Hacker News: ChrisSD

New comment by ChrisSD in "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"

ChrisSD — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 17:10:36 +0000

The other other way would be more structured. Arguments are not just an array, they also contain `--switch` and key/value pairs (e.g. `--key value` or `--key=value` depending on who you ask). One problem with the flat array approach is there's no way to distinguish a literal value starting with `-` from a switch, which means there needs to be some way to workaround that (and users have to remember the workaround; how often do people remember to use `rm -- "$FILENAME"`).

In practice almost every application does still need to do its own parameter parsing; a flat array is not enough.

New comment by ChrisSD in "Simple Is Not Small"

ChrisSD — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:41:26 +0000

I think the point was more that it's hard to compose shell utilities to make something new that's not supported out of the box. Instead you do have to write an entirely new utility and use that.

That said having key/value semantics and not just stream of bytes would make the shell much more versatile, at the cost of making it bigger.

New comment by ChrisSD in "You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It"

ChrisSD — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 09:59:23 +0000

Note that GDPR did not mandate the cookie banners we see everywhere today. Those are a form of malicious compliance. Their goal is not to conform to regulation but to undermine the regulation itself in the eyes of the public.

New comment by ChrisSD in "AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study"

ChrisSD — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 21:37:26 +0000

Sometimes things are just common sense pure and simple.

New comment by ChrisSD in "Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload"

ChrisSD — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:12:01 +0000

But then that shifts the issue. You've now got an opaque binary blob being injected into programs. What if it is malicious?

New comment by ChrisSD in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

ChrisSD — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:27:56 +0000

You can call into the kernel just fine in Windows. The fact you use a function call wrapper instead of a raw syscall is not really relevant.

Most Windows NT kernel functions take a buffer to use rather than allocating their own memory. Even many Win32 functions don't allocate (although there you have to be much more careful).

New comment by ChrisSD in "June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more"

ChrisSD — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:14:40 +0000

Servo was sparsely maintained for years after Mozilla abandoned the project. Just in the last year it has picked steam as an independent project with a range of third party sponsors. Work is now progressing apace and it's becoming increasingly compatible with real-world websites.

New comment by ChrisSD in "June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more"

ChrisSD — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:23:25 +0000

Maybe give them a second? Yes, it's usable for applications web views if you're willing to restrict yourself but for general purpose web browsing there's still a lot that needs doing (but work is progressing). Under Google's management, web tech has grown fast. And it's an ever shifting living standard. There is a lot for any alternative browser engine to implement, let alone keep pace with the changes.

New comment by ChrisSD in "Why do you suck at juggling now?"

ChrisSD — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:57:03 +0000

Like all such metrics, the specifics don't really matter. All that matters is that you can tell a story, over the course of the year, on how you've "improved". The goal is to use the story to highlight the work you've been doing while passing it off as evidence. This kind of story telling is something people in management positions tend to be very good at but it's also a skill people not in management should have some proficiency in.

New comment by ChrisSD in "A tale of two path separators"

ChrisSD — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:30:08 +0000

Or you could use powershell and avoid the issue ;).

Though nowadays system files should be protected even from admin and even if you do manage to delete them, Windows can restore them.

New comment by ChrisSD in "Myths about /dev/urandom (2014)"

ChrisSD — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:50:00 +0000

VMs should have VirtIO RNG set up so there is a high quality entropy source at boot time, provided by the host system.

New comment by ChrisSD in "Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES"

ChrisSD — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:40:45 +0000

Yep, that's why I was asking. I'd be very interested to hear of more candidates for uplifting into std.

I guess saying "every project" has 5 dependencies might be somewhat hyperbolic (or at least domain specific) but it would be interesting to know the kinds of things they're talking about that haven't yet been uplifted.

New comment by ChrisSD in "Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES"

ChrisSD — Mon, 11 May 2026 10:09:34 +0000

Can you name 5 as an example?

New comment by ChrisSD in "EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing""

ChrisSD — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:11:04 +0000

What law?

New comment by ChrisSD in "EU Parliamentary Research Service calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing""

ChrisSD — Sun, 10 May 2026 03:34:30 +0000

In that specific sentence the source is cited (via hyperlink). So even if you read it out of all context you can still find out the source is UK's Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza who said it, not "the EU" (whatever that means).

For this "story" to gain legs, someone must have pulled that sentence out of content without mentioning the source and then added some misleading context for the outrage.

New comment by ChrisSD in "How do I inform Windows that I'm writing a binary file?"

ChrisSD — Thu, 07 May 2026 04:30:37 +0000

For some background on what I meant see:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140411-00/?p=12...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/universal-crt-...

New comment by ChrisSD in "How do I inform Windows that I'm writing a binary file?"

ChrisSD — Thu, 07 May 2026 01:32:17 +0000

Calling it from C does not mean you need a full C standard library to exist. For example, much of the C standard library is itself written in C. But it's a "freestanding" C which assumes only a minimal set of library functions exist (e.g. functions for copying memory from one place to another, filling memory with zeroes, etc).

And you can of course use non-C languages to call the Win32 API. Or even directly using assembly code.

New comment by ChrisSD in "How do I inform Windows that I'm writing a binary file?"

ChrisSD — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:58:43 +0000

The Win32 API. E.g. using WriteFile to write files (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/...)

It wasn't until fairly recently that the C runtime was stably shipped with Windows. Previously you had to install the correct version of the C library alongside your application.

New comment by ChrisSD in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

ChrisSD — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:15:05 +0000

You can open directories using high level win32 APIs. What you need NtCreateFile for is opening files relative to an open directory.

New comment by ChrisSD in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

ChrisSD — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:30:53 +0000

> WinAPI access for ACLs was added in Windows 10

I'm not sure which docs you mean but that's not true. The NT kernel has used ACLs long before rust was invented. But it's indeed true that rust adds platform-specific methods based on demand. The trouble with ACLs is it means either creating a large API surface in the standard library to handle them or else presenting a simple interface but having to manage raw pointers (likely using a wrapper type but even then it can't be made totally safe).

> the de-facto standard winapi crate, which provides access to the raw syscall

Since the official Microsoft `windows-sys` crate was released many years ago, the winapi crate has been effectively unmaintained (it accepts security patches but that's it).