Hacker News: PhilipRoman

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:12:17 +0000

...except for HN "unvote"/"undown" feedback which is especially unfortunate due to the shared prefix. Every time I upvote something I squint at the unvote/undown to make sure I didn't misclick.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)"

PhilipRoman — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:50:36 +0000

Interestingly, the section doesn't actually have to start with a number. TCL man pages use the 'n' section and 'man' resolves them just fine despite the ambiguity. Conversely, manpage names can also start with numbers, although this is rare (I found only one such example: man 30-systemd-environment-d-generator)

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:48:49 +0000

I'm using Hyprland right now for its wayland support, but IMO so far the best mental model for window management I've seen is that of herbstluftwm with static layouts (you can still use dynamic tiling and tabs with it of course)

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Naming rights to street auctioned in San Francisco"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:27:49 +0000

Of course...

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New comment by PhilipRoman in "Delve allegedly forked an open-source tool and sold it as its own"

PhilipRoman — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:38:25 +0000

Didn't notice it, to be honest.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "AI has suddenly become more useful to open-source developers"

PhilipRoman — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:39:15 +0000

What they want? Sometimes. What they need? Almost never.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

PhilipRoman — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:00:35 +0000

I use the free version of ChatGPT (without logging in) when I need some one-off question without a huge context. Real world prompt:

  "when hostapd initializes 80211 iface over nl80211, what attributes correspond to selected standard version like ax or be?"

It works fine, avoids falling into trap due to misleading question. Probably works even better for more popular technologies. Yeah, it has higher failure rates but it's not a dealbreaker for non-autonomous use cases.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

PhilipRoman — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:05:02 +0000

I don't deny that node/npm is useful for building servers, devtools for JS development itself, etc. but as an end user I haven't encountered anything useful which requires having it on my machine.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

PhilipRoman — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:51:39 +0000

This sounds like satire but isn't - I just make sure the nodejs/npm packages don't exist on my system. I've yet to find a crucial piece of software that requires it. As much as I love that cute utility that turns maps into ascii art, it's not exactly sqlite in terms of usefulness.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Neovim 0.12.0"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:13:36 +0000

I always thought Vim/Nvim already had a built-in package manager, git clone inside ~/.vim/pack/*/start, am I missing anything by not using a "real" package manager?

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Neovim 0.12.0"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:09:23 +0000

In Vim, :! cleans up the tty context and hands it off to the child program, to do whatever it wants, you can open any TUI program and it will work as expected. In Neovim, :! just uses a plain pipe. Actually I believe GVim has the same problem. Since both Vim implementations now have a built in terminal handling stack anyway, I wonder if that could be used to unify the behavior.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:09:02 +0000

It's actually almost exactly the opposite, at least when considering the number of media outlets. Fox news is a massive outlier with a huge audience and strong republican leaning, but most of the major networks engage in democrat-aligned signaling (not necessarily the progressive branch of democrats).

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Tell HN: GitHub's Dependabot REST API is silently returning incomplete results"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 10:22:04 +0000

I believe you've always been supposed to handle pagination for this API: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/using-the-rest-api/using-pag...

Paginated-by-default APIs are an annoying pattern, like GitLab CI suddenly breaking after 20 builds, etc. I wish they would start making the pagination parameters required.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Linux is an interpreter"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:27:36 +0000

That sounds like something I would've done... When I was a kid, the 5€/month for a VPS was a massive expense, to the point where I occasionally had to download my 10GB rootfs to my mom's windows laptop, terminate the instance and then rebuild it once I had enough money. Eventually I got an old Kindle that was able to run an app called Terminal IDE which had a Linux shell with some basic programs like busybox, gcc. Spartacus Rex, if you're out there, thank you for making my entire career possible.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Hacking old hardware by renaming to .zip [video]"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:23:47 +0000

For RE cases where I know the original compiler used (a bit harder on C compilers due to huge number of obscure optimization flags), I give it a feedback loop to write a function that compiles to the original machine code.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Desk for people who work at home with a cat"

PhilipRoman — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:31:01 +0000

Mine likes them as well, but usually within 24 hours they're transformed into thousands of tiny cardboard pieces.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion"

PhilipRoman — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:25:52 +0000

I initially laughed at this but then remembered that https://poc.bcachefs.org/ exists...

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app"

PhilipRoman — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:55:58 +0000

Ente has a killer feature of supporting actual end-to-end encryption for photos. That alone puts them above many other competitors.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "You are not your job"

PhilipRoman — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:08:11 +0000

For an ideal ('spherical cow in a vacuum') type of homeless person, sure.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Work_mem: It's a Trap"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:05:09 +0000

Be careful with the setrlimit/ulimit API family, generally it doesn't do what you want. You can limit virtual memory (but... why?) or specific segments like stack, etc. There is also RLIMIT_RSS which sounds like what you'd want, but alas:

    RLIMIT_RSS
        This is a limit (in bytes) on the process's resident set (the number of virtual pages resident in RAM).  This limit has effect only in Linux 2.4.x,  x  <  3 and there affects only calls to madvise(2) specifying MADV_WILLNEED.

I also disagree with the conclusion "No hardware can compensate for a query gone wrong". There are concepts like 'quality of service' and 'fairness' which PG has chosen to not implement.