Hacker News: rnentjes

New comment by rnentjes in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

rnentjes — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:39:08 +0000

Keats blamed Newton for taken the magic out of the rainbow with a prism. Personally I think the magic only got greater.

New comment by rnentjes in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

rnentjes — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:29:49 +0000

To be fair, the average person already doesn't know how to do simple arithmetic.

New comment by rnentjes in "Was it a billion dollar mistake?"

rnentjes — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 13:33:29 +0000

After reading all that (ok skimming), he does mention nullable types, but doesn't go into them at all. What's wrong with having the option of defining if something can be null or not? This is how I understand nullable types, don't known about monads. You only have to check if it's null if you have defined that it can be null.

To me this sounds like a solved problem, for example like how it's done in kotlin: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/null-safety.html#nullable-types-...

New comment by rnentjes in "One Handed Keyboard"

rnentjes — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:51:50 +0000

I am using this mouse because of that, and it works for me:

https://www.contourdesign.com/collection/contour-slidermouse

New comment by rnentjes in "It Will Take Decades to Undo the Damage Done by "AI""

rnentjes — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 08:38:03 +0000

Seem to me that whether or not people will be asked to "come out of retirement" will completely depend on how good the LLM's will be in 20 years.

This seems to happen a lot in the discussions around LLM's. Some people discuss it like LLM's will not get any better, others discuss it as if LLM's will continue to get better forever. But only time will tell.

New comment by rnentjes in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

rnentjes — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:17:59 +0000

Diplomacy has been tried multiple times before, even with security guarantees from the usa. Still Putin invaded. There can not be lasting peace without actual guarantees (for which use is not even a trustworthy party anymore). Because Putin will rebuild and invade again as he did after the last time.

This is what Zelensky tried to explain to Vance before the discussion blew up.

New comment by rnentjes in "Translating 10M lines of Java to Kotlin"

rnentjes — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 11:20:26 +0000

The PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer I assume) is just the stdlib that is provided. The stdlib is not the same for all platforms, as can be seen in the documentation. A regex implementation is provided for all platforms, but is not quite the same on all platforms: https://kotlinlang.org/api/core/kotlin-stdlib/kotlin.text/-r...

In shared code you can define interfaces that have to be implemented by any platform you use.

New comment by rnentjes in "The quest to decode the Mandelbrot set"

rnentjes — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 12:24:56 +0000

I'll add my julia attempt that animates and works with webgl:

http://julia.perses.games/

New comment by rnentjes in "Ask HN: Did any one or any thing predict the Russian invasion of Ukraine?"

rnentjes — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 08:05:06 +0000

This might be an example of what you are looking for:

https://medium.com/@noclador/putins-plan-4652895de8ba

New comment by rnentjes in "Revisiting Java in 2021 – Part II"

rnentjes — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 17:10:10 +0000

Alternative way to count the vowels in Kotlin:

    val numVowels = countVowels(getDTO()?.string ?: "")

New comment by rnentjes in "The Surprising Story of the First Microprocessors (2016)"

rnentjes — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 11:47:44 +0000

I would like to see that number as well, I actually expect it to be a lot more than a million.

Take 1000 times the clock rate, 4 cores, multiple instructions per clock instead of multiple clocks per instruction. Operations on 64 bits i.o 8 and the Z80 doesn't even have multiply or divide operators and would need to loop and add to do a multiplication/division. And then think about things like ARM SIMD instructions.

New comment by rnentjes in "Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S."

rnentjes — Sun, 08 Nov 2020 12:05:27 +0000

It's saddening to see that wearing a mask to prevent infection from a virus is in any way political.

New comment by rnentjes in "When will the Netherlands disappear?"

rnentjes — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 15:42:59 +0000

> No one will ever suggest cutting the budget for this.

This is not completely true, farmers have been protesting the increase of this tax: https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/4942211/we...

New comment by rnentjes in "Making Games with Kotlin"

rnentjes — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 13:15:39 +0000

Yes, the upside of one language should be that you don't have to write the same stuff multiple times. But if you don't want the downside of having one common denominator holding you back, then you have to write some parts specifically for each platform. That is the option Kotlin gives you. And my point was that this doesn't necessarily mean it will hold the specific platforms back (which seemed to be your point).

New comment by rnentjes in "Making Games with Kotlin"

rnentjes — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 10:30:56 +0000

There is nothing keeping them from not making some constructs not portable to certain platforms. Mostly they try to do this with standard language constructs (of course), but for example the 'dynamic' type is completely javascript specific.

This only goes for Valhala. The other examples seem to be java playing catch-up to Kotlin (Panama for Kotlin native and Loom for co-routines).

New comment by rnentjes in "Tesla’s biggest market in Europe becomes the Netherlands as Model 3 sales surge"

rnentjes — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 20:12:13 +0000

Also the taxes are changing so everyone wants one before the end of the year. Q1 2020 wont be this good.

New comment by rnentjes in "A Simple Dutch Cure for Stress"

rnentjes — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 14:02:39 +0000

This must mean nothing gets done right?

Guess again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

Netherlands is number 5.

New comment by rnentjes in "Build a 6502 Computer"

rnentjes — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 09:30:40 +0000

Last night a new version of the vera documentation was uploaded (https://github.com/commanderx16/x16-docs/blob/master/vera-mo...). It looks like the changes will allow for more memory, up to 1mb. Of which the last 64kb seem to be reserved for the registers, so max 960kb.

Constantly copying data to the VERA (chasing the beam/screen), seems unpractical. The 6502@8MHz can never move that much data.

New comment by rnentjes in "CO2 in the atmosphere just exceeded 415ppm for the first time in human history"

rnentjes — Mon, 13 May 2019 11:01:08 +0000

So you're saying the climate is changing?

But seriously, the article you link to is directly stating rising CO2 levels as one of the causes as CO2 is good for plants.

New comment by rnentjes in "Making a Simple Music Sequencer Using CSV Spreadsheets"

rnentjes — Mon, 21 May 2018 08:32:12 +0000

As a hobby I have been working on an online tracker, you can fin dit here: https://www.music-tracker-online.com/tracker.html?song=XfK&p...