SMPTE standards, and to do so I pirated the standard. The standards are initially written to reflect existing systems, but then more systems are developed later.

New comment by plorkyeran in "My LSM tree was slower than a B-tree. Then I profiled it"

plorkyeran — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:58:06 +0000

The author didn't write the blog post so my default assumption is they didn't write the code either.

New comment by plorkyeran in "San Francisco Weighs PG&E Takeover Amid Soaring Utility Costs"

plorkyeran — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:17:31 +0000

The top-end rate with PG&E is not way higher than $0.50/kWh. If you're paying $500/month with no AC and no homelab or whatever then you have something else sucking up vast amounts of power and you should spend some time with a killawatt measuring your appliances.

New comment by plorkyeran in "San Francisco Weighs PG&E Takeover Amid Soaring Utility Costs"

plorkyeran — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:36:57 +0000

That is not at all how PG&E billing works. You can see the current rates and billing structure at https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid....

New comment by plorkyeran in "San Francisco Weighs PG&E Takeover Amid Soaring Utility Costs"

plorkyeran — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:24:35 +0000

This is just very straightforwardly incorrect. Last month I paid Ava Energy $26 for electric energy generation, and PG&E $99 for delivery. Cutting the generation cost to $0 would only reduce my bill by 20%. Ava Energy says that 70% of the power I used came from solar located within my city, so it's already located quite close to demand.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

plorkyeran — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:15:32 +0000

I have never gotten a response from Claude that is anything other than blandly polite, including with Fable, which makes me assume that anyone finding themself getting argumentative responses is doing something very weird.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

plorkyeran — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:55:46 +0000

Apple stock rises leading up to WWDC and then drops following the keynote every single year. People keep betting that this is the year that they're going to announce the next iPhone and the stock is going to 10x.

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

plorkyeran — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:08:36 +0000

XNU's posix_spawn implementation is not fork/exec-based. It does roughly what the API suggests it would do.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

plorkyeran — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:31:13 +0000

If you're getting fired for cause then it is not an amicable breakup and the norms for when you're trying to maintain a relationship obviously don't apply. Layoffs for any reason other than "the company is out of money and is shutting down tomorrow" which only pay two weeks severance would be unusually stingy.

New comment by plorkyeran in "EV Stupidity Checklist"

plorkyeran — Sat, 30 May 2026 01:13:03 +0000

That's a big part of why these things are stupid. There's a bunch of weird design decisions which shouldn't have anything to do with EVs but are a lot more common in EVs anyway.

New comment by plorkyeran in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

plorkyeran — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:36:32 +0000

Forcing people to pay property tax on an inflated valuation of their house or face eviction sounds like a terrible system, actually. If you offered to buy my house for a number that I agreed was a perfectly fair market value that I didn't expect to be able to beat on the open market, I would say no immediately. You'd have to offer something like 50% over what I'd expect to get for me to seriously consider the offer.

It is very common to have goods where the price a buyer is willing to pay is smaller than the price a seller is willing to accept, and in a free market that simply results in no transaction happening. Forcing the transaction to happen is always going to make at least one side of the deal unhappy.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Omarchy Is Not A Distro"

plorkyeran — Sun, 24 May 2026 19:25:42 +0000

The publishing process for Safari extensions is painful, but otherwise it's not meaningfully different from Chromium extensions and there's no good reason for it to work worse in Safari.

New comment by plorkyeran in "SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought"

plorkyeran — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:54:27 +0000

401ks and loans for houses are already things which have specific tax carveouts, so the idea that those would be exceptions even if secured loans in general were taxed doesn't seem like a particularly bold idea.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

plorkyeran — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:39:03 +0000

In a spoken Q&A setting opening every single response with "that's a great question" or "thanks for asking that" or whatever is pretty common as a way to fill a few seconds while you think about your response. This is obviously unnecessary on slack.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Garry Tan, the CEO of YC, accused me of unethical reporting"

plorkyeran — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:07:48 +0000

To some degree there simply isn't any plan you can have beyond that in the short term things will suck and hopefully the long term benefits will be worth it. If the existing incumbents are sufficiently ideologically opposed to your goals that they'll refuse to work rather than let you even inch towards them, there's not much you can do beyond try to replace them with people who don't have the relevant experience but are willing to work with you.

"Defund the police" didn't poll well so the progressive prosecutors who actually got elected were the ones who didn't admit that they were going to have to tear things down and start over (and maybe they didn't even realize it), but it was a very unsurprising outcome.

New comment by plorkyeran in "50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers"

plorkyeran — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:41:49 +0000

The comic is pointing out how absurd that false dichotomy is.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force kind attacks"

plorkyeran — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:16:47 +0000

That isn't a rumor? It's a pretty well documented fact that the NSA was involved in the design of DES and that the magic numbers that people initially assumed were a back door of some sort turned out to make differential cryptanalysis more difficult than randomly chosen ones would have.

New comment by plorkyeran in ""Parse, don't validate" through the years with C++"

plorkyeran — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:30:05 +0000

Some readers will expect Birthdate() to be equivalent to Birthdate(0, 0, 0), and naming it Birthdate::epoch() makes it clear that it is not that. I don't think it's worth it, but there is an upside.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

plorkyeran — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:40:09 +0000

Github is claiming that a usage spike in 2026 is the cause of availability issues in 2025, so their explanation is clearly incomplete at best. The usage spike may be why things have failed to get better despite them putting effort into improving things, but it isn't the root cause of problems.