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ghusbands

3,089 karma · joined August 8, 2011

JS, C#, HTML, language implementation.
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ghusbands··on The future of version control
A common misconception is that git works with diffs as a primary representation of patches, and that's the implied reading of "stores diffs". Yes, git uses diffs as an optimisation for storage but the underlying model is always that of storing whole trees (DAGs of trees, even), so someone talking about it storing diffs is missing something fundamental. Even renames are rederived regularly and not stored as such.

However, context would matter and wasn't provided - without it, we're just guessing.

ghusbands··on Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild
Yes, once you use 'unsafe' to bypass the safety model, you don't get safety.

Edit: If you reply with a reply, rather than edits, you don't get such confusion.

ghusbands··on The first new compass since 1936
The comments on this site (HN) may be what most people are talking about. Youtube comments are too easily censored, so they probably will never manage to stick around.
ghusbands··on OLED, Not for Me
I would probably see text quality issues on that setup. It depends on how far away the monitor is. PPI on phone screens tends to be much higher than PPI on laptops which tends to be higher than PPI on monitors, because each is typically used at a different distance.

If you're not using text around 9 pixels tall, as in the article, you're probably going to be okay. On a 27 inch screen at a typical office screen distance, I'd probably want 6k, but 4k is pretty good and 1080p is terrible.

ghusbands··on OLED, Not for Me
In my experience, it seems to. My astigmatism (or other eye stuff) seems to move different colours different amounts, leading to wider RGB pixels and making things like Cleartype so much worse. So people were enjoying Cleartype and I was hating the obvious colour-changes and fringes that somehow they weren't seeing. I assume some people are lucky enough to have aberrations that actually make cleartype more pleasant.
ghusbands··on OLED, Not for Me
It's not like the Cleartype tuner actually does what the pages claim - you can go through and use the magnifier to choose the grayscale-only outcomes and still see Windows doing RGB stripe cleartype throughout. People literally have to install third-party tools like MacType or GDI-PlusPlus to get solid font rendering. So blaming users for using it wrong (especially when they're not even on Windows) is odd.

Also, many people can see and are bothered by particular non-rectangular pixel layouts - it doesn't require doing odd things.

ghusbands··on Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold hands-on
I had the same experience (Z Fold 4, screen protector at hinge broke at the five month mark - I replaced it with a third-party one to avoid a long repair period and another such breakage - the screen itself is now faulty at just beyond the two year mark).

If anyone were to buy a modern Samsung folding phone, I'd suggest you make sure you get the two-year coverage for the screen and assume it will break soon after that, so treat it like you're going to buy one every 2-3 years. But remember that warranty repairs sometimes involve sending the phone away for weeks, and Android's phone transfer story is still incomplete. That's merely my experience, of course.

ghusbands··on The first new compass since 1936
The inhibition of movement via eddy currents works best while the needle is moving fast, so you can still end up with smaller oscillations for a while - the apparent jump-cut to a stationary needle could be hiding that.

It's far easier to just use a compass with a needle brake - manually dampen the oscillation using the brake (and let go to ensure you aren't holding an incorrect reading) and you get a reading quickly.

ghusbands··on Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol
Your site still says "HOW TO ADD ALMOST EQUAL TO IN HTML? Use an HTML entity, a decimal code, or a hex code."

That is incorrect. As you say, you should just write the character in your HTML and ensure it's served with the correct encoding. If it's just for legacy cases, debugging or such, say so on the site.

ghusbands··on Periodic Spaces
A simpler way: You can avoid sampling neighbours by clamping the ray-march step so it never moves further than the current cell's boundary (plus a tiny epsilon). That way, you only cross into adjacent cells at the edge and avoid the 8 to maybe 26 extra SDF samples. (This only works if the geometry is entirely contained within each cell.)
ghusbands··on Time travel? Or, just clever technology
> This sort of stuff is actually doable just with just video chat and OBS.

If what each person is hearing is 100-400ms delayed from what each person is producing, how can they possibly mutually react or even get their music in time? If B plays in time with what they hear from C, C hears what B did 200-800ms later - that's far too much and will sound terrible.

