Hacker News: suncore

New comment by suncore in "Where the goblins came from"

suncore — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:28:54 +0000

Marketing grab

New comment by suncore in "God sleeps in the minerals"

suncore — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:09:30 +0000

If "dead" things look this much alive, imagine how hard it is to determine life on other planets. Real life could look much more dull than these things :-)

New comment by suncore in "Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths"

suncore — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:14:02 +0000

Cheap QLC drives become super slow when it is starting to get fairly full and starts garbage collecting (collecting SLC writes into QLC at maybe 10MB/s). IMHO this is not good enough for an OS drive.

New comment by suncore in "Debunking Zswap and Zram Myths"

suncore — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:10:03 +0000

Very easy to reproduce: 1. Buy cheap QLC drive. 2. Fill with Steam games. 3. Delete some steam games and download new games. 4. Watch write speeds tank to zero for long periods when downloading.

It's due to garbage collecting on very slow QLC NAND. You won't see it until the drive starts to get 60%+ full. Until then, the drive pretends it is an SLC with very fast writes, but then it starts to show its true colors. Yuck.

New comment by suncore in "Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language"

suncore — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:48:35 +0000

About the Lobster language used: The first thing I do when encountering a new language is look at the memory management, since what I want to do with a piece of code is usually build and manipulate data in a safe and efficient manner, so this is central. I am happy to see Lobster seems to be trying to take a new(ish) and pragmatical approach to memory management and that there is a whole document describing it in detail (https://aardappel.github.io/lobster/memory_management.html) which means the language creator agrees that this is important. Also happy to see the language seems to support fast memory management in a multi threaded environment, which is absolutely not self evident in many languages.

New comment by suncore in "Systems Thinking"

suncore — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:42:03 +0000

Build what you know you need now. Refactor when things grow. Doesn't have to be rocket science.

New comment by suncore in "TeraWave Satellite Communications Network"

suncore — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:08:37 +0000

According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b66ZZ05wKC0 this might end very badly very soon.

New comment by suncore in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

suncore — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 12:22:33 +0000

I turned off HDR. Much happier now that I can see what's going on on the screen.

New comment by suncore in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

suncore — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:44:03 +0000

24 fps looks like shit. Hurts my brain. Ain't turning off smooth motion :-)

New comment by suncore in "Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version"

suncore — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 13:27:12 +0000

There is an interesting discussion about the need for ray tracing in one of the later Digital Foundry videos. The argument goes that sometimes baked lighting is impractical due to the size of the maps and how much dynamic lighting you need. The latest Doom game is one such game where light maps would be 100s of GBs. But I guess most other games are fine with baked lighting.

New comment by suncore in "Analyzing IPv4 Trades with Gnuplot"

suncore — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 09:11:11 +0000

Maybe the buyers started migrating to IPv6 when they saw how expensive IPv4 addresses are and there is a delay before they actually migrate. IPv4 addresses are way more expensive than I thought, upwards of $60 per address, jeez...

New comment by suncore in "Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian"

suncore — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 13:42:51 +0000

Splitting a piece of software into multiple pieces and shipping the pieces (dependencies) independently is sometimes a good idea, but it has its limits. Maybe the limit should be for dependencies which are very stable and used by many packages (libc, etc.). The hard line policy enforced by Debian here obviously is not working. Happy to see other distros solve this better. This might become really problematic for Debian in the future.

New comment by suncore in "GitHub is preparing for IPv6 support for Github.com"

suncore — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 08:10:53 +0000

That should be 16 IPv6 /64 networks, right? Which means Azure gives you a /60 prefix, I guess?

New comment by suncore in "All programming philosophies are about state"

suncore — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 10:22:34 +0000

Data (state, context, whatever) is more important to structure than code. Make sure your programming language lets you structure data the way you feel is natural. The code comes later and the main function is to massage the data. At least this is how I usually think about it, but everyones mind works differently... :-)

New comment by suncore in "Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in computer science?"

suncore — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 14:55:29 +0000

DPDK/SRIOV eats the interface so Linux kernel does not see it at all. The above diagram is kind of irrelevant as it would look like a giant bypass.

New comment by suncore in "Directory Opus – King of the Dual Panes"

suncore — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 20:52:49 +0000

I loved directory opus so much on the Amiga that I eventuelly wrote not one but three variants of it for Linux, albeit much simpler. The latest one I still use and maintain and you're welcome to try it at https://github.com/suncore/dflynav

New comment by suncore in "After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel"

suncore — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 08:25:33 +0000

Email issued by your government, in addition to authentication services needed for online banking etc.

New comment by suncore in "How to approach and prioritize technical debt"

suncore — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 17:40:15 +0000

Here's a few observations (after long time experience and involvement in research around technical debt):

1) It is impossible to avoid gathering technical debt. The code will deteriorate in one way or another. You need to prepare to fix it since you can't avoid it.

2) It is so extremely difficult to make a correct "risk assessment" on technical debt so you should avoid doing so at all. You will just end up arguing all day on the merits of clean code/architecture vs feature growth. Instead, keep two backlogs and reserve a set amount of resources on each, e.g. 20% on reducing technical debt and 80% for product features and other development.

3) The "cost" of reducing technical debt is actually negative. That's the whole point of working with it, to increase development velocity.

New comment by suncore in "Walkman Archive"

suncore — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 06:06:26 +0000

Ok, I'm biased since I was a kid during the 80s but two things strike me: 1. I still love the design language of the Walkman with brushed colored metal. Why can't we have that today? 2. It strikes me that a lot more thought and engineering has gone into these products compared to today. Most things today are just cheap all over with pointless design without function.

New comment by suncore in "The Metaverse Has Always Been a Dystopian Idea"

suncore — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 16:48:10 +0000

Sceptic here...

VR goggles are too anti-social on the local scale. Have kids? Dog? Spouse? Hard to see they will accept that you shield yourself off completely for long periods of time. You won't even see them coming when they start to grow tired... This is a fundamental flaw.

Then the metaverse... What is the usecase? Why is it fun or why is it useful? It might be cool for a while, but so are lots of other MMOs out there...