Hacker News: JdeBP

New comment by JdeBP in "Show HN: Sigwire – a live TUI switchboard for every signal on your Linux box"

JdeBP — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 03:34:43 +0000

If you're going to support the ADM-3A terminal up/down navigation characters k and j, also support the vi navigation characters Control+N and Control+P. And Control+S and Control+Q for pause/resume as well.

New comment by JdeBP in "DNSGlobe – Rust TUI to watch DNS propagate around the world"

JdeBP — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:04:06 +0000

Forwarding proxy DNS servers leading to a (yes) single resolving proxy DNS server at the end.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/dns-server-roles.html

New comment by JdeBP in "Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux (2019)"

JdeBP — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 03:38:30 +0000

It's bad the other way, too. btop on a 50×232 terminal over an actual 57600 BPS serial line is unusable, even in 16-colour mode. It does not have even the most basic of full-screen TUI redraw optimizations, and outputs the entire screen again and again.

New comment by JdeBP in "Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux (2019)"

JdeBP — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:57:53 +0000

Well, unless one is using FreeBSD or OpenBSD, where the btop code is still using 32-bit integers to calculate 64-bit sizes, and falling prey to unsigned integer wraparound. htop's code calculates using size_t, which ends up as a 64-bit integer on 64-bit architectures.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48778757 (https://crocidb.com/post/freebsd-ate-my-ram/)

* https://github.com/aristocratos/btop/pull/1728

New comment by JdeBP in "Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux (2019)"

JdeBP — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:45:28 +0000

Screws have been around for about 3 millennia at this point. They have patently failed to obviate the use of nails. So by this analogy we can expect the 'Only GPUs do the work.' believers to be still promising this, any day now, about three thousand years hence. (-:

New comment by JdeBP in "Commodore 64 Basic for PostgreSQL"

JdeBP — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:29:30 +0000

It's already C64 BASIC inside an SQL server. Don't give them ideas of emulating a cassette tape, with Datasette for PostgreSQL, too! (-:

New comment by JdeBP in "FreeBSD ate my RAM"

JdeBP — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:03:50 +0000

Ports is on 1.4.7.

* https://freshports.org/sysutils/btop/

The fix is still pending being even made to the origin version.

* https://github.com/aristocratos/btop/pull/1728

New comment by JdeBP in "Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives"

JdeBP — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:20:01 +0000

It's the version where a committee put in em-dashes to replace Jefferson's semi-colons, if those pictures are accurate. This is not unexpected given the provenance; but a semi-colon version would have made for a more interesting discovery.

New comment by JdeBP in "This is my attempt to get Vulkan going on NetBSD"

JdeBP — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:02:39 +0000

Actually, it's orthodox; and it's fetch that isn't. FreeBSD is actually the odd one out, for having an extra tool for doing the same thing. The ftp tool in all of the BSDs, including FreeBSD, speaks HTTP, and has done since Luke Mewburn did lukemftp (later to be named tnftp) and Theo de Raadt did likewise, both based on the original 4.2BSD ftp, back in the middle 1990s.

* https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/contrib/tnftp/ChangeLog#n1...

* https://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/ftp/main.c?...

* https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/log/src/usr.bin/ftp/main.c,v?sort...

New comment by JdeBP in "Learn Vim motions with an ice-cream van"

JdeBP — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 10:23:46 +0000

That does not really present any argument that we should be teaching your way of working to VIM novices, instead of teaching them the obvious arrow keys first and the hjkl navigation later.

New comment by JdeBP in "Learn Vim motions with an ice-cream van"

JdeBP — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 10:15:59 +0000

The arrow keys can be used as motions for operators in VIM. Try them. This is also true for nvi.

New comment by JdeBP in "Learn Vim motions with an ice-cream van"

JdeBP — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 21:25:01 +0000

Yes, hjkl navigation is certainly one of the things that should learn about a vi clone. But are novices well served, in the 2020s, by that being the primary thing that they learn before anything else?

This is not a criticism of this WWW site specifically. The VIM doco has the same priorities, teaching hjkl navigation before arrow keys. (So do nvi2 and NeoVIM.) The problem is that the received wisdom, that arrow keys are some newfangled idea that might not have reached your terminal manufacturer yet, is massively out of date.

Even if one does not teach the arrow keys first, the BS SPC SO (Control+N) DLE (Control+P) set is surely worth teaching early on. One cannot make any reasonable argument that terminals might not have spacebars. (-:

New comment by JdeBP in "Pystd, similar-ish functionality with a fraction of the compile time"

JdeBP — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:44:35 +0000

Given what is discussed in the commentary to the post, I wonder whether the author would be amenable to some Doxygen.

New comment by JdeBP in "Pystd, similar-ish functionality with a fraction of the compile time"

JdeBP — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:34:53 +0000

Also: You boot from the 'system' volume, and the operating system is stored on the 'boot' volume. (-:

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/boot-and-system-volumes.html

'Windows subsystem for' actually has a similar sort of logic behind it.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417059

Although Microsoft then spoiled that explanation a couple of years later by switching to a virtual machine system instead of the NT kernel emulating the not-present Linux kernel.

New comment by JdeBP in "Xsnow "protestware" in Debian"

JdeBP — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:32:18 +0000

I wonder how many people immediately thought about whether similar things had been snuck into xfishtank and xpenguins.

New comment by JdeBP in "Xsnow "protestware" in Debian"

JdeBP — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:17:56 +0000

The naïveté of that position is that the users are not informed ahead of time that there's a random chance of a political protest popping up on their screen, so do not get to make an informed choice before it is perhaps too late. It's not mentioned in the doco. It's obfuscated in the source code as an 'extra tree' in an array of xpmtrees. The commit that added this had the commit message 'willem'.

New comment by JdeBP in "Xsnow "protestware" in Debian"

JdeBP — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:02:30 +0000

It is interesting to read M. Allbery's comment side by side with the discussion here on Hacker News about a CLAUDE.EXE program with hidden behaviour that subtly changes the way that it outputs an information banner based upon timezones, hostnames, and domain names.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

Further LWN commentary (as observed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518) is that the result would not be solely drama but potentially some fairly nasty real world consequences for some people.

New comment by JdeBP in "We moved our Bluesky data to Eurosky"

JdeBP — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:20:47 +0000

I am sure that DARPA, BBN, USC Information Sciences Institute, and many others will be overjoyed to learn that they've been erased from history by the new narrative that Venture Capitalists Built Everything. (-:

New comment by JdeBP in "The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting"

JdeBP — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:57:19 +0000

I am wondering whether there will be any effect to petition e-7124. It seems unlikely, to me.

* https://noscommunes.ca/petitions/fr/Petition/Details?Petitio...

New comment by JdeBP in "Pollen tried to remove my article and Google is assisting with it"

JdeBP — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:42:10 +0000

We probably should not read too much into the fact that the Daily Mail's guide to what's currently on television no longer lists a documentary from 2023. Except, perhaps, that the Daily Mail's search engine gaming is clearly quite effective.