Hacker News: PhilipRoman

New comment by PhilipRoman in "A third way of using Linux"

PhilipRoman — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 23:01:40 +0000

another comment on a different HN thread pointed out a similar issue. Now I'm wondering if backdrop-filter can be used correctly at all or should just be avoided entirely

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

PhilipRoman — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:34:17 +0000

GitHub could make it the default for new repositories created via web UI and devs who don't touch the CLI probably wouldn't even notice

New comment by PhilipRoman in "In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 18:16:54 +0000

I'm in the process of building one myself. Take what I'm saying with a massive grain of salt, but I believe you basically need three things - objective, tube lens and a camera module.

If I were you, I would probably buy a normal microscope that supports a microscope camera attachment, instead of specifically looking for USB microscope. There is a lot of misleading marketing around USB microscopes, a lot of them are literally just doing digital zooming in (I have a 30€ "1000x" microscope from Amazon which is nice for soldering and such things, but these fake microscopes appear even at higher price ranges). Treat anything >1000x for light-based microscopes as a red flag.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Why isn't mutable a subtype of immutable, or vice versa?"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:18:10 +0000

In C, const can also answer B, but only in non-pointer contexts.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3"

PhilipRoman — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:27:48 +0000

The doc won't point it out explicitly and I apologize if my explanation offends anybody, but the intention is basically leftist, state-friendly bitcoin. The authors took a look at the anarchy of real cryptocurrencies and realized they don't actually like anarchy, so instead they want to make something "wholesome" that governments would be willing to go along with (since they can tax it).

They are funded by EU and banks in an attempt to claw back some market share from cryptocurrencies which are slowly getting banned.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Scaling Golang CI by Replacing actions/setup-go"

PhilipRoman — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:47:46 +0000

The way caches are managed in CI is bonkers (at least in GitLab, but GitHub probably does the same). I guess it's built to conveniently work with the simplest of projects. I had to reimplement the mechanism by hand just to get basic things working, like not downloading the entire cache when only a few entries will be used for each build

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Base84 deserves a place in file names"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:55:11 +0000

and for programs that don't respect this convention ./--file

New comment by PhilipRoman in "A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:14:24 +0000

I'd say Java's virtual threads are also a parallelism construct (at least in the performance sense, not logical guarantees), since they're scheduled on a pool.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:12:27 +0000

Just to nitpick, it's a 8MB-sized mapping, not 8MB of RAM.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution"

PhilipRoman — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:16:05 +0000

Write a subleq interpreter with a magnet and a steady hand? (Hopefully the magnet is not compromised)

New comment by PhilipRoman in "There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 15:27:56 +0000

I can believe that... We've had logging macros break because line numbers no longer fit in an u16

I would love a TV show like "Hell's kitchen" except it's code bases and development processes.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "JIT Compiling Code in 5μs"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 08:57:10 +0000

W^X is typically per mapping, not per memory page and does not interfere with JIT compilation.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:34:43 +0000

"per band" is also hilarious, as if you could get that kind of data rate in 2.4GHz

New comment by PhilipRoman in "WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do"

PhilipRoman — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:48:04 +0000

Am I missing something? For practical use you only care if it carries a certain amount of packets per second without excessive retries, not whether it preserves the waveform exactly.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

PhilipRoman — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:41:11 +0000

I even saw it using the -bearing suffix in other cases, like describing a function responsible for 802.11 radar detection as "radar-bearing"

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints"

PhilipRoman — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:48:21 +0000

This is an underappreciated point when people talk about AI/chat integrations. If they put a claude-level model behind it, I'm sure it could resolve 99% of the situations faster and better than a human could, or at least realize its limitations when it can't. But of course that is too expensive so they often use extremely weak models that are literally worse than a good incremental full text search box.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Incentives are for losers"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:33:43 +0000

On the other hand, there are vastly fewer rich people than poor, so for many things it doesn't matter if they can pay the fine. If only millionaires were littering, the streets would be quite clean.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months"

PhilipRoman — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:47:59 +0000

It's very difficult to do it smoothly with no downtime, but all it takes is one emergency for the existing workflows to be thrown out. Companies suffer emergencies and data losses all the time and nothing ever actually happens, they get over it.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Run Kimi K3 using 29 GB of RAM at 0.50 tok/s"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:26:02 +0000

It still has much better latency than modern NVMEs and much, much better write endurance (probably not critical for AI workloads)

New comment by PhilipRoman in "The C ``Clockwise/Spiral Rule''"

PhilipRoman — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:31:20 +0000

I think the only significant mistake was having both prefix and postfix operators for types. If they all neatly sat on one side there would be no problem.