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bigcityslider

31 karma · joined July 4, 2026

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bigcityslider··on Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s
Really cool. This reminds me of escape rooms. Since they're a newer thing, a lot of them rely on modern low-cost DIY stuff like this.
bigcityslider··on Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
What about Jurassic Park 2? Never saw it
bigcityslider··on Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
Oh, guess Jurassic Park has two programmer main characters if you count the one who knows Unix
bigcityslider··on Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
7GB could very well be less than a game today. I've got only one commercial game on my Mac, MTW2 at 14GiB, and it's on the older side. But AssaultCube is 80MiB :)
bigcityslider··on Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
It feels like 1990s movies were the heaviest on computers/gadgets. Jurassic Park has a programmer as a main character, GoldenEye has two.
bigcityslider··on C++20 Improved the For-Loop Syntax
And it's not because he's cranky or something, he was holding out for something worthy to possibly use instead of C. Turned out to be Rust.
bigcityslider··on Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
Yeah, people were definitely recommending Wayland in 2021. That's when Ubuntu made it default.
bigcityslider··on Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
Was there some other reason distros switched to Wayland? I've always heard X11 was just not maintained well and had too much tech debt, not so much about the security.

From what I remember, Wayland is a thinner layer than X11, basically handing clients pointers to shared buffers for them to write into, which seems better than X11's server approach. Thought maybe people were eager to switch for latency reasons, but this benchmark is showing otherwise. And would think Wayland is more efficient too, but I haven't noticed or heard of a difference.

bigcityslider··on Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
I don't know enough about this to have a favorite, just know the transition was rough. Like one day at work our DE had to get changed because of whatever reasons they couldn't use X anymore, and that affected more things like Chrome Remote Desktop. Years after I tried setting up Linux on an old PC and learned that Wayland is de facto default now, but not in Mint, even though Mint is supposed to be the easy one... and CRD was still finicky in either one.

Linux is about choice, but unless you're ready to write a lot of things yourself, it's outside your control how well parts of the ecosystem are supported. For an average user it's unacceptable for your entire GUI to suddenly change in a way that requires relearning, something that Mac and Windows have avoided doing at least since 2000. Even Win8 or Mac26 wasn't so disruptive. It's possibly worse for an average Linux user because they aren't just concerned with how it looks but also compatibility with advanced things like X forwarding or VNC or CRD.

bigcityslider··on Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
You can measure a 3.3ms difference, but whether someone will notice and care is a different thing.
bigcityslider··on Ancient Roman Board Game
Glad I'm not the only one
bigcityslider··on The console wars have been lost
Every time I've been at someone's house with a new (ie post 2005) game console, there's some problem with launching the game. Except for Nintendo, kinda, well even then getting controllers to pair is like herding cats.
bigcityslider··on The console wars have been lost
Maybe, idk, no horse in this race. My newest console is a GameCube, and my Mac can run approximately 2 games. Just saying there's a delineation between PC and console.
bigcityslider··on Protobuf-py: Protobuf for Python, without compromises
Yeah I saw that a while back, this is how it should be done
bigcityslider··on The console wars have been lost
Windows PC can run Steam though
bigcityslider··on Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
Well yeah if you made your router use 2002:1.2.3.4, your ISP advertised 2002:1.2:: on BGP, and the other ISPs agreed your ISP owns that, that would work. They didn't do that, and the spec didn't say to. They did 6to4 instead.

I understand the limitation that you can never put a 128-bit address in a 32-bit field, and one way or another two hosts and everything in between have to understand the new packet format. That didn't force them to make ipv6 its whole separate network from v4 where almost no state is shared with v4. Having separate DHCP6 vs DHCP4 was a choice, likewise with DNS, NAT, and even the routing tables. It makes the difference for service operators who would be fine adopting ipv6 but don't want it to be a big project.

bigcityslider··on Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
Having 1.2.3.4 in v4 doesn't make ::ffff:1.2.3.4 or 2002:1.2.3.4 route to me in v6. It would route to a relay that translates/resends to v4 1.2.3.4, then it reaches my router over v4. Nobody can use that address over pure v6.

There's no one clever trick to make the transition easy, the idea is to preserve the v4 address blocks in v6. That cascades down to a bunch of different decisions, some of which include keeping NAT around. They've most likely thought of that too, and turned it down because they wanted to start with a clean slate and maybe also had some other vision of pure P2P apps.

bigcityslider··on Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
If I have 1.2.3.4 in ipv4 world, I want 1.2.3.4 in ipv6 world instead of a random new address. I want another ipv6 host to be able to send dst=1.2.3.4 and have it go directly to my ipv6 host. 6to4 isn't comparable to that, it's for translation to/from v4 like you said.
bigcityslider··on The console wars have been lost
Locked down OS and hardware, or not usable for general compute for some other reason. 20 years ago you could have a gaming PC with discs like a console, but again the console was locked down.
bigcityslider··on The console wars have been lost
Doesn't seem blurry to me, Steam Machine is just a PC.
bigcityslider··on The console wars have been lost
A game console is also locked down from the user, usually because the company is selling hardware at a loss, wants to maintain control, and wants to prevent cheating in online games. May also have exclusive games tied to the hardware.
bigcityslider··on Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
Unsafe Rust makes me think they did this entirely because LLMs are better at Rust than at Zig, but let's see what happens next.
bigcityslider··on Protobuf-py: Protobuf for Python, without compromises
The regular proto-to-python feels fine to me. I quit Google a while ago and have still been using protobufs, and the main things that usually make teammates wary are: 1. No way to load .proto specs at runtime (there are GH issues about this) 2. No clear and easy way to use it with HTTP/1.1. Neither is specific to Python.

Both of these might sound silly if you're used to protobufs, cause you can build little helpers for both, but plenty of people have never used protos. They would shrug proto away if there weren't someone like me to attest that it won't get in the way. It seems like Google focused on gRPC, but the real prize for adoption would've been going after the simple HTTP+JSON use cases. Like an official protobuf Express middleware.

bigcityslider··on Why Vanilla JavaScript
Same, but the article isn't about JS vs TS, it's a criticism of frameworks.
bigcityslider··on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
If AI-generated comments are disallowed, why are AI-generated articles allowed? Seems like they have the same issues.
bigcityslider··on Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
6to4 or NAT64 isn't the same thing as what all those IPv4+/5/7/8 people want, if that's what you were referring to. You don't actually own the IPv4-mapped-V6 address, as in packets don't get routed to you, they go to a relay that was notoriously flaky.
bigcityslider··on Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
That IPv8 draft has stuff like oauth in it that don't make sense. I put together an IPv5 proposal based on all the old ones. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781622
bigcityslider··on A fleshed-out IPv5 proposal
V5 would depend on IPv6 packet parsing to work, but the reason some are avoiding v6 now is really everything else about it, which v5 avoids.

Agree about the rest. Also I did have a note about 6to4 in there but had to remove it due to char limit. RFC 6343 has some retrospective on why it got abandoned, basically the config-free option (anycast) was too flaky.

bigcityslider··on Yet Another IPv5 Proposal
For the same reason they haven't already switched from v4 to v6. It's too much setup in some cases.