Hacker News: Xirdus

New comment by Xirdus in "If IPv4 were land"

Xirdus — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 22:29:59 +0000

IPv4 stopped working fine some 30 years ago. The invention of NAT was caused by IPv4 not working fine (RFC 1631 was written under assumption it's a temporary solution). Hole punching is a thing solely because IPv4 stopped working fine. Much like Y2K, the reason IPv4 appears to work fine is because absolutely massive engineering effort was put to work around the parts that don't work fine.

New comment by Xirdus in "Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?"

Xirdus — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 23:53:16 +0000

Per the article, "Astra was not willing to comply with the request. I also attempted this using the Daybreak Blue toggle with the same result, blocked."

New comment by Xirdus in "The tragedy of losing your Wikipedia page"

Xirdus — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:47:56 +0000

Insanely deep lore is a dime a dozen these days. Every other fantasy book series has one. Every other video game has one. Not to mention fanfics, especially shared universe fanfics. Being deep lore should be a reason to delete, not to add a page.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for Mr. Tik-tok from Oz to have his own Wikipedia page. He's less notable than, say, Knight Artorias, and I don't think anyone in their right mind would argue Knight Artorias deserves one.

Then again, neither does the Great Grey Wolf Sif, yet here we are.

New comment by Xirdus in "Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?"

Xirdus — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:19:08 +0000

Probably getting larger and larger with all the agentic workflows popping up as of late.

New comment by Xirdus in "Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?"

Xirdus — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:15:24 +0000

Can confirm, got caught by it once. We were discussing if prompt engineering is still relevant, and I copied both the prompt I used and the output I've got. I realized I was shadowbanned because I'm not logged in on every device I use for browsing HN.

New comment by Xirdus in "SS United States to be sunk as largest artificial reef"

Xirdus — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:10:15 +0000

That "with a brain" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

New comment by Xirdus in "SS United States to be sunk as largest artificial reef"

Xirdus — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 07:32:57 +0000

Wait until you learn about SS the government security service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secret_Service

(Officially USSS, but it's often abbreviated to SS in common parlance.)

New comment by Xirdus in "Git for the US Code"

Xirdus — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 06:32:18 +0000

I mostly meant the web app. Forgot to link it. https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/home.xsp Unfortunately it's only in Polish.

Example page for the traffic code https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU19970...

First PDF is the original, second PDF is the unified version, then there's links - 4 others changed, 4 explicitly obsoleted, 12 implicitly obsolete, 707 administrative orders, 12 Constitutional Tribunal rulings, 11 previous + current unified versions, 212 patches, 14 relevant EU directives.

New comment by Xirdus in "Reviewers rarely talk about reliability. Owners bring it up twice as often"

Xirdus — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 06:05:27 +0000

There's also the matter of "the Old Trusty" being a dying species. Seemingly every brand I heard of being reliable - Bosch, Milwaukee, Toyota, Sony, Victorinox, Michelin, Dyson, possibly more - has gone to shit in the recent decade.

New comment by Xirdus in "Git for the US Code"

Xirdus — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 05:47:52 +0000

Poland has an official, somewhat manual version of this - the ISAP system.

Actual bills are written in the form of patches ("§1. In the law X paragraph 5, the words "such and such" are replaced with "this and that". §2. The law X paragraph 4 is striked. §3. After law X paragraph 8, a new paragraph 8a is added that says "etc. and so on".)

After a patch or a collection of patches are passed, they are combined together and a unified version of the law is published. These documents aren't technically the law, they just show a snapshot of what the law is at the specific moment.

ISAP system is an online collection of all bills that were passed, plus crosslinks between laws that change/supercede/otherwise interact with each other, plus current and archival unified versions, plus related administrative orders and other miscellanious documents. Makes looking up laws and changes to laws very easy.

New comment by Xirdus in "The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]"

Xirdus — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 23:54:49 +0000

This but unironically.

New comment by Xirdus in "Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop"

Xirdus — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:33:47 +0000

I think you grossly overestimate how long it takes to copy-paste an email, especially in the age of AI - as well as underestimate the entertainment value of making bureaucracy squirm. And if the FOIA request makes sense in the first place, I believe the inclination would be self-evident (exposing corruption, holding government employees accountable, undermining big corps' exclusive access to information, preserving local history, etc.)

New comment by Xirdus in "Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop"

Xirdus — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 01:53:25 +0000

I see. Awful. I hope you'll get everything you want eventually.

New comment by Xirdus in "I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27"

Xirdus — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 01:51:51 +0000

A lot of people say this unironically about Facebook/Youtube/other social media. As long as it's in private hands, they're apparently free to manipulate information and restrict selected users however they want, regardless of how enmeshed they are in everybody's life.

New comment by Xirdus in "Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop"

Xirdus — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 01:33:31 +0000

If 4chan can find 100 like-minded people to search for HWNDU flag in a total wilderness, including volunteers to drive around and honk randomly, then HN can find 100 like-minded people to write a single email.

Also, isn't this how the contact-your-senator-about-this-horrible-bill campaigns work? And they seem to be fairly successful, at least in the "contact" part.

New comment by Xirdus in "Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop"

Xirdus — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:51:56 +0000

At this point, why won't you find 100 like-minded people and each of you file a FOIA request for 1/100th of the data? Instead of extending the deadline by another X each time they reply, all of the requests will have to be replied to within the same 1X, and with sufficiently small requests they won't be able to paginate.

New comment by Xirdus in "UUIDv7: Timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities"

Xirdus — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 19:10:32 +0000

As long as they are invariants. Due to clerical errors, the aforementioned PESEL numbers are not really unique and the gender doesn't always match records and even the checksum digit is sometimes incorrect. And the encoded date of birth isn't always the actual date of birth, but this one is intentional (there's only 5000 numbers available for each day, per gender).

New comment by Xirdus in "The Goose Programming Language"

Xirdus — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 04:06:11 +0000

There's stack the CPU primitive, and there's stack the heap-allocated data structure. Goose's multiple stacks are the latter. Unrelated to OS-managed thread stacks. More like VM-managed thread stacks in Java and other bytecode languages, which also live on the heap.

New comment by Xirdus in "The Goose Programming Language"

Xirdus — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 02:15:22 +0000

The obvious question is how does it work for linked lists, trees, and other non-stack-shaped data structures?

New comment by Xirdus in "UUIDv7: Timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities"

Xirdus — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 07:58:37 +0000

You can encode extra things in IDs no problem. E.g. Polish civil records system uses PESEL numbers which, on top of being unique IDs, also encode date of birth and gender.

As long as you have absolute control over every single ID generated, it will work just fine. The problem is that it's way too easy to accidentally generate UUID in a way that ignores whatever rules you set up for it. Also, clocks are hard.