Hacker News: svth

New comment by svth in "Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy"

svth — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:36:34 +0000

Geothermal is fantastic for heating. Speaking as an Icelander, we have so much hot water in Reykjavík that we even use the residue to keep our pavements clear of ice in winter. Pipes under the sidewalks carry exiting geothermally heated water from nearby houses. It's great technology and has served us well.

New comment by svth in "Everyone in Seattle hates AI"

svth — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 02:44:04 +0000

What's wrong with wahn-der-fyoo-gull?

New comment by svth in "WinObjC – The Windows Bridge for iOS"

svth — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 06:27:16 +0000

If I recall correctly, iTunes was a Carbon application. They ported parts of the Carbon APIs to get it running on Windows.

New comment by svth in "Why is this hard?"

svth — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 03:45:17 +0000

"There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage." -- Kurt von Hammerstein

New comment by svth in "Show HN: Whippy Term - GUI terminal for embedded development (Linux and Windows)"

svth — Wed, 07 May 2025 00:15:36 +0000

Why no macOS support?

New comment by svth in "Moving away from US cloud services"

svth — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:51:57 +0000

Britain is not in the EU.

New comment by svth in "The "Bird and Baby" grows up: inside the new Eagle and Child"

svth — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:27:16 +0000

End of an era. Used to go there in the 90s. Now everything belongs to shitty, worthless Silicon Valley adventurers.

New comment by svth in "Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities"

svth — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 13:46:49 +0000

There's also afplay - Audio File Play (plays an audio file to the default audio output). Can play all audio formats supported by CoreAudio.

New comment by svth in "macOS Sequoia is available today"

svth — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 16:46:38 +0000

Use iTerm2

New comment by svth in "The demise of the mildly dynamic website (2022)"

svth — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 22:47:27 +0000

Thank you for that lengthy diatribe, which I heartily agree with. It's really all about separation of concerns.

New comment by svth in "Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?"

svth — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:35:29 +0000

Yes. I maintain some open source Mac apps in my spare time (and even develop new ones from time to time) using Objective-C. I've known and used this programming language for 20 years, and don't really see the point of investing in Swift given the way the Apple ecosystem has developed.

New comment by svth in "Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API"

svth — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 13:29:42 +0000

English-language only text-to-speech.

New comment by svth in "The Icelandic Saga Database"

svth — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 20:59:30 +0000

I'd say we have quite a vibrant startup ecosystem given the size of the country.

New comment by svth in "Sloth – A Mac app that shows all open files, directories, sockets, etc."

svth — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 18:54:22 +0000

Sloth author here. To clarify, Sloth does not run with or require root privileges. However, it allows you to (optionally) run lsof itself with root privileges via Apple's Authorization framework. The application is Developer ID signed, but not notarized by Apple (which is a PITA). I guess it's "unaudited", but the source code is right there for anyone to view, analyze and build from scratch.

Also, I'd be curious to know what "blocks of code copy-pasted from stackoverflow" you found. As far as I know, I wrote all of Sloth myself, starting 19 years ago. As for references to "Mac OS X" in code comments, that seems rather pedantic given that this is very old code and Apple keeps changing the name of their operating system: Mac OS X -> OS X -> macOS.

That being said, thank you for identifying the appcast deployment script, which shouldn't have been in version control to begin with.

New comment by svth in "Show HN: Socketify.py: Http/Https and WebSockets servers for PyPy3 and Python3"

svth — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 15:17:12 +0000

I've been using PyPy and psycopg2cffi in production for the last 5-6 years or so without any issues.

https://pypi.org/project/psycopg2cffi/

New comment by svth in "VALL-E: Microsoft’s new zero-shot text-to-speech model"

svth — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 13:47:04 +0000

No. Have you?

New comment by svth in "Nowhere to hide: How a nuclear war would kill you–and almost everyone else"

svth — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 13:09:39 +0000

Dr. Strangelove : It would not be difficult, Mein Führer! Nuclear reactors could - heh, I'm sorry, Mr. President - nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could raised and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country. But, I would guess, that a dwelling space for several 100,000 of our people could easily be provided.

President Merkin Muffley : Well, I would hate to have to decide who stays up and who goes down.

Dr. Strangelove : Well, that would not be necessary, Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors of youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be vital that top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Heil! Actually, they would breed prodigiously, yeah? There would be much time and little to do. With a proper breeding techniques and a ratio of, say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could interact their way back to the present gross national product within, say, 20 years.

New comment by svth in "The Fate of Rome"

svth — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 21:46:24 +0000

This is a very good and important point. As our technology becomes more complex and our global structures more essential, the system surely must tend towards ever greater fragility. Just like software, really.

New comment by svth in "Average home prices in New Zealand reaches 8.8 times average household income"

svth — Fri, 06 May 2022 14:59:55 +0000

> Average annual household income here is 610000 NOK (~64500 USD).

Norway's GDP per capita is about USD70.000. Surely you're using GDP per capita, or average individual income, not household income? I have a very hard time believing that Norwegian average household income is just over half that of New Zealand.

New comment by svth in "Web3 is centralized and inefficient"

svth — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 13:06:16 +0000

Russia is not a third world country. Rather, it is a second world country.