Hacker News: rangerelf

New comment by rangerelf in "Anna's Archive hit with $19.5M default judgment and global domain takedown order"

rangerelf — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:14:32 +0000

That's exactly what jonhohle was talking about -_-

New comment by rangerelf in "Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE"

rangerelf — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:53:21 +0000

llama-server from the llama.cpp package has a local web interface.

New comment by rangerelf in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

rangerelf — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:22:01 +0000

Because the companies that are pushing for DC constructions are corruptors, and some politicians are easy to corrupt.

New comment by rangerelf in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"

rangerelf — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:20:25 +0000

The problem isn't the availability of lower quality versions of a high-quality product, it's the transformation of a formerly high-quality product into a shitty-quality version, meanwhile, maintaining the same price, or worse, a higher price, than the former high-quality version of itself.

The price tags on tools don't go down with time, but the quality of the tools certainly does.

I'm all for tiering product lines, harbor freight is doing it right by offering their top-of-the-line in the Hercules brand, a "pretty good for non contractor" line with Bauer, and then there's lower tiers for one-offs. But if I look for, and buy, a Porter Cable tool, I'm buying it because I expect a certain performance and quality, but it's in fact a rug pull right now. That should be fraud.

New comment by rangerelf in "Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)"

rangerelf — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:08:29 +0000

You're not the only one. In college I took a compilers course and we used the dragon book, to me it sucked the joy out of the magical concept of making a compiler.

Some years later I (re-) discovered Forth, and I thought "why not?" and built my own forth in 32-bit Intel assembly, _that_ brought back the wonder and "magical" feeling of compilers again. All in less than 4KB.

I guess I wasn't the right audience for the dragon book.

New comment by rangerelf in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

rangerelf — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:32:08 +0000

Do you have any links to support this? Because the commonality of all arguments _against_ has been that they make water and power crazy expensive for everyone that has to live close to the newly opened datacenters, while the DC operator enjoys subsidized land use tax, water and power.

New comment by rangerelf in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

rangerelf — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:27:28 +0000

This right here is the right take.

New comment by rangerelf in "EFF is leaving X"

rangerelf — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:47:57 +0000

This is to laughably misguided that it leans toward malicious.

I mean, you're talking about Elon, the Doge guy, the one who organized mass hoovering of citizens data from whatever sources he could get his grubby mitts on? That Elon?

Opposed to mass surveillance??

And then you sprinkle some commonly known truths on top to make your comment palatable ("we're being divided and conquered!"), and finally you add a dash of malicious speculation to seed some doubt against the organization ("Perhaps the EFF has been compromised!! It's a trick!!").

No thanks.

New comment by rangerelf in "Microsoft terminated the account VeraCrypt used to sign Windows drivers"

rangerelf — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:39:22 +0000

If it's impossible for a service provider to even talk to its customers, why is it in operation at all?

New comment by rangerelf in "Every GPU That Mattered"

rangerelf — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:16:42 +0000

This was a very sweet video card.

New comment by rangerelf in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

rangerelf — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:06:45 +0000

On the other hand, EVERY young person in my circle (my kids and their friends) is insanely privacy aware. All of that means ... we're not part of the young people anymore?

New comment by rangerelf in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

rangerelf — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:58:15 +0000

I think there's more than enough evidence that Zuck has not grown to see others as human beings.

New comment by rangerelf in "Go away Python"

rangerelf — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:22:22 +0000

Have you tried Nim? Strong and static typed, versatile, compiles down to native code vía C, interops with C trivially, has macros and stuff to twist your brain if you're into that, and is trivially easy to get into.

https://nim-lang.org

New comment by rangerelf in "Canada loses its measles-free status, with US on track to follow"

rangerelf — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 17:46:56 +0000

Not disagreeing, just a question: if you were to catch it, would you stay inside until you're healthy again and not a danger to others?

New comment by rangerelf in "SPy: An interpreter and compiler for a fast statically typed variant of Python"

rangerelf — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:46:13 +0000

It's not just its age, it's how easy it is (was?) to jump in and start writing useful code that could be revisited later on and be able to read it and understand it again.

All of these efforts to turn it into another Typescript are going to, in the end, kill the ease of use it has always had.

New comment by rangerelf in "SPy: An interpreter and compiler for a fast statically typed variant of Python"

rangerelf — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:25:30 +0000

I kind of object to this take.

Nobody's talking about porting billions of lines of code, for all we know it's just for personal projects, or a learning experience.

This kind of replies is like killing an idea before it's even started, smells like the sunk cost fallacy.

OTOH I do understand the weight of a currently existing corpus in production, evidence is the ton of COBOL code still running. But still, your reply kind of sucks.

New comment by rangerelf in "SPy: An interpreter and compiler for a fast statically typed variant of Python"

rangerelf — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:23:09 +0000

I was looking for someone else that had done this, I had the same exact experience.

That said, anyone looking into a completely static typed language that has nice ergonomics, is easy to pick up but has enough depth to keep you busy for weeks on end, and is versatile enough to be used for anything, do yourself a favor and give Nim a try.

https://nim-lang.org/

New comment by rangerelf in "How First Wap tracks phones around the world"

rangerelf — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 23:41:52 +0000

You're not wrong.

I've seen so many things announced that make me ask myself "But, why?".

New comment by rangerelf in "MicroPythonOS – An Android-like OS for microcontrollers"

rangerelf — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:16:08 +0000

If only you'd bothered to quote the rest of the sentence:

"Android-like touch screen UI with gestures"

Could have used also "IPad-like..." or "IPhone-like..." and it would have meant basically the same. Maybe author is more familiar with Android?

PS: What's with all the outrage manufacturing?

New comment by rangerelf in "Python's splitlines does more than just newlines"

rangerelf — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 16:46:49 +0000

What if the text is already in a [string] buffer?