Hacker News: 0x0203

New comment by 0x0203 in "OpenBSD has a use-after-free allowing local privilege escalation to root"

0x0203 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:06:42 +0000

Depends on what you mean by active. The kernel has the code in the binary, but on boot it goes through device discovery and initialization, so it doesn't initialize or run drivers for things that aren't present.

There are also architecture specific builds, so the aarch64 build won't include driver code at all for devices that are specific to x86.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Atomic Force Microscope [video]"

0x0203 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:56:58 +0000

What's the size difference between the AFM needle and the area of stored magnetic flux on a hard drive platter? If you used an AFM as a sort of record player, scanning along lines of little pits, what sort of theoretical information density could be achieved over the whole surface of the disk?

New comment by 0x0203 in "MicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C"

0x0203 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:48:53 +0000

It's not mine; just a project I've toyed with a few times in my search for GUI toolkits over the years. Issues and/or PRs can be filed on the github page though.

New comment by 0x0203 in "MicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C"

0x0203 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:18:43 +0000

For a slightly larger, cross-platform, retained mode GUI written in C, there's libagar [0]. Different use case than MicroUI, but still a neat project.

[0] https://libagar.org/

LibAgar – Cross-platform GUI written in C

0x0203 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:28:30 +0000

Article URL: https://libagar.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48538787

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by 0x0203 in "Why Janet? (2023)"

0x0203 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:42:44 +0000

Seems some of the listed advantages for Janet would also apply for tcl (small/simple, easy to learn, embeddable, usable as a shell, great for domain specific languages). It would be interesting, to me at least, to see a fan of Janet compare the two.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"

0x0203 — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:15:30 +0000

As long as you're taking suggestions, since many of the books are quite old, adding a publication date or date range to the search functionality might be nice. I personally would find it very useful since I have a tendency to look for things that are older than year _x_ when researching various things.

Thanks for all the effort put into the site!

New comment by 0x0203 in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

0x0203 — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:19:25 +0000

I don't understand this perspective. How can one accept the objectively more user hostile option because the less hostile one gets money from the other. If one objects to using products funded by google, why is there not also an objection to using products from google?

For as long as the funding for Firefox continues, it remains a viable option. And despite all their bad decisions of late, they still give users the ability to configure or disable user hostile components.

Their funding model is a risk, but I've been using Firefox and librewolf forever and I'd argue it's a much better option than chrome or edge, especially with a handful of plugins. A risk is still better than the actual realization of the risk.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon"

0x0203 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:05:59 +0000

I suspect that timing might help Intel here, with so much of the better established foundries near fully allocated for the next two years, it may be more a question of availability than brand name risk. And for whatever problems Intel has, it's pretty unlikely they'd go completely under and disolve in less than a year. Good non completion clauses in the contracts can mitigate a good chunk of the remaining risk.

Not to mention potential customers who would prefer a US based foundry regardless. My guess is that there's a pretty large part of the market that would be perfectly fine with using Intel.

New comment by 0x0203 in "We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack"

0x0203 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:27:58 +0000

Even PDFs don't always render the same from one platform to another. I've mostly seen it due to missing fonts.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Wren: A classy little scripting language"

0x0203 — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 09:19:30 +0000

I find myself referencing this list of embeddable scripting languages pretty frequently: https://github.com/dbohdan/embedded-scripting-languages

Ones that might be of interest to you are Umka, tcl, and berry.

There's also a lot of others listed that range from someone's experimental side project to professional grade and well supported languages. Kinda fun to see different people's approaches to things, and no matter what your preferred programming style, there's probably a few in there that will mesh pretty well.

New comment by 0x0203 in "rlsw – Raylib software OpenGL renderer in less than 5k LOC"

0x0203 — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 02:28:47 +0000

Not sure what the line count is, but PortableGL is a software renderer for 3.x(ish):

https://github.com/rswinkle/PortableGL

Cool project, and fun to play with.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ"

0x0203 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 22:03:12 +0000

> Genuinely curious what the solution here is.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the drone shouldn't be flying anywhere near the crane. It's an active construction zone with a structure that moves and swings about in unpredictable ways with people and equipment moving about below. It shouldn't be delivering to the construction zone, and if it can't figure out how to stay out of the area, it doesn't belong in the sky.

There are some FAA requirements about cranes/temporary structures that would give pilots an appropriate NOTAM, but I don't know if all cranes require this. That said, I'd argue that if it isn't tall enough to require notifying the FAA, the drone is flying too low.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Red: A programming language inspired by REBOL"

0x0203 — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 11:51:53 +0000

Tcl/tk is still alive and doing well. It's cross platform, very quick to learn, and easily embeddable into other languages/projects.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Mwm – The smallest usable X11 window manager"

0x0203 — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 01:23:53 +0000

Sadly very overlooked these days.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods"

0x0203 — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 10:32:47 +0000

It's mostly bad actors, and a smattering of optimists who believe that despite its current problems, AI will eventually and inevitably get better. I also wish the whole thing would calm down and come back to reality, but I don't think it's a bubble that will pop. It will continue to get artificially puffed up for a while because too many businesses and people have invested too much for them to just quit (sunk cost falacy) and there's a big enough market in a certain class of writer/developer/etc... for which the short term benefits will justify the continued existence of the AI products for a while. My prediction is that as the long term benefits for honest users peter out, the bubble won't pop, but deflate into a wrinkled 10 day old helium balloon. There will still be a big enough market driven by cons, ad tech and people trying to suck up as many ad dollars as possible, and other bad actors, that the tech will persist, and continue to infest the web/world for quite a while.

AI is the new crypto. Lots of promise and big ideas, lots of people with blind faith about what it will one day become, a lot of people gaming the system for quick gains at the expense of others. But it never actually becomes what it pretends/promises to be and is filled with people continuing the grift trying to make a buck off the next guy. AI just has better marketing and more corporate buy in than crypto. But neither are going anywhere.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images"

0x0203 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:44:39 +0000

For anyone that hasn't clicked the link, it shows that in just a few days, the observatory has already found over 2000 new asteroids. That is indeed very impressive.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images"

0x0203 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:31:44 +0000

Ah, thanks. I had seen a bunch of hype about the camera itself (which is on its own very impressive) and assumed that was the complete device. Didn't realize it was part of a larger telescope.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Vera C. Rubin Observatory first images"

0x0203 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 10:54:46 +0000

Why do the brighter objects have the four way cross artifact? My (apparently incorrect) understanding was that those types of artifacts were a result of support structures holding reflecting mirrors on a telescope. But this camera just has a "standard" glass lense with nothing obstructing the light path to the sensor.

New comment by 0x0203 in "Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole"

0x0203 — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 13:22:16 +0000

If the universe does have a positive curvature as this predicts, would that mean that if we look out into space, we could see the same galaxies multiple times? Or even our own galaxy in the past? Or is the predicted curvature slight enough that anything we might see multiple times is already beyond the limits of visibility due to universe expansion?