Hacker News: ape4

New comment by ape4 in "Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore"

ape4 — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:16:04 +0000

Does google have a option to avoid AI summaries?

New comment by ape4 in "Myths about /dev/urandom (2014)"

ape4 — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:07:49 +0000

Ah, I wonder what's change since then.

New comment by ape4 in "A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking"

ape4 — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:15:12 +0000

Yeah the exact kind shouldn't matter - just the WebGL capabilities.

New comment by ape4 in "Your hex editor should color-code bytes"

ape4 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:27:31 +0000

As a next level beyond coloring... how about adding some interactivity? How about a slider to control the brightness of each type of byte. Turn everything but text to 10% when when you're looking for some words in a binary file.

New comment by ape4 in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

ape4 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:36:49 +0000

As a non-European I want to say: thanks EU

New comment by ape4 in "Nanopass Framework: Clean Compiler Creation Language"

ape4 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:05:54 +0000

Can it only make compilers for Lisp-like languages

New comment by ape4 in "Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)"

ape4 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:03:48 +0000

Right that's what I meant ... the .ll file. Thanks

New comment by ape4 in "Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers (2008)"

ape4 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:45:35 +0000

Would a practical approach be parsing the source into clang's AST format. Then let it make the actual executable.

New comment by ape4 in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

ape4 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:47:28 +0000

Why don't they charge by the Gigabyte

New comment by ape4 in "What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)"

ape4 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:46:11 +0000

I guess some of the great symphonies doesn't count as "intellectual"?

I also nominate the invention of Clippy the friendly assistant.

New comment by ape4 in "Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user"

ape4 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:39:07 +0000

Good on El Reg for doing some actual hands on fact finding.

New comment by ape4 in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

ape4 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:29:36 +0000

I'd like to see some side-by-side before and after photos

New comment by ape4 in "Show HN: CSS Studio. Design by hand, code by agent"

ape4 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:19:44 +0000

I imagine it would be harder to make a design product that doesn't use pixels but it needs to be done - because that's the right way to make CSS

New comment by ape4 in "Show HN: CSS Studio. Design by hand, code by agent"

ape4 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:18:23 +0000

The music was trying too hard ;)

New comment by ape4 in "Running out of disk space in production"

ape4 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:56:51 +0000

Very cool. Reading the man page I see, by default, shred does 3 iterations. Adding --iterations=1 makes it random enough for this purpose and faster.

New comment by ape4 in "Running out of disk space in production"

ape4 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:12:39 +0000

Interesting! I did `fallocate -l 1G myfile` - very fast. Its all zeros but probably won't be compressed by the filesystem since its created with the fallocate() system call.

New comment by ape4 in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

ape4 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:21:59 +0000

You could make a local `man` page.

New comment by ape4 in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

ape4 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:37:27 +0000

I have noticed I can make a less sharp sound with my bike bell by ringing it a certain way. I use this to let pedestrians know I am coming but that they don't have to jump out of the way.

New comment by ape4 in "Running out of disk space in production"

ape4 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:24:56 +0000

That's very cool. Sadly running that exact command gets an incomplete file and error "error writing output file". It suggests adding iflag=fullblock (to dd). Running that makes a file of the correct size. But still gives "error writing output file". I suppose that occurs because dd breaks the pipe.

New comment by ape4 in "Running out of disk space in production"

ape4 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:49:34 +0000

If I recall correctly:

    dd if=/dev/urandom of=/home/myrandomfile bs=1 count=N