Hacker News: chasil

New comment by chasil in "Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled"

chasil — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 05:37:06 +0000

For as much COBOL as my (former) coworkers use every day, they should bankroll her day.

New comment by chasil in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

chasil — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:43:23 +0000

Safari has real problems compared to Chrome on other platforms.

Primarily, incognito mode is difficult to access. Android allows a shortcut to be dropped to start in this mode.

Cut and paste is also awkward and uncomfortable in Safari compared to Android.

My first move on iOS is to install Firefox Focus, to get Safari's history under control.

New comment by chasil in "A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices"

chasil — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:51:27 +0000

I'm not comfortable giving away time and power consumption on a machine that I own.

I would definitely opt out.

Is Apple going to compensate the owners?

New comment by chasil in "A Modern Web App in C"

chasil — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:30:10 +0000

I have used ccgi.c when I needed access to system calls and PHP was too much of an attack surface.

https://github.com/moths/libccgi/blob/master/ccgi.c

New comment by chasil in "No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C"

chasil — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:53:51 +0000

The VAX floating point was advanced as an alternative standards proposal at that time. Intel won the argument.

https://sixlettervariable.blogspot.com/2007/05/vax-floating-...

New comment by chasil in "No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C"

chasil — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:45:16 +0000

IEEE-754 is a harsh mistress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754

New comment by chasil in "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"

chasil — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:21:34 +0000

My initial syntax does work in dash (and bash), but all these shells appear to rely on expanding ~ inside a word, that your source asserts is not POSIX (which I do not contest).

Perhaps a succinct and compliant expression could be:

  export PATH="$PATH:$(printf %s ~/.local/bin)"

That comes at the cost of forking a subsell.

Edit: 2.6.1 Tilde Expansion in the POSIX standard says that ~ may be expanded "following any unquoted ".

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

That being so, the most succinct and compliant version is my first variant, with the colon moved outside the quotes:

  export PATH="$PATH":~/.local/bin

Thank you for prompting me to look this up.

New comment by chasil in "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"

chasil — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 16:10:29 +0000

I think the appropriate method by POSIX rules would be:

  export PATH="$PATH:"~/.local/bin

I may be wrong. If I'm not, that works in any POSIX-compliant shell.

Edit: this appears to work properly with mksh on my phone:

  :/ $ export PATH="$PATH:"~/.local/bin
  :/ $ print $PATH
  /product/bin:/apex/com.android.runtime/bin:/apex/com.android.art/bin:/system_ext/bin:/system/bin:/system/xbin:/odm/bin:/vendor/bin:/vendor/xbin:~/.local/bin

New comment by chasil in "LineageOS 24.0"

chasil — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:28:53 +0000

A plain Lineage install will include "rooted debugging" in the developer options.

This is separate from the Magisk root app.

I don't believe using the ADB root functionality is problematic. The Magisk app also has a hide mode.

New comment by chasil in "Apple/macOS removed from official Unix registry"

chasil — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:42:33 +0000

If I remember correctly, two Linux variants were on the list at one time.

They were:

Inspur K-UX (expired on 3 February 2019)

Huawei EulerOS (expired in September 2022)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS

These were both based on Red Hat.

New comment by chasil in "Clinical trial of a prion disease drug candidate begins enrolling participants"

chasil — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:59:53 +0000

Prion diseases include:

-in sheep, scrapie

-in humans, Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jacob

-in cows, BSE ("mad cow")

-in deer, Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)

-in cats, feline spongiform encephalopathy

Scrapie is particularly known, deadly, and long-lived. The toxin proteins can survive for a decade in soil, and infect a new host years after it emerged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...

New comment by chasil in "Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court"

chasil — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:42:22 +0000

What you will see with a general read of the criticisms in the wiki are indications of bias and several nations in Africa and South America annulling the ICC influence.

The U.S. had peripheral involvement in these actions.

I am upvoting you, as I don't find your line of questioning abrasive enough to warrant down votes.

New comment by chasil in "Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court"

chasil — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:04:15 +0000

There is indeed a long list of criticisms of the ICC.

The U.S., along with China, India, Russia, and many other nations, are not members and do not grant any weight to ICC rulings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#C...

New comment by chasil in "Reducing undefined behavior in the C language"

chasil — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 05:02:56 +0000

C is also famously bad at floating point optimization.

Fortran has historcally led this realm (see the Numerical Recipes book).

Julia is a newer option, and I understand that both are commonly used in Python objects.

https://numerical.recipes/

"Read the older 2nd ed. book in Fortran online for free."

New comment by chasil in "Reducing undefined behavior in the C language"

chasil — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 03:14:27 +0000

It was written for a PDP-11 with 64k of RAM.

There wasn't room for safe programming practices, and direct manipulation of the hardware was a design requirement.

It assumes that you know what you are doing.

There are also ports to the Zilog Z80, an architecture with similar limitations (UZI, FUZIX).

New comment by chasil in "Reducing undefined behavior in the C language"

chasil — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 03:08:13 +0000

"Some Honeywell machines, for example, had nine-bit bytes."

OS 2200 has 36-bit words. It is still a supported platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_1100/2200_series

This platform was the first SMP UNIX implementation:

"Any configuration supplied by Sperry, including multiprocessor ones, can run the UNIX system."

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...

New comment by chasil in "It may soon be possible to create "mirror life""

chasil — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:39:51 +0000

Actually, scrapie itself is conjectured to trigger BSE.

"Cattle are believed to have been infected by being fed meat-and-bone meal that contained either the remains of cattle who spontaneously developed the disease or scrapie-infected sheep products...

"The British Government enquiry took the view that the cause was not scrapie, as had originally been postulated, but was some event in the 1970s that could not be identified."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

New comment by chasil in "It may soon be possible to create "mirror life""

chasil — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:46:47 +0000

Unfortunately, there are several prion diseases already in existence: scrapie in sheep, BSE in cows, Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, and both Kuru and Crutzfeld-Jacob in humans.

Scrapie is incredibly durable in the environment; the prion toxins can remain transmissible in the soil for a decade, causing disease years after it was shed by its previous host.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...

New comment by chasil in "It may soon be possible to create "mirror life""

chasil — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:57:16 +0000

The "Potential Risks" section of the wiki is a bit thin on the mechanisms of the danger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life#Potential_ri...

'In December 2024, 38 scientists, including several synthetic biology researchers and two Nobel laureates, warned that the creation of mirror-image life could cause "unprecedented and irreversible harm" to human health and ecosystems worldwide. The reversed structure of mirror-image bacteria could allow them to evade many mechanisms critical for immunity and predation that have evolved to recognize natural-chirality structures. As a result, mirror-image bacteria could potentially escape immune defenses and invade natural ecosystems, leading to "pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans."'

New comment by chasil in "The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)"

chasil — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 22:25:49 +0000

I should have checked that.

I remember that Logo was available for my TI-99/4a and assumed it was closer to the '80s.