Hacker News: bch

New comment by bch in "Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions"

bch — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:49:15 +0000

Pardon the pedantry, but I the current abbreviation of the price ("Shutterstock to pay $35M") should be "$35MM".

New comment by bch in "NYT and vaping: How to lie by saying only true things (2022)"

bch — Sat, 16 May 2026 06:34:46 +0000

> No evidence is provided for the safety of THC vaping products.

That's not the point - gwerns article dismantled the NYT article. If one read (or heard about) the NYT article and used it as "proof" of "vaping is bad", gwern is saying: "not so fast". That's not to say "vaping is healthy", nor even "vaping is not unhealthy" - just that this article isn't the proof you're looking for. Vaping (legal flavoured nicotine (which is what's on trial)) could be horrible - simply citing instances of why this is so isn't actually done in the article.

If it matters, I'm not condoning vaping or smoking at all.

New comment by bch in "The Power of a Free Popsicle (2018)"

bch — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:46:58 +0000

> The beer went from local to Bud and Bud Light. Then according to my wife, it went from Bud to Kirkland (the brand you find at Costco)

So, back to local breweries? /s

New comment by bch in "Computer Hobby Movement in Canada"

bch — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:01:08 +0000

I didn't realize he was Canadian - as a child I got so much mileage out of Machine Language for the Commodore 64[0]. I used to think of my program, get out sheets of graph paper and flip through a table of opcodes I wanted to use, get their decimal rep, and write out the list of numbers in a long column, then go to my computer and POKE them into place and watch a spite come to life, or the screen change colour. So much fun had with that book.

[0] https://archive.org/details/Machine_Language_for_the_Commodo...

New comment by bch in "Local privilege escalation via execve()"

bch — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:47:39 +0000

>> monolith kernel written in C

> Who is really running anything like this in 2026 and for what purpose?

Am I parsing your question correctly?

New comment by bch in "Local privilege escalation via execve()"

bch — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:40:47 +0000

Its like rain on your wedding day - not actually ironic, just unfortunate.

New comment by bch in "I’ve banned query strings"

bch — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:08:52 +0000

> an open-source application framework, was that hosting that used FastCGI, would not honor Auth headers

So you were writing your application as a fcgi-app, and (e.g.) Apache was bungling Auth headers? Can you expand on this? Curious about the technical detail of (I guess) PARAM records not actually giving you what you expect?

New comment by bch in "Used La Marzocco machines are coveted by cafe owners and collectors"

bch — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:19:01 +0000

Before making sure you have access to good beans (had to carry on with the theme), make sure you actually want to have "coffee" as another hobby in your life. Maybe it's worth it to outsource to your local cafe the machine maintenance, grind fine-tuning, bean recipes, hours learning milk steaming, hours spent on youtube, coffee forums, commenting in the occasional HN coffee-adjacent articles...

New comment by bch in "Used La Marzocco machines are coveted by cafe owners and collectors"

bch — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:12:33 +0000

Would sound absurd to all but the nerdiest, most dedicated, but have you considered making your own water[0]?

[0] https://www.baristahustle.com/diy-water-recipes-the-world-in...

New comment by bch in "Used La Marzocco machines are coveted by cafe owners and collectors"

bch — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 04:58:37 +0000

Fruity Kenyans and Ethiopians by V60 or Chemex, classic Italian on the espresso machine, the way $deity intended. Acidic espresso is gross, but the juicy acidic coffees shine as pour-overs.

New comment by bch in "Used La Marzocco machines are coveted by cafe owners and collectors"

bch — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 04:53:08 +0000

> For those unfamiliar, Slayer is (imo the best) one of the top $$$ machines and pairing it with a budget grinder is a classic sign the owner doesn't know a thing about coffee.

The exception to that rule is Espresso Vivace in Seattle, with (at Capitol Hill location) a couple 3-group La Marzoccos at the bar and a collection of modded Niche Zeros on grinding duty. Nobody can accuse David Schomer[0] of "not knowing a thing about coffee".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Schomer

New comment by bch in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

bch — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 02:14:01 +0000

I think of it as BSD style, though of course it could be suggested/mandated elsewhere -

  [...]Use a space after keywords (if, while, for, return, switch). No braces are used for control statements with zero or only a single statement unless that statement is more than a single line, in which case they are permitted.[0]

As I look, GNU guide is less specific, but examples[1] show the same style.

The good thing is that -Wmisleading-indentation [2] (comes along with -Wall) catches this indentation error.

[0] https://man.openbsd.org/style - happens to be same for at least NetBSD.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Syntactic-Conve...

[2] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html

New comment by bch in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

bch — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:33:08 +0000

> that was one of my inspirations

Colins FreeBSD work or Emiles NetBSD work?

New comment by bch in "Reflections on 30 years of HPC programming"

bch — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:26:06 +0000

> C++ is like C with extra features, but you don't need to use them

C++ certainly (literally (Cfront[0])) used to be this, but I thought modern (decade or more) conventional wisdom is to NOT think like this anymore. Curious to hear others weigh in.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront

New comment by bch in "Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines"

bch — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:45:15 +0000

see too[0][1] for projects of a similar* vein, incl historical account.

*yes, FreeBSD is specifically developed against Firecracker which is specifically avoided w "Smol machines", but interesting nonetheless

[0] https://github.com/NetBSDfr/smolBSD

[1] https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/freebsd-fire...

New comment by bch in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

bch — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:33:34 +0000

I think of this as the curse of Emacs. Infinitely configurable, thereafter entirely unique in the universe, which can be a double edged sword. See too (maybe it's the same thing) The Lisp Curse.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450973

New comment by bch in "Cells for NetBSD: kernel-enforced, jail-like isolation"

bch — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:09:19 +0000

I followed your and @blymn's work then, and filed a bug report against veriexec. blymn gently improved the characterization of the problem and fixed it. That led me to start studying lex/yacc, instead of just treating them like magic.

Thanks for your work.

New comment by bch in "Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years"

bch — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:58:07 +0000

> This is expected in the normal population

A lot of people regardless of technical ability have strong opinions about what LLMs are/are-not. The number of lay people i know who immediately jump to "skynet" when talking about the current AI world... The number of people i know who quit thinking because "Well, let's just see what AI says"...

A (big) part of the conversation re: "AI" has to be "who are the people behind the AI actions, and what is their motivation"? Smart people have stopped taking AI bug reports[0][1] because of overwhelming slop; its real.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/curl_ai_bug_reports/

[1] https://gist.github.com/bagder/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d...

New comment by bch in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

bch — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:26:29 +0000

Is anybody aware of audio-only coverage of this mission? I'd have loved to just tuned into most of the launch like radio, rather than having my unwatched youtube running.

New comment by bch in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

bch — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 03:50:07 +0000

What a horrible (preventable) position to be in, though.