Hacker News: restalis

New comment by restalis in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

restalis — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:32:46 +0000

Your range checking requirement is just one of many things that may or may not be necessary to someone using this. Taking them all into account (besides the fact that may be unfeasible, if there happen to be some conflicting requirements) would render the solution to be unnecessarily complex. It's better to focus on the minimal set of viable requirements and thus have a base design as simple as possible. For additional requirements, just go and complicate your design (and be the only one having to pay the costs that come out of that complication), hopefully only when and only for as long it makes sense to do so. For the need you mention, some kind of container wrapper may do, with the amount of number's words specified in it. A good thing is that you'd be able to limit the use of such container-wrapped numbers only to some situations (like the exchange of data to and from unsanitized areas).

New comment by restalis in "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)"

restalis — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:42 +0000

While there are indeed "details" out there that have a great impact on the macro-dynamic, and even pose as blockers, history also provides us many counter-examples. The steel-making process has been invented and reinvented many times and in different places in an (arguably) independent manner. The same for sea-faring, writing systems, laws, and so on. They have all been different but did enabled progress more or less in similar way, and thus - are also details that it's fair to gloss over.

New comment by restalis in "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)"

restalis — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:39:00 +0000

You two debated this as a philosophical or even moral issue, but it changes everything when you look at it from the natural hazard prospective. It doesn't even have to be a subjective matter. Picture this - you know the climate change is happening and you understand that some colony of animals will surely vanish because of that if you wont do a thing about it. Doing something could mean just taking a few pair of animals and relocate them to a safer area. Do you think that the survival of such descending colony of animals mean anything (to anyone)? Who can argue that it won't be our time (and obligation) to reduce the risk of having the only known capable civilization residing on only one planet or galaxy?

New comment by restalis in "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)"

restalis — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:18:36 +0000

The dilemma of spending significant amount of effort and resources for a colonizing project when the result won't benefit the enterprising society is not new. When looking for a reason, considering only the (individuals' or collective's) benefits on a rational basis does not make much sense indeed. Most likely there must be something more, akin to a religious goal, aiming for species' or civilization's greater good.

New comment by restalis in "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)"

restalis — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:01:17 +0000

It's also called "vision". It's what provides and powers directions on large and long term scales. Those "simple" and "mundane step-by-step issues" are just chores by themselves, yet at the same time may become stepping stones in the context of a well thought vision that people buy into and rally behind.

New comment by restalis in "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)"

restalis — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:43:07 +0000

In the open space, shades get very cold, like a few degrees over absolute zero cold, because even without a medium to facilitate convection and (atmospheric contact) conduction, the loss of heat through mere radiation (into the pitch black universe) is very efficient (for normal, non-reflective materials). Thus, for an astral body to remain in a melted state, continuous steams of energy should be poured in (and some thermo-insulating gaseous atmosphere may also help to reduce cooling, if the body in question would have enough gravity to retain it), but that's hardly a thing to worry for a project where the energy itself is carefully controlled and dosed.

New comment by restalis in "Just 'English with Hanzi'"

restalis — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:10:48 +0000

"to Thai, squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are all ปลาหมึก. For English speakers, those are similar things, but all clearly distinct. But for Thai speakers, they're all ปลาหมึก, just different types."

Then, ปลาหมึก = coleoidea? If so, the squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are (in English and many other languages) all just types of coleoidea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleoidea

New comment by restalis in "Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury"

restalis — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:12:37 +0000

Also, the kind of satellites that aren't much more than mirrors, even with today's knowledge, they can be designed to change their profile/surface and thus reduce the absorption of the incident radiation, if they'd had to cross the space between the sun and the sunlight collector areas.

New comment by restalis in "A Programmer's Loss of Identity"

restalis — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:29:26 +0000

"I’ve seen too many «well crafted» implementations of such technically vexing features as «fetching data and returning it» that were so overengineered that it should have been considered theft of company money."

This judgement has merit. However, over the years I got to perceive that over-engineering tendency to be the manifestation of exploratory spirit in one's craft. This is how the Unix got to be created at Bell Labs. To their managers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on programs like the "ed" editor, thus they cared about "value being provided to the user (or the business)". What was later officially named Unix was not pitched as an operating system, but instead framed mostly just a needed way to organize the growing set of utilities, among other things (i.e. as a footnote). What are the over-engineered bits (and the related gained experience) in a given project may become useful for something else. People (tend to) do this kind of stuff. But should they be blamed, considering the enticing promise of growth and development of new technologies, practiced by employers themselves, as part of recruitment game?

New comment by restalis in "Are we dismissing AI spend before the 6x lands? (2025)"

restalis — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:24:39 +0000

"We should look at how people are using LLMs right now instead of chasing promises of superintelligence."

