Hacker News Reader

exidyon Grok 4.6

To the best of our recorded knowledge, nobody ran a 4-minute mile in the five millennia prior to Roger Bannister in May 1954[0], but more than 2,000 people have met or exceeded this achievement since. In fact, his record stood only briefly, being bested the following month by John Landy.

The moral of the story? People work in parallel on the same goals, they build on best practice, or sometimes just need to see something is possible (reusable rockets). Having achievements cluster like this is normal and expected.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile

exidyon macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

There was a brief period of time where you could buy your car like this. You'd purchase a rolling chassis from one manufacturer, and commission a coachbuilder to put a body on top. Many premium brands such as Bugatti, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar (Swallow) started in this fashion.

Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.

We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.

As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.

Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.

If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody

[1] Servers/Linux are the commercial vehicles in this analogy

exidyon Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash

You are absolutely correct that things can go wrong very quickly, especially at altitude. Modern planes fly very high for reasons of efficiency, but as the air thins, the window between stall speed and overspeed becomes narrower[0]. That's why piloting always emphasises the need to be thinking ahead of what the plane is doing and not following it.

For this incident, they were flying at FL350 (35,000 feet) and had a service ceiling of FL370 at their current weight -- that's a difference of only 2,000 feet. Within 30 seconds of the autopilot disconnecting, Bonin put the aircraft into a 7,000 feet/minute climb! So that margin was eaten up very very quickly.

If you're interested in aircraft incidents and accidents I recommend Petter Hörnfeldt's excellent YouTube channel Mentour Pilot[1]. He goes into deep technical detail and has covered not just AF447 but many other incidents where the pilot lost situational awareness and put a perfectly working plane into the ground.

[0] https://www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/aerodynamics/coffin-...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot

exidyon Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash

Once the aircraft was stalled there was a narrow window to recover from it, which obviously did not occur. But the stall was entirely caused by pilot input of full nose up! The procedure for unreliable airspeed (which was in both the QRH and the FCOM) was simply to fly a known safe power / pitch from the tables provided in the QRH.

At no time was any of the pilot's Attitude Indicators (Artificial Horizons) inoperative -- all they had to do was maintain straight and level flight at a known power setting and everyone would have come home safely.

exidyon Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash

The behaviour you describe above only occurred after the pilot flying stalled the plane. There was a procedure for unreliable airspeed indication. Had the pilot flying performed it, the situation would have been resolved without incident.

AF could perhaps be held liable for insufficient training on high-altitude stalls or recognising and responding to reversions to alternate law. But it's hard to see how Airbus can be responsible for a pilot ignoring the most basic first response.

exidyon Colossus: The Forbin Project

The line is actually "HOW MANY NIGHTS A WEEK DO YOU REQUIRE A WOMAN?" and was cut from the broadcast version.[0]

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/alternateversions/

exidyon Comparing the Z80 and 6502 to Their Relatives

> Speedwise the 1MHz 6502 and 4MHz Z80 were on par.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, the 6502 was efficient but not that efficient. While generally understood that the Z80 took 2x-4x ticks to execute instructions as the 6502, in the real world its larger register set meant properly-written Z80 code could avoid expensive, slow round trips to memory.

Outside of artificial benchmarks real world performance shows that the 6502 is roughly 2x as efficient per clock cycle as the Z80[0], i.e. a 1 MHz 6502 is approximately equivalent to a 2 Mhz Z80.

This is reflected in the computers of the day, i.e. TRS-80s were not being blown out of the water by Commodore PETs.

[0] https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal/blob/master/minipasca...

exidyon Lost in translation: The linguistic challenges facing N. Korean defectors (2025)

I completely understand the sentiment you're expressing here, however if it helps the language you see as a monolithic invader underwent exactly the same process, more than once. If you could go back in time, no doubt a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon would bemoan the influx of Norman French replacing perfectly capable English (Germanic) words.

exidyon KLM cancels 160 flights due to fuel shortage

News outlets around the world continue to misreport this particular phenomena. Demand for air travel is highly elastic. As airlines raise prices to cover the increased cost of fuel, they are cutting capacity to ensure their load factors remain in the profitable range.

This post links to the incorrect article. From the correct one [0]:

> The Dutch airline said: "This concerns a limited number of flights within Europe that, due to rising kerosene costs, are currently no longer financially viable to operate. There is no kerosene shortage."

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/16/europe-supp...

exidyon One DNA letter can trigger complete sex reversal

... in mice. [0]

[0] https://jamesheathers.medium.com/in-mice-explained-77b61b598...

exidyon Things I learned from Reddit fashion

I can walk down a Bangkok street in my suit and be comfortable. Why? Lightweight Italian wool fabric, silk-lined jacket, cotton shirt. Meanwhile the guy next to me in short sleeve polo and jeans is a puddle of sweat.

Synthetics definitely have their place. Uniqlo's Airism is a game-changer in the tropics and lots of outdoors activities like hiking or skiing are much more comfortable with modern technical fabrics, but natural fibres are far from obsolete.

exidyon 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)

Even a sextant and decent watch should be able to get you to within a nautical mile or two.

exidyon Move Detroit

> It would be like the UK allowing Oxford or Cambridge to become a slum, the universities moving away and the old buildings becoming derelict. Or the Sydney Opera House going vacant and letting squatters move in.

Or the Roman Forum going from the centre of life in the world's most powerful empire to cattle field? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum#Medieval

exidyon Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't

> I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so excellently

Probably Singapore, which is sometimes described as the Switzerland of Asia anyway. 10 Gb symmetric fibre is broadly available at around SGD $50/month (about 35 EUR).

exidyon Oracle slashes 30k jobs

I had to explain this to some slightly younger colleagues recently. It's hard to believe now, but in ye olde days hardware was not as cheap and abundant as it is now. So you invested heavily in your database servers and to justify the hardware and software cost, ran as many workloads as possible on it to spread the pain.

