Hacker News: silvester23

New comment by silvester23 in "How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU"

silvester23 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:40:00 +0000

The thing about the anti-piracy is true, at least in the original version (I don't know about re-releases).

The way it worked was you had to offer at least a few pizzas that were reasonably close to recipes from the booklet in order to get any customers. Once you had that, you could get creative with custom recipes but if you only did custom recipes, you were bound to fail.

New comment by silvester23 in "Open source security at Astral"

silvester23 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:38:37 +0000

For us, the DX of uv for dependency management is much better than just using pip and requirements.txt.

To be clear though, we only use uv in the builder stage of our docker builds, there is no uv in the final image.

New comment by silvester23 in "Boring Go!"

silvester23 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:36:48 +0000

Kind of off topic but I don't understand the reading time. It says "7.8h 48m". What does that even mean?

New comment by silvester23 in "Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools"

silvester23 — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 08:29:56 +0000

Unobtanium was a thing in fiction long before Avatar.

New comment by silvester23 in "I know genomes and I didn’t delete my data from 23andMe"

silvester23 — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 11:27:51 +0000

I respect your ability to react to such a post in this way. All I could think was "What the fuck?!"

New comment by silvester23 in "Uncommon Uses of Python in Commonly Used Libraries (2022)"

silvester23 — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 12:56:56 +0000

If you want to combine a mixin with a base class you have no control over, just put the base class last in the inheritance chain. Then it does not matter if it calls its super __init__.

New comment by silvester23 in "Switching Pip to Uv in a Dockerized Flask / Django App"

silvester23 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 12:18:07 +0000

This is actually covered by the --locked option that uv sync provides.

If you do `uv sync --locked` it will not succeed if the lock file does not exist or is out of date.

Edit: I slightly misread your comment. I strongly agree that having no lock file or a lockfile that does not match your specified dependencies is a case where a human should intervene. That's why I suggest you should always use the --locked option in your build.

New comment by silvester23 in "Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?"

silvester23 — Tue, 13 May 2025 12:50:12 +0000

Was there any particular reason you stopped making music?

I'm listening to one of your mixes right now and I'm wondering if you were influenced by Klangkarussell at all (or maybe the other way around?) or if that was just the general 2014 vibe.

New comment by silvester23 in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

silvester23 — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 08:48:51 +0000

Does he have a coherent position on anything?

New comment by silvester23 in "Celebrating the timeless allure of Tintin's aesthetics"

silvester23 — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 13:39:56 +0000

I'm not sure I understand the sequence with the rhino. Is he actually killing the rhino by drilling a hole in its back and lighting a stick of dynamite inside the hole? Or am I reading this wrong? That seems pretty out there.

New comment by silvester23 in "Using uv with PyTorch"

silvester23 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 08:29:06 +0000

I would also say absolutely. We've been using pipenv for ~6 years and have managed to build a pretty good workflow around it. But uv is just _so much faster_. So we've started moving everything over to uv and I don't think we'll ever look back.

Migrating is not super hard, we wrote a small script that moves all the information from a Pipfile to a pyproject.toml and it works like a charm.

New comment by silvester23 in "The Ultimate Guide to Error Handling in Python"

silvester23 — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 12:07:04 +0000

What they mean is that in Java, for example, a method has to explicitly state which exceptions it might throw as part of its signature. Note that they said "throws", not "throw".

Python does not have that.

New comment by silvester23 in "xAI announces series B funding round of $6B"

silvester23 — Mon, 27 May 2024 06:06:41 +0000

There used to be a list of people on the about page but they changed it, apparently. Here's a snapshot that still shows it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240415120557/x.ai/about

I don't know enough about the AI/ML scene to say if any of these are notable people.

New comment by silvester23 in "Private company landing on the moon today"

silvester23 — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 15:42:16 +0000

True, for instance no wars have yet been fought over 2 for 1 at Dominos.

New comment by silvester23 in "Which Movies Are the Most Polarizing? A Statistical Analysis"

silvester23 — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 14:11:47 +0000

I noticed that for every movie on the list that I like, I can totally see how others might not. But for most movies that I dislike, I just don't get how people can genuinely enjoy them.

I don't know what that says about anything but I found it curious.

New comment by silvester23 in "Every aspiring writer should read terrible books (2022) [video]"

silvester23 — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 07:59:07 +0000

You might enjoy the podcast "372 pages we'll never get back". It's basically a bad book club. The title is a reference to the first book they cover which is Ready Player One.

They are on Book 23 or so at the moment, more or less alternating between books by "big" authors like Dan Brown or Sean Penn and super obscure stuff like Harry Potter-Twilight-crossover fan fiction.

New comment by silvester23 in "Is this Duplo train track under too much tension?"

silvester23 — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 06:26:30 +0000

A full circle is 360° and a curved piece makes a turn of 30°, so you need 360° / 30° = 12 pieces turning in the same direction to make a full circle.

Every time you use a piece turning the other way, you need to add an extra piece turning the way you want to complete the circle, so the difference between the directions has to be 12.

Note, however, that not every track with exactly 12 more pieces turning one way than the other necessarily makes a complete circle, straight pieces can cause the ends not to match up.

New comment by silvester23 in "Plans to cut speed limits ‘will significantly improve road safety' – minister"

silvester23 — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 12:23:42 +0000

Is there any data showing that you can have too many limitations on e.g. motorways?

New comment by silvester23 in "Facebook must pay $100.000 to Norway each day for violating our right to privacy"

silvester23 — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 12:23:34 +0000

Norway may be small in terms of population but it's still one of the richest countries in the world. I doubt they are doing this for the money.

New comment by silvester23 in "Navy in Middle-Earth"

silvester23 — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 13:00:58 +0000

If you are into this kind of in-depth look into fantasy worlds, you might enjoy the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (https://acoup.blog).

For a related article see, e.g. this one: https://acoup.blog/2019/06/14/collections-the-siege-of-gondo...

It has a bit of a different angle in that it critiques works of fantasy in terms of realism, feasibility and consistency in a pretty nitpicky way (the hint's in the name, really). Still I find it mostly good-humoured.