omoikane

> Might as well go back to ye olden days and put 100% of your memory in a giant preallocated block

I do that for the Playdate: statically allocate most of the large structures and tables in global variables, and don't call malloc or free after initialization is done.

I also put some things on the stack, not so much because I need to dynamically allocate or free something, often it's because I get lower access latency to the stack compared to main memory (because stack lives inside ARM's tightly coupled memory).

I wonder why the publishers insist on selling thick books like that. The books I read tend to come in multiple volumes, and it's not like I would finish it all at once so I just need to carry at most one or two volumes.

Coincidentally, the same plant in Japanese is kuzu (クズ, or 葛), which shares the same pronunciation as the word for trash (屑). So bad code is trash.

Maybe because if the code wants to call the invalid opcode interrupt handler (INT6), it needs extra code to populate the flags and registers expected by that handler, whereas actually triggering an invalid opcode exception will get all those parameters populated automatically.

Regarding compiler deleting memset, there are multiple memory-zeroing functions that are guaranteed not to be optimized away:

https://cppreference.com/c/string/byte/memset (memset_s)

https://cppreference.com/cpp/string/byte/memset (memset_explicit)

Also see notes section for various other functions that people were using before memset_s became standard.

> Torturers don't hit people in the head

The comic doesn't say hit the person in the head, it says "hit him with this $5 wrench", and did not specify what to hit.

https://xkcd.com/538/

> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40090809

The playlist included "the sound of jet planes all night" and "the screams of rabbits being slaughtered". I don't think they really need AI for that, anything loud would probably do the trick after 51 days.

I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack.

I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.

Another solution from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49562657 - Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge (4 days ago, 99 comments)

I just tried and it doesn't happen for me, maybe the problem has already been fixed?

Separately, if I were seeing a captcha that I can't get past, my first reaction would be to find a different site to see if it's a site specific issue, because some sites intentionally configure their captcha to work like that (e.g. you can't get in until you have been stuck solving captchas for at least a minute). I would see that more as a signal that the site operator is user hostile and not attribute it to a captcha provider.

I think this is an example of "shipping your org chart". The fix is proposed in the reply "we need one person/team to own the overall picture", but I am not sure they reached that fix by the end of the thread.

> This means that adding one (1) to the difficulty of a challenge makes it 1024 (one thousand twenty-four) times as hard to solve in the worst case.

I don't understand the units here, wouldn't a bit versus nibble difference make the multiplier 16, instead of 1024?

I also have been using a flip phone ever since I got a cell phone. I had to upgrade it once because the old phone only supports up to 3G network or whatever, and my carrier just silently dropped all calls on that network a few years back, so I had to upgrade to one with 4G. My current phone is Alcatel 4051S.

But I also have an Android phone without any data plan attached, which I use only for recording GPS coordinates when I am taking pictures outdoors. I have mostly managed to avoid places that require scanning some code or installing some app.

Video explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f2wV7Odq8E

A multiquine of 51 languages by Yusuke Endoh, where each quine also accepts an argument to output quine in another language.

In 2021, USD to JPY exchange rate ranged from ~102 to ~115, and the average was ~109. The actual exchange rate could be a bit less depending on where you make the exchange, so 100 USD to 10000 JPY doesn't seem like that much off.

(For example, I noticed that if I buy something from Amazon or try to pay for something using Paypal, the exchange rate they offered me is consistently worse than the market rate if I elect to pay with USD instead of JPY. The difference often adds up to a few dollars, even accounting for foreign transaction fees that my bank might charge.)

> User interface and user experience improvements

https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta6/release-notes/#:~...

Menu that does different things based on modifier keys seems novel to me, is BeOS or Haiku the first interface where menus take modifier keys into account?

> humans have a high ability to ignore negatives in things they're a fan of, including (and often especially) their own work

I thought this is due to the "backfire effect", because humans perceive criticisms of things they like as threats.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

This is a wonderful paper that includes many optimization tricks that are generally applicable, including various optimizations that they retrofitted into lld. But I thought there was one meta optimization that was especially interesting (from page 2):

> A new linker's early adopters knowingly accept such differences, which is one reason why drastic improvements tend to come from new linkers rather than existing ones

This is true of many things, not just linkers. I think this is encouraging for people to (re)try things that have already been done, because newcomers are allowed to take risks that established things can't take.

Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762

But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.

There was another miscompilation discussed last month:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48743462 - It's not me, it's the compiler (2026-07-01, 26 comments)

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/158206

Alan Paeth's three-shear rotation is one of my favorite algorithms, especially because it's perfectly suited for rotating pixel art. Because shearing preserves all the original pixels, it even works with dithered images, unlike sampling-based rotation schemes.

It's also fairly simple to implement. I have implemented a version that rotates ASCII art, and that code made it to Ruby's list of sample programs:

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/tree/master/sample/trick2025/01...

I like Existential Comic's explanation of the simulacrum concept, using football/soccer injuries as an example:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/476

I like how a website for tracking balloons escalated into critical infrastructure. Reminds me of 99 Red Balloons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons

It's iOS only, relying on iOS to exclude isSecureTextEntry things from screenshots:

https://github.com/mozzius/expo-privacy-sensitive/blob/main/...

The 1% Fighter

> while (has_watermark(text)) slightly_rewrite...

I understand what you are trying to say but I am not sure any watermark detection API would definitively return a true/false answer, I would have expected something more like a numeric confidence value. I am also not sure if the API would be deterministic.

Maybe Bluesky is not quite the Twitter rival it set out to be, but it's got a better shot than Mastodon, according to the user count graphs here:

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

https://mastodon-analytics.com/

Bluesky has a higher total user count. I think the number of active users might be higher too, but I am not sure what's mastodon's definition of an active user for the second link above. Anecdotally, Bluesky feels more lively for me because that seem to be the default destination for Twitter refugees.

Related, Oscar Toledo also made a tiny Klondike Solitaire program for IOCCC, I wonder if it was inspired by this one:

https://nanochess.org/klondike_in_c.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450024 - Klondike Solitaire game for curses in 5k of C (2026-06-08, 17 comments)

> Sanjay (who just joined Twitter)

Clarification: this comment is saying Sanjay Ghemawat joined Twitter as a user recently (new account @Sanjay_Ghemawat as of July 2026), as opposed to Sanjay working for Twitter the company.