<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: somat</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=somat</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:35:26 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=somat" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I suspect(with out reading the source to find out) that screens are the traditional X11 screens as opposed to the modern xrandr combined screen.<p>Traditionally each screen in an X11 setup was it's own separate thing with it's own separate frame buffer. While technically applications could move between screens, this depended on the application caring enough to do so. It had to maintain two(or more) mirrored windows(one per screen) and keep them all aligned. So realistically no application did this.<p>The modern method of doing multi monitors on X11 involves one large virtual screen with each monitor assigned a section of it. This has downsides, for example; this is where the myth that X11 can't do mixed DPI setups comes from. But it has one huge massive overwhelming upside. The application does not have to be aware that there are multiple screens and multi monitor setups just work.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:07:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532727</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532727</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532727</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a thing I have wondered about. are arabic numbers little endian when embeded in arabic text? The text is read right to left. But the numbers are the same as we put them in our left to right text where they are big-endian(read big to small). so are numbers in original arabic little-endian? read small to large. with the interesting side effect that numbers are universal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:20:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520500</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520500</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520500</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Conversely, English has a joined form(cursive) that is nearly dead because mechanical text assistance devices (first typewriters, now computers) work much better with the block form. While sad in a cultural loss sort of way the joined form only really makes sense when the text is hand written.<p>I am not familiar with the history of Arabic typography, but I sort of assume there was an archaic block form and their current joined form is the result of many centuries of encoding hand writing practice. advanced enough that falling back to a block form is impossible with the side effect of making simple mechanical text formatting also impossible.<p>As for Chinese derived characters. we currently are able to jam them awkwardly into our alphabet optimized structures(one code per character) but I wonder if a Chinese native encoding would look different. Would it make sense to try and represent the sub-characters present in each Chinese character in the encoding? I suspect not, Chinese  works, but it also does not appear amiable to simple mechanical assistance.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:06:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520383</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520383</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520383</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Renault: Electric motors with no rare earths"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is something... weird about this. this tech has existed.... a long time. And I am not familiar with what is common in electric cars so may be missing something obvious but thought this was already how it was done. let me explain my limited understanding.<p>With ac motors electromagnets can be used in the rotor. there is even a super clever way to do it where the electromagnet in the rotor is driven wirelessly via induction. there are some downsides but having no physical sliding electrical connection to the rotor is a huge upside.  The ac can be  dynamically formed from DC via high speed switching(transistors, in industry often called a VFD).<p>Due to the upsides of ac induction motors I sort of assumed this was already what was found in cars. I am a bit surprised to find out there were rare earth magnets in the first place.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:32:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510977</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510977</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48510977</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is easy enough to search for what happened over the Taiwan strait in September 1958. But here is the best report I have found on the incident.<p><a href="https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/20515413/doc-10-taiwan-1958.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2051...</a><p>TLDR: page 46: the sidewinder missile(a fully autonomous rocket powered kamikaze drone to use modern sensationalist language) was used for the first time in combat.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:32:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507717</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507717</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507717</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "The RCE that AMD wouldn't fix"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is something wrong with the internal fan curve on my old rx580 as well. I ended up writing a controller to manually set the fan speed via the /sys interface.<p>I still need to figure out why the internal curve is not working, but have not gotten around to it because I like my controller so much. The novel bit is that as I was writing it I had an epiphany "Why a curve? What we really want is to close the loop. Set an ideal temperature and figure out the fan speed to maintain it" So my controller has a cute little PID loop to do just that. realistically it never works as I imagined. At idle the temp is lower then the set point at the slowest fan speed and at load the full speed fan keeps it ~ 10C higher than the set point(perhaps this means my set point should be higher?). but sometimes I get that goldilocks midrange load and it works great.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:36:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498373</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498373</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498373</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That is not true. By my calculation the first human killed by drones was probably September 24, 1958 when planes were shot down by fully autonomous rocket powered kamikaze drones released over the taiwan strait.<p>My point being A. we have been killing people with fully autonomous drones for a long time now. and B. why the name change? just because it uses a propeller or is in vertical helicopter form does it is not a guided missile?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:44:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497420</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497420</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497420</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>DoH is intended to be indistinguishable from HTTPS traffic, if the application specifies a specific DoH server a DNS based ad block will not work.<p>Right now The ad companies have not really figured this out and DoH largely works like port 53 DNS did. But give it a few years. They will up their game and our ability to mitm our own dns queries will vanish. I will miss it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:32:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481446</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481446</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481446</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ship has already sailed, it's called DoH. Please note, that it is to make your DNS safer  and has absolutely nothing to do with removing your ability to resolve DNS in whatever way you want to(cough adblock cough).