Hacker News: retatop

New comment by retatop in "The drivers behind software delivery inefficiency"

retatop — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:37:39 +0000

I've never really understood this opinion. For me there's plenty of times that some problem needs to be solved and simply banging my head against it isn't going to make it happen any faster. Having some easy low priority stuff to do for a bit (or a high priority short task that interrupts) seems to let my subconscious solve the issue in the background and keeps me happier and more motivated. If it was two difficult tasks that were supposed to be done in parallel maybe that would be different, but I've never seen anyone asking for that

New comment by retatop in "Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK"

retatop — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:47:28 +0000

Isn't Wayland always one frame delayed compared to Xorg to avoid tearing or has that been changed? If so, his very high refresh rate would minimize that effect

New comment by retatop in "Phosh 0.56.0"

retatop — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:37:55 +0000

I'm a certified gnome hater, but a phone is basically the perfect application for it. As far as resource usage goes, I have been dailying an FLX1 for a year and a half now and Firefox is the only noticeable resource hog

New comment by retatop in "'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech"

retatop — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:56:54 +0000

I sort of agree with you, but how would you run any kind of industry on 15 employees? I think my limit would be somewhere in the ballpark of 100-200. That feels "big" to me, but not "huge faceless corporation"

New comment by retatop in "U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app"

retatop — Sat, 16 May 2026 01:14:35 +0000

I have never met anyone who properly fixed an emissions problem, and I think that's what GP meant by willful violations. Any car old enough to have emissions problems isn't worth enough to fix properly, so you cheat it by doing things like buying a spacer for the O2 sensor. Personally I'd be shocked if emissions inspections had a significant effect on total vehicle emissions, and I think that the most effective things are done at the manufacturer

New comment by retatop in "The USB Situation"

retatop — Sun, 03 May 2026 05:11:05 +0000

It's simply length. Ethernet is expected to work on 50-100m runs, while USB4 specifies maximum cable lengths of 2m even for just 5gbps (at least for passive cables). 80gbps is 0.8m

New comment by retatop in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

retatop — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:29:59 +0000

My phone (A Furiphone FLX1, which is kindof a variant of a Gigaset GX6) has a removable back with a gasket and is IP68. One of their promotional videos had them change the battery on video then boot the phone and and unlock it underwater

New comment by retatop in "Building a Mostly IPv6 Only Home Network"

retatop — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:48:36 +0000

This is exactly what I do. Almost everything has a nice DHCPv6 address so that I can actually remember the ULA + the suffix, but then for the two devices on my network that don't do DHCPv6 they get a SLAAC. One oddity though is that it means most devices on my network have both a SLAAC and a DHCP-provided one, since I wasn't able to be able to get it to prioritize a DHCP. Combine that with them having both ULA addresses and public addresses and some stuff on my network have way more addresses than you'd expect

New comment by retatop in "PCB Rework and Repair Guide [pdf]"

retatop — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 04:01:29 +0000

I do a lot of soldering at my day job to bodge boards, tune networks, etc. I burn myself on the time because when I'm working through the microscope I seemingly forget I have hands or lose track of them and bump the iron into them when pulling it away from the work. Not sure why, but it's really easy for me to get into this mode where the view through the scope is the only thing in the world

New comment by retatop in "Going immutable on macOS, using Nix-Darwin"

retatop — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:29:25 +0000

I haven't used Nix yet, but I have done exactly this a number of times with Guix now. I assume Nix has the same capabilities. In Guix you can specify a home configuration that includes packages, configuration files, and running services all in one manifest.scm file. If you want to make sure that it's isolated from whatever else is set up on the system you can launch that manifest in a container with a single extra flag

New comment by retatop in "The Journey Before main()"

retatop — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 15:28:29 +0000

Guix (and I assume Nix as well, but I only know Guix) can create a package that is completely self contained including glibc. You can even have it be an AppImage https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Invoking-guix...