This is also the same incentives that resulted in many classic architectures from 80s and 90s relying heavily on stored procedures. It was the only place where certain data could be crunched in a performant way. Middleware servers lacked the CPU and memory to crunch large datasets, and the network was more of a performance bottleneck.

exidyon Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody

[1] Servers/Linux are the commercial vehicles in this analogy

exidyon Flighty Airports

> Departure time is easier because of https://www.fly.faa.gov/edct/showEDCT

If you're in the US!

exidyon Flighty Airports

While I appreciate the aesthetics of this feature I actually fear it represents a loss of focus for Flighty. As a traveller, I don't need a global view of airport disruptions, I need relevant info for my flights.

Given the prominent TV Mode button in the interface, this update seems to be about competing with Flightradar24, who sell business subscriptions for airports and related sectors for information displays.

exidyon Flighty Airports

> one of the most important pieces of data for a flight, its duration

Flighty is all about getting you to the airport in time for your flight, so the most important pieces of information are things like departure times, connection times, delay information, terminal and boarding gate. These are prioritised in the interface.

The flight duration is set when you book the flight and it's not going to change, there is no reason to prioritise this.

> It also doesn’t surface boarding time

I think this would be useful but difficult data to get. Airlines sometimes will push boarding announcements to their own apps but I doubt they would agree to feed Flighty.

exidyon Windows 3.1 tiled background .bmp archive

It's a face, specifically the "face of technology". [0]

[0] https://1000logos.net/packard-bell-logo/

exidyon The MacBook Neo

I don't think it's a useful distinction. I wouldn't describe my car as "really a vacuum cleaner", despite them both having an electric motor.

The form factor is the defining characteristic, because that informs how people use it. The CPU does not.

exidyon America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks

> Singapore has a regressive shock absorber model where something like half the country are immigrants that are ineligible for, say, public housing

Singapore has about 1.5 million foreign workers[0] of the population of 6.1 million or just under 25%. Of that 1.5 million, 75% are WP holders who pay no tax and have housing provided as a condition of their employment. Why would you expect social housing to be provided for them?

Only about 5-6% of the population are on EPs and SPs. They are definitely vulnerable during a downturn, but they are professionals and they know the rules coming in. At least while they're here they enjoy low tax rates and don't have to contribute to CPF. If they fell into the expat trap of living the high life and didn't save, that's on them.

[0] https://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-workforce-numbers

exidyon America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks

> The country effectively runs on a slave class.

I really wish people would not throw this word around so casually, it is disrespectful to the many millions of people over the course of human history (and today!) who were forced under threat of violence or death to labour without remuneration.

Of course Singapore's migrant worker system is open to criticism, but every single one of those workers can resign tomorrow and get a free plane ticket home, and the same applies to domestic helpers as well.

Migrant workers work in Singapore because it's their most rational economic choice. They pay no income tax, room and board is provided and the wages are sufficient to house, feed and educate their family back home, almost certainly to a better standard than would otherwise be possible had they remained in their home country.

tl;dr migrant workers have agency!

The comment about cars is unintentionally hilarious. “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.” and the public transportation in Singapore is very good indeed.

exidyon America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks

The non-resident population of Singapore (which is a reasonable proxy for migrant worker population) is at the highest it's ever been, as is the total population.[0][1]

[0] https://www.singstat.gov.sg/publications/reference/singapore...

[1] https://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-workforce-numbers

exidyon Waymo exec reveals company uses remote workers in the Philippines

It's a direct translation of Las Islas Filipinas which dates it back to the Spanish colonial era.

exidyon Waymo exec reveals company uses remote workers in the Philippines

I'm sure no ill intent on your part but referring to the Philippines as "The PI" (short for The Philippine Islands as it was known under US colonial administration) is roughly equivalent to calling Thailand "Siam" or Sri Lanka "Ceylon".

Since 1946 the country has simply been known as the Philippines, officially "the Republic of the Philippines" and the ISO 3166 code is PH.

exidyon Trump revokes landmark ruling that greenhouse gases endanger public health

As a non-American this seems very similar to what happened with Roe vs Wade.

> With a divided Congress unable to agree on legislation to tackle rising global temperatures, the EPA finding became central to federal efforts to rein in emissions in the years that followed.

Trying to get the right outcome via (arguably) the wrong process has left these policy initiatives sitting on wobbly foundations and subject to reversal. Moreover, it provides ammunition for those who would rally their base with criticism of the "technocratic elite."

Easier said than done, but Americans need to fix their democracy. If the majority of Americans want action on climate change then Congress must reflect and enact the will of the people.

exidyon RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001)

Even many decades later I remember the frustration in university 100-level CS courses of every new concept demonstrated with a mess of foo(), int* bar, void** baz scribbled on a overhead projector.

Descriptive names are helpful, people! I think even back in the 90s C supported at least 31 characters.

exidyon C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

The author is upfront about their goals and motivations and explicitly acknowledges that other concerns exist. Calling it whiny is ungracious -- the author is letting some very human frustration peek through in their narrative.

Not everything has to be written with all the warmth and humanity of a UN subcommittee interim report on widget standardisation.

exidyon Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

Partly it was an anti-Wobbler thing. Someone in America or somewhere thought it was real clever to make the game ask you little questions, like “What’s the first word on line 23 on page 19 of the manual?" and then reset the machine if you didn’t answer them right, so they’d obviously never heard of Wobbler’s dad’s oﬃce’s photocopier.

-- Only You Can Save Mankind, Terry Pratchett, 1992