News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

g7r

It's car manufacturers who should be held responsible for this. I used to be the owner of a diesel car.

Diesel cars used to be really reliable. And then, in a moment, they got that ecology thing. They leaped from 500k+ kilometers until the first major expenses to just 100k+. From a consumer point of view, you were just buying the next version of the same diesel car. But in reality you get nothing even close. If that's not a deception, then I don't know what a deception is.

Many modern diesel cars require very expensive replacement parts after just 100k kilometers. I mean really expensive. I had Fiat Tipo and the particle filter would cost me €5000+. Which is more or less half the car market price. After trying "cheaper" approaches that mounted to the same €5k over the 1.5 years, without resolving the problem, I decided to sell the car.

On the other hand, this is just an ecology thing. Your car can perfectly live without it. You can turn it off for a fraction of that cost. After a year of trying different approaches, my mechanic even offered to do it for free. The temptation is very strong. You didn't plan financially for this kind of repair costs when you were buying a diesel car. You need your car to keep going for another 2-3 years at the very least to make the purchase feasible.

Of course, you can call it a customer mistake. After all, the manufacturer didn't provide a warranty beyond 100k kilometers. But nobody tells you that the car takes €5000+ in repairs per 100k kilometers.

I'm all hands for the ecology. Don't get me wrong. I didn't accept the offer to remove the insides of the particle filter. However, if I didn't have the money to buy a new car, I would certainly do that. With my conscience being clear, because I'm 100% sure that the manufacturer is the one who is responsible for this. And the governments who allowed this manufacturer to behave like that. I'm OK with paying the "ecology tax", but it should be clearly stated in the papers, and not shadily emerge after 100k kilometers.

Re:How to Implement an FPS Counter on Saturday April 25, 2026 @07:23AM (#47900562)
Technically, the methods with a queue drop up to an entire frame at the beginning of the window. Depending on how the averageProcessingTime() function is implemented, this can mean either faster recovery after a single heavy frame (if it divides by the sum of the durations of the frames in the window) or slightly lower than actual values overall (if it just divides by the duration of the window).

But that's just the nerd in me talking. The article is great!

Re:A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2 on Sunday November 23, 2025 @02:50AM (#46021618)
Ah, nice story!

This reminds me of another story with FPU involved. I was a game developer once. We were making a game that consistently triggered assertion failures related to FPU calculations, but only on a single PC in the whole office. The game was explicitly setting FPU precision to 32 bits at the start to make all calculations more consistent. However, on that particular PC, there was a fancy hand writing input software that injected its DLL into every process. As you've probably already guessed, that DLL did FPU mode reset to the default in the event handling loop (i.e., main thread). I had to shift FPU mode setting code from process initialization to the event handling loop to be able to deal with the damage that third party DLLs could inflict.

Re:Kitten TTS: 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source Voice Model on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @09:54PM (#44806787)
Yes. The FAQ says that multilingual capabilities are in the works.
Re:(On | No) Syntactic Support for Error Handling on Wednesday June 04, 2025 @01:49AM (#44177596)
Maybe so. However, it is really really handy when you are assessing the completeness of your tests using code coverage, and can clearly see unhandled negative paths. And then you can decide whether some of them deserve dedicated tests or not.
Re:MongoDB Announces Acquisition of Voyage AI for $220M on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @02:02AM (#43169048)
I have experience using both MongoDB and PostgreSQL. While pretty much spoken here is true, there is one more scalability aspect. When a fast moving team builds its service, it tends to not care about scalability. And in PostgreSQL there are much much more features that prevent future scalability. It's so easy to use them when your DB cluster is young and small. It's so easy to wire them up into the service's DNA.

In MongoDB the situation is different. You have to deal with the bare minimum of a database. But in return your data design has much higher horizontal scalability survivability.

In the initial phase of your startup, choose MongoDB. It's easier to start and evolve in earlier stages. And later on, if you feel the need and have resources to scale PostgreSQL, move your data there.

Re:Be Aware of the Makefile Effect on Saturday January 11, 2025 @03:12AM (#42664237)
We use Cargo Cult to refer to this phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
Can you please share a couple of examples on how you use Anki?
Re:It’s not hypocrisy, you’re just powerless on Saturday January 07, 2023 @06:34AM (#34287160)
It works the same way at international level, A-countries vs. B-countries.
This isn't a whataboutism, this is a case law.
Re:Russia halts deliveries of rocket engines to the U.S. on Thursday March 03, 2022 @02:56PM (#30545971)
A good way to lower possibility of conflicts is to deepen interdependencies between countries. This is how EU works, for example.

Loose ties on the other hand lower the barrier for countries to initiate a war.

Re:Steam's login method is kinda interesting on Monday January 11, 2021 @10:41PM (#25741977)
This strange solution looks like a legacy of times when Steam used HTTP instead of HTTPS. Maybe they just didn't bother to update working code after migration to HTTPS?
Re:UX Issues with Notion on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:17AM (#25525648)
5% is a lot! But even if it wasn't, it is not a proper justification for breaking basic things.
Re:UX Issues with Notion on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:14AM (#25525638)
No, I don't want do disallow editing. I do want to allow it but protect the content from accidental edits. Every time I publish a Notion page and forget to lock it, it is being accidentally modified. Some people notice it and undo. Some don't. In the combination with useless page history it is very difficult to reason whether the edit was accidental. The page could remain in accidentally modified state for a long time until author notices it.
Go linker generates relatively big binaries due to static linkage. For some cases binary size is becoming an issue. 100+ MB binaries aren't uncommon in Go universe.
Re:Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0 on Thursday July 30, 2020 @03:07AM (#23995460)
How employers would reason when their employees start getting UBI? "Hmm, I was paying my employees say $1000/mo that was barely enough to survive. Now government gives them $500/mo. That means that I can can subtract $500/mo from their salary".
Yes! The thing about line width limit in terminal isn't about display resolution and size only. As a man who prefers big characters due to conditions I always vote for lower line width limit. It is starting to get really uncomfortable on lines longer than 100-120 chars.
Re:JEP 325: Switch Expressions on Saturday January 20, 2018 @01:32AM (#16192354)
I want this in Go!