Hacker News Reader

cghon Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

Yeah, Sceptre's site shows a bunch of dumb TVs that max out at HDMI 2.0, 4K/60Hz. Basically, they are ten years out of date.

cghon Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

There are still annoyances. Our TV finds every opportunity to send you to its home screen of apps, requiring me to reset the input to the PS5 that we use for Netflix etc. And regardless, I don't want to pay for a lousy customised Android with a bunch of crappy apps preinstalled.

cghon Size of Life

“Compressible rodent” was not a phrase I thought I’d ever hear but I’m glad I did. Worth the price of a couple of coffees.

cghon If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

That’s what the article is about.

cghon Why we built Lightpanda in Zig

Essentially enough syntactic sugar so you could write eg the Allocator interface without manually specifying the vtable and the opaque pointer.

But yeah, Go’s system is nice and simple. I am not sure, but I think the fact that Zig programs are a single compilation unit might have some bearing on the orphan rule. There is no concept of crates so “traits”/interfaces can be defined and implemented anywhere.

cghon Why we built Lightpanda in Zig

Proper interfaces would be nice. I realize that eg tagged unions work for most cases but the syntactic sugar would reduce a bit of friction.

cghon Why we built Lightpanda in Zig

Most of the article is about why they didn’t use C or C++.

cghon Why we built Lightpanda in Zig

https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator, the company that hosts Hacker News.

cghon Japanese four-cylinder engine is so reliable still in production after 25 years

Nissan VQ series, 1994-today

cghon Apple to beat Samsung in smartphone shipments for first time in 14 years

This comment really reminds me of that old Onion column The Outside Scoop by Jackie Harvey.

cghon Iceland declares ocean-current instability a national security risk

It’s worth looking at this polar map to get a visual sense of the ramifications of this happening:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle#/media/File:Arct...

Notice the red line, marking where the average temperature of the warmest month is below 10°C. Notice how low it is on the west side of the Atlantic, in Nunavut and Labrador. It’s between 50° and 60° north.

Now imagine that line at those latitudes in Europe. You’d have Labrador-like conditions in the UK, a drastic situation indeed. Reykjavik would suddenly resemble Iqaluit.

cghon Copenhagenize Index 2025: The Global Ranking of Bicycle-Friendly Cities

According to Wikipedia, the mean daily minimum of Helsinki in January is -5.6°. In Quebec City, it’s -17.7°. Not the same, at least according to Wikipedia.

cghon Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3

This is a variation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

cghon The time has finally come for geothermal energy

Canada as a whole is roughly 70% hydroelectric.

cghon Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

Since 2010: 3GS, 6S and now an SE. All of them were dropped, submerged and generally knocked around. The SE fell off the top of a moving vehicle. I do use an Otter case.

cghon Project Euler

I still have the code for the first 50 problems in GitHub. The last commit was thirteen years ago. I don’t know why I checked these in rather than treating them as throwaway code like I did for so many other things, but I’m glad I did as I’m sure my PE account is gone now too.

cghon Vitamin D reduces incidence and duration of colds in those with low levels

I experimented with taking 10,000 IU a day for about a year. I had my D levels checked with my normal yearly blood test (lipids, etc) and it put me into the high normal range. I still take 5000 IU daily and have for years with no ill effects.

I should note that I live in a place that sees little sun for five or so months a year.

cghon Asbestosis

When I was nine years old, we moved to an asbestos-mining town for about a year and a half. Sometimes dust settled on our house when they were blasting up at the mine site. It’s closed now and the road into town was decommissioned. It’s a remote place to begin with but I still hear of people making the trek to get in there.

cghon Apple M5 chip

I have a 3rd Gen iPad Pro from 2018 and iPadOS 26 runs fine.

cghon KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser

The point is that KDE from 2015 will still run on today’s hardware.

cghon No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

Also, I believe in the US ordinary dividends are taxed at the income tax rate which is much higher than the capital gains rate.

cghon Vectrex Mini

My friend had one of these when we were little kids and I remember being impressed by how smooth and high-quality the joystick felt. This was mid-80s so maybe it’s because the competition was lacking.

Also, I’m pretty sure this was the only Vectrex within ~40,000km^2 of where I grew up.

cghon Cormac McCarthy's personal library

Child of God and The Crossing are two of my favourites by him.

cghon The AI coding trap

A surprising conclusion to me at least is that a lot of programmers simply don’t like to write code.

cghon You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here

I once submitted a typo fix, among other things, to XFree86 way back when. Talk about love of the game, good grief.

cghon The American Nations regions across North America

Was just about to type this comment. Allegedly, the guy who came up with the term “First Nations” was from a group (Athabaskan? I don’t remember) who were historically at war with the Inuit, so he left them out. Pretty ridiculous. I’m pretty sure everyone involved would be annoyed at getting grouped together into the same “nation”.

cghon This map is not upside down

Heck if I know. All I know is I am a lot more worked up about the misuse of “less” when the correct word is “fewer”.

cghon This map is not upside down

There’s an outdated rule in English that states you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. It dates back to a time when writers applied Latin’s grammatical rules to English. It’s mostly ignored now.

cghon Java 25 officially released

Java is hugely popular and widely used on large backend systems. I guess a lot of people here don't work on such systems? I'm always surprised when I see comments like the parent, since in my career exposure to Java is near-ubiquitous.