This. When more computing power and memory resources became available to software engineers, we've seen how that impacted the software development. Sure, there were happy stories of new class of problems being attacked, which couldn't before due to resource limits, but a lot of software just stopped being frugal and did pretty much what it did before, but somehow consuming much more. Extrapolating to the case of staggering resources poured over the AI solutions, I'd be surprised if most of it won't just be consumed to generate higher resolution (and longer) videos.

New comment by restalis in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

restalis — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:22:03 +0000

rsync does what was designed to do and the lack of scope creep is not a bad thing. There is "fpsync" - another tool on top of rsync (which was mentioned in one of the comments at article's page) that covers the parallel processing use-case: https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/fpart/fpsync.1.en.html

New comment by restalis in "Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM"

restalis — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:15:54 +0000

"No stuffing about with swapping physical hardware just because I've temporarily relocated myself."

That's exactly the use case for which the carriers offer roaming plans. The bonus is that you (as in your phone number) get to remain connected and accessible by your contacts, as no other phone number is involved at any point. One should not need to change the SIM unless is about one's phone change.

New comment by restalis in "How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips"

restalis — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 21:59:37 +0000

Managing the light source, specifically the 13.5nm length on the wave spectrum, that gets generated from overheated tin plasma, is in fact the most challenging part of the machine. Here "managing" includes the process of hitting a rightly sized tin droplet with lasers at the right angles, and all the rest of the complicated fluid math necessary to get the most of that precious lighting moment, as well as the proper handling of that spark event's after-effects, of course. As opposed to the rest of the machine parts (like directing the EUV light to the reticle through those mirrors you mention), the light generation part is dynamic, very easily to get wrong, and very costly to iterate on.

Fixing the ReactOS Test Suite

restalis — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 22:08:11 +0000

Article URL: https://reactos.org/blogs/cbialorucki-tests-2/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816414

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by restalis in "John Carmack on mutable variables"

restalis — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 21:34:17 +0000

I was thinking about this too. When you read a program, there is this information payload, which is the metaphorical ball you have to keep your eyes on, and more or less forget about the rest as soon as it isn't relevant any more. In the functional paradigm it's like seeing the juggle of a bunch of such balls instead (plus the expectation to admire it), but that's just wasteful on reader's attention.

New comment by restalis in "An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS"

restalis — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:27:59 +0000

Most likely, it didn't happen (yet) due to kernel related stuff being still actively worked on¹ and (more importantly) due to a shortage of developers willing and capable to tackle that kind of challenge.

¹ At the time of this writing, there are open PRs like this one: https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/8422

New comment by restalis in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

restalis — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:42:03 +0000

"putting yourself and your hard work in legal risk"

Like what? I'm genuinely curious what personal risks faces anyone from contributing to ReactOS. I also am curious what kind of legal risk may threaten the work? I mean, even in the unlikely scenario that something gets proven illegal and ordered to be dismissed from the project, what would prevent any such particular expunged part to be re-implemented by some paid contractor (now under legally indisputable circumstances), thus rendering the initial effort (of legal action) moot?

New comment by restalis in "The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe"

restalis — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 22:15:16 +0000

"A good example I think has adjusted the behavior of the ecosystem is Rust: it makes certain things much easier than before and slowly the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit because of it."

From a software design prospective, the functionality that should go into a compiler is code compilation only. Taken it to extreme (as in Unix philosophy), if the code compiles, then the compiler should just build you the binary or fail silently otherwise. The code checking and reporting various aspects of the quality of the code is supposed to be a static code analyzer's job. (In reality, pretty much all compilers we have are doing compilation coupled with some amount of lighter code checking before that, and the static code analyzers left only with the heavier and more exhaustive code checking.) What Rust does is to demand its compiler to perform even more of what a static analyzer is supposed to do. It's a mishmash of two things (which still manage to stay separate things when it's about other programming languages, because that makes sense) and masquerades that as revolution.

So, (even when it's about code in blamed languages like C & C++) the "the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit" by not skipping the static analyzer kind of expensive checks, the kind that Rust happen to make impossible to skip.

New comment by restalis in "The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe"

restalis — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:54:26 +0000

The transition from kilobytes to megabytes is not comparable to the transition from megabytes to gigabytes at all. Back in the kilobytes days, when the engineers (still) had to manage bits and resort to all kind of tricks to somehow make it to something working, a lot of software (and software engineering) aspects left to be desired. Way too many efforts were poured not so much into putting the things together for the business logic as were poured into overcoming the shortcomings of limited memory (and other computing) resource availability. Legitimate requirements for software had to be butchered like Procrustes' victims, so that the software could have a chance to be. The megabytes era accommodated all but high end media software, without having to compromise on their internal build-up. It was the time when things could be properly done, no excuses.

Nowadays' disregard for computing resource consumption is simply the result of said resources getting too cheap to be properly valued and a trend of taking their continued increase for granted. There's simply little to no addition in today's software functionality that couldn't do without the gigabytes levels of memory consumption.

New comment by restalis in "UTF-8 is a brilliant design"

restalis — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 20:39:21 +0000

This fits your description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-length_quantity