Hacker News: 201984

New comment by 201984 in "Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents"

201984 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:32:56 +0000

>We're choosing a license that is usable by the entire community.

What a weaselly way to put it.

A GPL library, as I'm sure you know, is perfectly usable by anyone including jujutsu and anyone else. They just have to also license under the GPL and this is no barrier to open source projects.

New comment by 201984 in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

201984 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:38:52 +0000

There's a part of the .so ELF file (the Global Offset Table aka GOT) that has to be modified with all the addresses of the functions being imported, which of course vary from process to process.

If not patching, what exactly would you call modifying part of the file?

New comment by 201984 in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

201984 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:44:51 +0000

How do you think position independent code can call functions from other .so's without being patched with their addresses?

They can't, so even PIC code still has to have a relocation table that gets patched. It's in a different page than the code though, so code does still get reused.

New comment by 201984 in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

201984 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:10:48 +0000

Shared libraries (and mmapped files in general) are deduplicated; it's nowhere near as bad as you think. The kernel loads a .so into memory once and then maps that memory into every process that mmaps it.

Editing to add: this deduplication is one of the greatest upsides to dynamic linking. Common libs like libgcc and libc only have to exist in memory once and can stay in CPU caches, whereas if they were statically linked into every binary, each binary would have a copy of that library that wouldn't be shared with anything else and you'd waste a lot of memory.

New comment by 201984 in "Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding"

201984 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:26:49 +0000

I just don't get why an image format needs the ceremony from being an international standard accepted by governments. It's just an image format; governments shouldn't be involved in this at all.

What did ISO give the JPEG XL team that made paywalling the standard worth it? Did ISO pay them or something?

New comment by 201984 in "Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding"

201984 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:29:09 +0000

Does anyone know why the JPEG XL team went through ISO instead of publishing it themselves?

New comment by 201984 in "Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding"

201984 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 03:06:41 +0000

Seems "closed but royalty free" would be a more accurate description then.

New comment by 201984 in "Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding"

201984 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:12:03 +0000

Mostly off topic, but why is the spec for JPEG and JPEG XL paywalled? I wouldn't call them open standards if they're not available free-of-charge to the public.

New comment by 201984 in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

201984 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:13:48 +0000

As if there's no difference between harmful substances combined with lewd activity, and talking with people on a video game.

https://metro.co.uk/2026/06/01/uk-considering-banning-kids-s...

New comment by 201984 in "If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?"

201984 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:23:03 +0000

You don't HAVE to, but most of the big ones do.

New comment by 201984 in "If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?"

201984 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:51:07 +0000

This is false. Evaporative cooling systems consume significant amounts of water and do not reuse it. They can't anyway, recondensing the water would release all the heat they removed by evaporating it.

New comment by 201984 in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

201984 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:35:18 +0000

How are kids supposed to have a safe space "to be curious, build autonomy, and feel free" if they can't get out from the authoritarian hands of their parents or their government?

New comment by 201984 in "Coreutils for Windows"

201984 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:31:39 +0000

There's also a windows port of busybox if you want something more stable. w64devkit uses it.

https://github.com/rmyorston/busybox-w32

New comment by 201984 in "Coreutils for Windows"

201984 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:29:50 +0000

AI said to do it.

New comment by 201984 in "GitHub and the crime against software"

201984 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:07:05 +0000

I liked it. It has character.

New comment by 201984 in "Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)"

201984 — Sat, 30 May 2026 22:36:11 +0000

So you'd switch USA for China, and still have a foreign dependency embedded into the very fabric of your society. Do you not see a problem with this?

New comment by 201984 in "Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)"

201984 — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:56:30 +0000

What, like electronic payments using phones running American operating systems? With the bonus that you have two new gatekeepers that can lock your citizens out (Apple and Google).

New comment by 201984 in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

201984 — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:45:43 +0000

Exactly, do they want people to buy their FPGAs or not? Charging per-seat licenses for developers and heavily restricting the free version mean people will buy from other vendors or just not use an FPGA at all.

New comment by 201984 in "2026 HIPAA Security Rule Update"

201984 — Mon, 25 May 2026 18:36:23 +0000

I'll bite. Why is it the fault of the organization that gets broken into, rather than the fault of the attackers breaking into it? Even if the defender takes every reasonable defensive measure, they could still get pwned from some zero day that they had no defense against. Should they be fined into oblivion for something like that?

New comment by 201984 in "2026 HIPAA Security Rule Update"

201984 — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:54:09 +0000

Is this why every healthcare website has 2FA now? It's so annoying.