Hacker News: ygra

New comment by ygra in "C vs. C#: racing VLC's Gaussian blur"

ygra — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 06:23:25 +0000

Probably a reflection of the age of that code along with the usefulness of the feature. If no one actually needs the video blurry, then it doesn't matter how efficient the filter is.

New comment by ygra in "Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers"

ygra — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:46:51 +0000

I found it very tiring to read, actually.

New comment by ygra in "Tesla takes on $30B in credit as it approaches unprofitability"

ygra — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:33:17 +0000

It's not really a vehicle that many people need. Our VW Caddy seats 7 with the third row of seats, but that was installed for a week before we took it out and it's been in the garage since then. I've had the car full of stuff more often than I had it full of people. And even then it's mostly air in a car that's shaped like a brick wall that's been driven around most of the time. I can drive it at around 6.5 l/100 km of gas, but 7.1 is more typical. So a more sensible choice would have been a smaller and more efficient car.

New comment by ygra in "Video CDs Break Windows Explorer"

ygra — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 07:41:04 +0000

Similar to Audio CDs. Considering that that was a time when these were more likely being played in an actual hardware player than put into a PC, I don't think the choice was necessarily wrong. Also, I think for CDs with a file system on them, the error correction was necessary, thus reducing content size.

New comment by ygra in "Video CDs Break Windows Explorer"

ygra — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:32:24 +0000

From the description I'm not sure Explorer is actually the culprit, as they mention other apps also causing this, if they use Windows’ own file copying routine. And that might mean just restarting Explorer might not work, when the CopyFile call hangs somewhere in the kernel.

New comment by ygra in "Augustofaces: Pareidolia Fine Art"

ygra — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 06:06:26 +0000

As someone with mild prosopagnosia I find some of them rather frustrating instead. Interestingly I can find a face in many of them, but some are effectively impossible.

New comment by ygra in "A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts"

ygra — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:47:09 +0000

> I don’t mind if you want a custom look and feel for your application: I very much do mind if your widgets don’t behave like other widgets of the same type ...

Interesting that you picked 2007 as the start of Windows' decline in this regard when WPF (from the same year) makes it so much easier to change the look without changing the behavior. I my eyes that toolkit does a lot of things right with controls that only define their behavior and not their visuals, which can easily be completely replaced (well, easier than writing a new Scrollbars from scratch).

New comment by ygra in "A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts"

ygra — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:40:04 +0000

I don't think the original Minesweeper used actual buttons for its playing field. That'd be a lot of controls that can be better handled by one custom drawn control. They also did look different from actual Win32 buttons which likely is another clue.

New comment by ygra in "Java 27 Released"

ygra — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:44:20 +0000

You don't really have to use the latest C# version, though. Install the latest .NET and you get the performance improvements without usually having to change anything about your code.

New comment by ygra in "What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?"

ygra — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:20:30 +0000

Either that call would have to do the same (i.e., walking the files and counting), or you'd need some additional metadata in the directory entry to store how many files there are, requiring additional storage accesses for adding and removing files. Adding to that that both FAT32 and NTFS are quite old and had to run on older hardware. Cycles and disk accesses are not free.

On top of that, how often is it necessary to efficiently know the number of files in a directory while at the same time not caring about the files enough to list or display them? This algorithm is a special case where you could use the count of using a bit simpler code that ultimately would have the same file system API calls (since you cannot tell the FS to give you file #37 from that directory, so you'd have to use FindNextFile 37 times anyway, just like the sampling algorithm).

New comment by ygra in "Commercially Available Bike Generators Are Not Sustainable (2011)"

ygra — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:48:56 +0000

Are there options that don't limit the output power? Typically the light power is limited, so dynamos only provide around 5 W or so, which already makes them not so attractive even for charging your phone on a bike.

New comment by ygra in "Pressed Penny Machine Map"

ygra — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 22:05:32 +0000

They do exist here in Germany as well, mostly in tourist destinations. The map does not show any outside the US, though. OpenStreetMap has 662 of them here.

New comment by ygra in "Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory"

ygra — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:27:42 +0000

Are you sure? https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how...

New comment by ygra in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

ygra — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:27:57 +0000

Also known as banner blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness). I'm genuinely surprised that a UX person doing usability testing (for a website!) has never heard of this. But I guess there's people missing basic knowledge in every field.

New comment by ygra in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

ygra — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 05:21:51 +0000

You can bring the water to a boil and dial back the heat when you add the pasta. Will still cook, but no boiling over. Saves a bit of electricity as well.

New comment by ygra in "Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap"

ygra — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:10:21 +0000

Yeah, StreetComplete helps both with adding the data in the first place and then keeping is current, since it will also ask those questions again after a while (which also gives an opportunity to check whether a feature still exists). What's less visible there is whether a cafe exists at all – it's not as good to add missing objects as it is for filling in details of existing objects, at least for the casual user.

New comment by ygra in "Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap"

ygra — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:05:43 +0000

Well, those things can be added:

    - opening_hours=*
    - amenity=cafe
    - website:menu=*

But they can easily become outdated again. Still, local QA via StreetComplete, MapComplete, EveryDoor and a multitude of other apps is always needed.

New comment by ygra in "LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent"

ygra — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 04:35:04 +0000

> Where is Windows' equivalent of APFS / BTRFS (or even EXT4)..? NTFS is more than 20 years old by now.

There's ReFS, but a lot of NTFS features are basically baked into the filesystem API, so replacing it is hard.

That being said, NTFS works extremely well and reliable. I don't really see a compelling need to replace it (which is always a messy transition unless you're completely backwards-compatible -- but in that case, NTFS has evolved a lot already).

New comment by ygra in "G# – A modern .NET language with Go, Kotlin, and Swift ergonomics"

ygra — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:58:20 +0000

They still do.

New comment by ygra in "StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time"

ygra — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:56:30 +0000

There's a companion app, StreetMeasure, that uses Google's AR measuring capability on compatible phones. Personally, I carry a laser distance measure.