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:30:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472776</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472776</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48472776</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Show HN: Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Another interesting concept here is that the solar system is a second generation(minimum) system, too much iron+ for a first generation system. So the first generation star had explode to form all the heavy metals. Where is the original stellar remnant? Is there a Black hole or neutron star or whatever it is called if it can't even make it to neutron star levels in roughly the same galactic orbit as our sun?.<p>A good follow up question that nobody knows the answer to is "how much iron is in the sun?" The problem as I understand it is we can only directly see the very outer layer where there is no iron, so the standard answer is statistically none, only fractional percentages. But based on the distribution of elements in the solar system I sort of expect a sizable iron core.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 02:35:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470648</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470648</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470648</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Siri AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The juxtaposition between what perhaps the best single use case I have seen for AI and how bad of an ad for it is killing me. I love it.<p>"I told my bumbling assistant to plan a trip for me and he got nothing right but I enjoyed it because the chaos  introduced a certain spontaneity and whimsy missing from my life"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:12:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48460065</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48460065</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48460065</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "7.8 magnitude earthquake shakes part of southern Philippines. Tsunami possible"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is why I don't think tidal wave is a bad term for the phenomena, A wave that comes in like the tide. at least as good as tsunami, literally harbor wave, Which I guess is a wave you get in a harbor(a place with no waves usually)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:21:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48441885</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48441885</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48441885</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Powering up a module from the IBM 604: an electronic calculator from 1948"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>With regards to the more advanced tubes (tetrodes, pentodes, etc) Was there any experimentation with integrated circuits before transistors took over? Put 10 tubes in the same enclosure, 100.<p>I am imagining something like a vacuum florescent display but with logic instead of display elements.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 01:32:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440411</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440411</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440411</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "My Software North Star"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
deficiencies."<p>-- C. A. R. Hoare</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:00:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436661</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436661</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436661</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Motorola effectively bricked its entire line of WiFi routers without explanation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Give it a try, take Motorola to small claims court. don't be greedy but see if you can get them to spend a couple thousand in lawyer expenses for a couple hundred of claim.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:23:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434583</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434583</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434583</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Motorola effectively bricked its entire line of WiFi routers without explanation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If only the app could be stored on the router.<p>Unfortunately the only tech stack that can do this is the web, (serial/remote shell comes close).<p>In fact I regard this as the major failure of the app method of program deliverance. Why do you need to install them at all? It should be like the web, hit an address load the app. It is why I am thankful that the web was not developed as a commercial project. No for-profit entity would have let it escape their control like that. It would have been designed exactly like the app system for phones is. enforced central blessed "app-stores" and manual install processes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 03:10:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431404</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431404</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431404</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#35" rel="nofollow">https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#35</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:06:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423714</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423714</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423714</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>An interesting lesser known role of GPS is that it is part of the US nuclear monitoring network and it's L3 signal is part of this.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjLnIb41DuQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjLnIb41DuQ</a> I Found The US Nuclear Detection System In Space (saveitforparts)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:29:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423078</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423078</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423078</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Meh, a metric ton is 0.9 of a US ton, well within the error bars for this sort of thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:41:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397823</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397823</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397823</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by somat in "Summer of '85: DOSBOS is rejected by ANALOG Computing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I missed the basic era by a little but I always wonder why the BASIC roms never became the shell of the disk operating system when disks entered the pictured. Think analogous to the unix shell which is both the interactive command line and a scripting language. Get rid of the line numbers, add some directory access commands (list, mkdir, cd etc) and you would have a pretty good cli. but nobody appears to have done this. Instead you ended up with things cp/m and dos. fine enough I guess but their command interpreter sort of sucks in comparison to what basic could have brought to the table. And basic was already there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:45:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397283</link><dc:creator>somat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397283</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397283</guid></item></channel></rss>