Hacker News: timw4mail

New comment by timw4mail in "The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader"

timw4mail — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:40:37 +0000

While I agree in terms of modern browser expectations (and books absolutely should not need JavaScript), I think books in HTML makes a lot of sense. HTML was meant for sharing text documents, after all.

New comment by timw4mail in "The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader"

timw4mail — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:34:32 +0000

As a crazy person with both, I have mixed feelings between them.

In favor of the X3:

- Crisper text

- Whiter display

- Slightly better battery life

- Top-mounted power button (subjective)

In favor of the X4:

- Larger display

- Plain USB-C charging

- Slightly better custom firmware support

- Backward and forward button on the same side (subjective)

New comment by timw4mail in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

timw4mail — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:50:20 +0000

More mass = more momentum = harder crash. That's physics.

New comment by timw4mail in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

timw4mail — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:46:49 +0000

For the bigger vehicle, perhaps, but a smaller vehicle, even if up to modern standards, is less safe due to the larger one.

New comment by timw4mail in "Macaroni – a single HTML file messenger"

timw4mail — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:04:12 +0000

...and that's why I've always hated that name

New comment by timw4mail in "Several injured in Boeing 787 nose-gear collapse in Frankfurt"

timw4mail — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:07:48 +0000

Confirmation bias, instant communication, hyper focus on Boeing mishaps, etc.

New comment by timw4mail in "Was my $48K GPU server worth it?"

timw4mail — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:44:42 +0000

And here I felt like I was wasting money on an Intel B70 to run LLMs locally.

New comment by timw4mail in "Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site"

timw4mail — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:29:35 +0000

Syncthing

New comment by timw4mail in "Haiku"

timw4mail — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:17:59 +0000

Beta it may be, but there's a good amount of software and programming language support. The 64-bit version is amazingly stable, even on the nightly version.

New comment by timw4mail in "Haiku"

timw4mail — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:53:26 +0000

Resource efficiency is a huge one. If you are familiar with the Via Nano: it's a SLOW x86_64 chip (sometimes used in thin clients) that feels about half as fast as older AMD 64 cpu. Haiku feels great on a Via Nano, and it's really storage-space-efficient. Linux distros are slower, and use more storage space (especially important for using an OS on a thin client PC).

New comment by timw4mail in "Don't hijack my mouse pointer"

timw4mail — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:44:36 +0000

Wait...what year is it again?

New comment by timw4mail in "Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port"

timw4mail — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:49:30 +0000

I've never seen the appeal of GNOME 3+, the design seems so user-hostile to anyone who has used computers for a while: hiding menus for no reason, having super limited menu options, etc.

I'd rather use LXDE, XFCE, or KDE.

New comment by timw4mail in "IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember"

timw4mail — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:30:45 +0000

The only case where I care about an IPv6 address is for something I actually want to expose to the internet. A temporary address would be quite annoying in that case.

New comment by timw4mail in "Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XVIII: How Does FPU Detection Work?"

timw4mail — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:29:21 +0000

Some 486SX boards are even sillier: There's a soldered 486 SX, and a regular 486 socket, so you can add a socketed 486 SX to your board with a 486 SX. Obviously the point is to be able to add a regular 486 CPU, but it's still amusing.

New comment by timw4mail in "How to turn anything into a router"

timw4mail — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:10:20 +0000

Surely something like OPNsense/PFsense would be better for the average user than setting up all the software manually?

New comment by timw4mail in "What came after the 486?"

timw4mail — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:32:10 +0000

Pentium-compatible processors were more numerous than you think.

- AMD (K5/K6/K6-2/K6-III) - Intel (Pentium) - Centaur (IDT Winchip, later Via C3/C7/Nano) - Cyrix (6x86, 6x86MX) - Rise (mp6)

New comment by timw4mail in "What came after the 486?"

timw4mail — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:27:47 +0000

For the vast, vast majority of use cases, they are faster, yes.

Cyrix chips get too much hate because of Quake being optimized specifically for the Pentium and its FPU.

New comment by timw4mail in "VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS"

timw4mail — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:23:24 +0000

Homebrew wouldn't support Haiku anyway.

New comment by timw4mail in "macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal"

timw4mail — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:07:40 +0000

No.

New comment by timw4mail in "Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360 (2018)"

timw4mail — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:25:10 +0000

And there was the same problem with early PS3s, on Nvidia's GPU package...it was a fairly widespread problem at the time.