Jamming would seem to require incredibly low latency audio just for the rhythm to work between two performers.

ghusbands··on EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies
You could post that comment on every article. (Please don't.)
ghusbands··on A tiny (1000 lines), fastish, embeddable scripting language can be AOT compiled
> garbage collection, I just link the Boehm GC. Not ideal, but good enough

It's worth noting that on 32-bit, the Boehm GC can have consistent issues [1] [2] [3] that make it worth avoiding for anything long-running. The Mono team implemented their own GC due to this. If a runtime is aiming to be useful on such systems, it may be worth implementing or using a less conservative GC.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_%28software%29#Garbage_co...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3576396

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8152374/

ghusbands··on Learning from the Amiga API/ABI
Try to notice how you're avoiding answering the points I raised and jumping at any chance to defend the Amiga (it was only 4-channel 8-bit built in and nobody achieved 14-bit sound before 1991). The Amiga vs X wars were decades ago at this point - you could just let it go.
ghusbands··on Learning from the Amiga API/ABI
I don't think there's intentional dishonesty in it - the author is just biased to seeing everything Amiga very positively.
ghusbands··on Learning from the Amiga API/ABI
Stereo 14-bit sound didn't really happen until the 1990s and needs quite a lot of CPU time and careful hacking, as Amiga sound chips are 8-bit, 4-channel. 4096 colors via weird hold-and-modify modes was never useful outside of demos and vanishingly few games. Nobody used 640x400 because interlacing was far too flickery, and such resolutions certainly didn't support 4096 colors.

The Amiga was ahead of its time in many ways, and the pre-emptive multitasking was fantastic, but claiming it was some paragon doesn't help anyone. If you wanted a fun home machine attached to a TV, it was great. Even a fun home machine attached to a monitor. If you wanted a business machine with a monitor, it wasn't the safest or best choice, if only due to a lack of software.

ghusbands··on Every 5x5 Nonogram
That's great, thanks. I've also independently verified the 25,309,575 using similar techniques.
ghusbands··on Every 5x5 Nonogram
It's common to assume that your solver encodes all the techniques that a human might reasonably use (without backtracking) but it's rarely the case. Someone could look at the clues in two columns and two rows at the same time, for example, and work out whether they together constrain something. (It's easier to see cases in minesweeper where quite long-range deductions can be made, especially when you're down to the last few mines.)

Look elsewhere in the thread and you'll see that there are 333,064 uniquely-solution grids that you have excluded.

ghusbands··on Every 5x5 Nonogram
The number of unique 5x5 grids is 33,554,432 (2^25) and the number if you ignore rotation or reflection is 4,211,744. What is 28,781,820?
ghusbands··on AI Responses May Include Mistakes
The one that appears when you search with Google.
ghusbands··on AI Responses May Include Mistakes
Which is notably not a "visual body cue"
ghusbands··on The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I (2021)
You're replying to someone who did, and plenty of others do. Language is fluid and flexible.
ghusbands··on Concurrency in Haskell: Fast, Simple, Correct
As siblings note, TVar is a transactional variable. However, it's not just protective against concurrent writes but also against concurrent reads of altered variables, so it offers true atomicity across any accessed state in a transaction.

So if you have a thread altering `foo` and checking that `foo+bar` isn't greater than 5 and a thread altering `bar` and checking the same, then it's guaranteed that `foo+bar` does not exceed 5. Whereas if only write conflicts were detected (as is default with most databases) then `foo+bar` could end up greater than 5 through parallel changes.

ghusbands··on Investigating MacPaint's Source Code
What are you trying to imply? That is was written entirely by LLMs or such? It has none of the usual tells. Or perhaps that an LLM was used to help? Yeah, that is possible, but not problematic.

I think it is mostly just a somewhat dry, academic style.

ghusbands··on Minding the gaps: A new way to draw separators in CSS
The way a word is typically used is its general meaning, even if it has a different meaning in some technical circles.
ghusbands··on Memory safety for web fonts
To be clear: Windows still does subpixel rendering, and the wizard is still there. The wizard has not actually worked properly for at least a decade at this point, and subpixel rendering is always enabled, unless you use hacks or third-party programs.
ghusbands··on Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 2: The Bad Update Exploit
You wrote "He suggests that all of the fat models will eventually red ring due to being stress tested at the factory" - it directly states that stress testing at the factory is the claimed reason that the fat models will red ring. Or was the video host somehow stress tested at a factory?
ghusbands··on “A calculator app? Anyone could make that”
That's a typo in the response, I believe. The screenshot shows 10^100 (10 to the power of 100).
ghusbands··on Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)
Got a link to one of those debunkings? (If it's so thoroughly debunked, it should be easy.)
ghusbands··on Why is Git Autocorrect too fast for Formula One drivers?
You're missing the value of these things in identifying bugs. When you subtract a number of seconds from a temperature, you'll be glad for the compile-time error. There also doesn't have to be a runtime cost, as in C++ (and languages supporting value type instances) they can either be type-erased or cost no more than an integer.
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