Hacker News: unwind

New comment by unwind in "How does IKEA come up with names for its products?"

unwind — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:26:20 +0000

I'm firmly in camp dad joke, but since Ü is a German letter that is not part of the Swedish alphabet, may I suggest you learn how to say RÄKSMÖRGÅS and update the joke?

The patched version might even work on some Swedish-speakers if you nail the pronounciation! :)

New comment by unwind in "How does IKEA come up with names for its products?"

unwind — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:23:44 +0000

To reiterate on another comment that would make no sense to Swedish speakers. Å is a distinct letter, with a different and unique vowel sound. It is in no way "a slightly different kind of A".

Your suggestion sounds a bit like spelling Apple like AIILE and using the circles to form a cool infinity symbol. Or something.

New comment by unwind in "Classic Amiga titles, free to download"

unwind — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:50:48 +0000

Wow this is really cool!

Epic to see that it has "No Man's Land" [0] and really really weird feeling to read the readme. No idea why it's listed as a "17 Bit" title though, perhaps they distributed it at some point but they certainly were not involved in creating it. Source: I wrote it. Fun times.

Edit: formatting.

[0]: https://amigafreeware.downer.tech/17bit/17bit/1423

New comment by unwind in "Ported my C game to WASM, here's every bug that I hit"

unwind — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:10:17 +0000

Nah I'm still against repeating the type name all over the place, and the cast adds nothing good imnsho.

New comment by unwind in "Ported my C game to WASM, here's every bug that I hit"

unwind — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:38:41 +0000

Meta: a space is missing in the title.

Since this is one of the bugs, I always recommemd writing

    game->boardPieces = swAlloc(sizeof(ThingHandle*) * row * column);

Like this instead:

    game->boardPieces = swAlloc(sizeof *game->boardPieces * row * column);

It's not 100% better, but it cuts out a few tokens which helps readability and moves the significant asterix further left where I think it's easier to spot.

New comment by unwind in "Mechanical Pencil: An illustrated celebration of the engineering around us"

unwind — Sun, 31 May 2026 05:15:16 +0000

Meta: confusing typo in title. Mods , please fix penciN -> penciL. Thanks.

New comment by unwind in "Fc, a lossless compressor for floating-point streams"

unwind — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:53:09 +0000

Can you elaborate on how it detects and signals if it runs out of output buffer space? I couldn't see how the amount of available space was even communicated to `fc_enc()`.

Also there some "C icks" (to me, I'm very picky and used to know the standard awfully well from answering many SO questions) that you might want to look into. The two I remember now are the casting of `void` pointers from allocation functions, and (worse) the assumption that "all bits zero" is how a NULL pointer is represented.

New comment by unwind in "Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered"

unwind — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:24:36 +0000

Probably [1], from 2025.

[1]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/31374/pinocchio-by-collodi-c...

New comment by unwind in "How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way"

unwind — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 04:05:16 +0000

Meta; typo in title, should be "learNEd".

New comment by unwind in "Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game"

unwind — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 06:13:25 +0000

This is fantastic, thank you for doing this. I hadn't thought of the poor Jaguar in ages! Heh.

Found a tiny typo, this sentence from quite early (page 17):

Notice how apparently wasteful this file format is: some of the triplets contain only byte.

I think the word "one" is missing before the final "byte".

New comment by unwind in "Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16"

unwind — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:32:42 +0000

Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.

There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:

    for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)

But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just

    for (;;)

That was confusing me a bit.

New comment by unwind in "Rice Theory: Why Eastern Cultures Are More Cooperative (2014)"

unwind — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:32:09 +0000

How about "R, G, B Mars" [1], then?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

New comment by unwind in "Animated Knots"

unwind — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:51:29 +0000

As a ultra noob in the art of knotting, I liked this when I stumbled over it a few weeks back. I agree that for newbies it would be even more instructive with smoother flows, I guess they're held back by the animations being photos and not, well, animations.

I also have read their backstory/naming thing [1] several times but I still don't quite get it. I first thought they were related to the historical Grog, but that was a misunderstanding. I think.

[1]: https://www.animatedknots.com/grog-story

New comment by unwind in "Minichord: A pocket-sized musical instrument"

unwind — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:16:13 +0000

Meta: This is a very messy title, it should just be "The minichord: a pocket-sized musical instrument" or something like that. We have the github info in the auto-generated blurb right after the title, after all. Thanks.

New comment by unwind in "MicroPythonOS graphical operating system delivers Android-like user experience"

unwind — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 11:33:34 +0000

Reasonably, that language is MicroPython [1] which is the special pared-down version of Python for memory-constrained embedded targets.

[1]: https://micropython.org/

New comment by unwind in "Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle"

unwind — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:04:25 +0000

Just a few months back I worked in embedded development on a project and there was a physical dongle to unlock the compiler, which was surprising during on-boarding as I've spent years doing commercial embedded work relying on GCC. :)

New comment by unwind in "Declassifying JUMPSEAT: an American pioneer in space"

unwind — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 06:26:46 +0000

“The historical significance of JUMPSEAT cannot be understated,” said Dr. James Outzen, NRO director of the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance.

I'm no native speaker but that is backwards, right? Shouldn't it be overstated if it was a success?

New comment by unwind in "Infinite pancakes, anyone?"

unwind — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:44:30 +0000

Me too, from Firefox in Linux and no (!) blockers. Weird. Maybe geo-fenced for not being in the US, sometimes companies do that which is ... weird.

New comment by unwind in "Some C habits I employ for the modern day"

unwind — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 08:07:26 +0000

Uh that piece of horror was not in the post. Phew.

New comment by unwind in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

unwind — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:37:28 +0000

Brown in German is actually, wait for it, "braun".