Hacker News: crackez

New comment by crackez in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

crackez — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:02:53 +0000

Oh really? Have you tried to rewrite anything to put your theory to the test? I don't think it's as straight forward as you think it is...

New comment by crackez in "SDL bans AI-written commits"

crackez — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:25:57 +0000

I'm just happy to be on the food chain at all...

New comment by crackez in "Rats Play DOOM"

crackez — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:56:25 +0000

I think there would be more money saved by making sure deer don't get hit by cars...

New comment by crackez in "Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price"

crackez — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:11:51 +0000

That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically.

It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.

New comment by crackez in "Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes"

crackez — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 12:24:33 +0000

What about CICS? What about JES?

New comment by crackez in "Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department's Use of Flock Safety"

crackez — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 17:35:45 +0000

"you're either with me or you're against me" is an indicator for a bad decision being forced upon you, often by a bad person. Best to just disregard and move on.

New comment by crackez in "The first year of free-threaded Python"

crackez — Fri, 16 May 2025 20:27:38 +0000

Fork on Linux should use copy-on-write vmpages now, so if you fork inside python it should be cheap. If you launch a new Python process from let's say the shell, and it's already in the buffer cache, then you should only have to pay the startup CPU cost of the interpreter, since the IO should be satisfied from buffer cache...

New comment by crackez in "Half-Life"

crackez — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 18:25:58 +0000

So, what's your replacement machine consist of?

I used to use the hardware raid to stripe 2x ssd's to get over 1GB/s from my sata drives.

New machine has a pcie5 gen5 m.2 nvme. Stupid fast at 12GB/s.

I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now...

New comment by crackez in "Half-Life"

crackez — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 14:44:17 +0000

I just replaced my HP z800 from 2008 because it was holding it's own with the addition of a few ssd's and an RX580 GPU over the years. Went from 6c12t Xeon to 16c32t (R9950x) and 7900xt.

Performance just hasn't out paced people's needs in the last 15 years the way it used to...

New comment by crackez in "20 years working on the same software product"

crackez — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:07:19 +0000

It sounds like the view of some person with zero experience in the real world of professional software engineering. My experience is the opposite. The USA has a very diverse software workforce.

New comment by crackez in "How do interruptions impact different software engineering activities"

crackez — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:04:08 +0000

Hard disagree.

It's not at all a mental illness. That's ignorant.

Some of the most technically adept people I know are on the spectrum and they are incredibly valuable. We're talking Chief architects, lead/senior engineers, Network engineers, and the list goes on.

People like that probably have divergent neurochemistry compared to you.

Learn to leverage that asset and stop being a Karen.

Feigned wisdom isn't.

New comment by crackez in "Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)"

crackez — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 01:47:16 +0000

Sure, for JCL and COBOL...

New comment by crackez in "The Thought Experiments That Fray the Fabric of Space-Time"

crackez — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:03:47 +0000

Since when is the surface of the universe that of a hypersphere?

New comment by crackez in "A Lisp compiler to RISC-V written in Lisp"

crackez — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 01:15:00 +0000

Vulkan shaders have entered the chat...

New comment by crackez in "A Lisp compiler to RISC-V written in Lisp"

crackez — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 23:24:08 +0000

Yet the same number of register bytes (when only counting 6502's zero page)... 32x8 = 256 bytes...

New comment by crackez in "Perfctl: Stealthy malware targeting Linux servers"

crackez — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 18:08:13 +0000

There's always - cat /proc/net/tcp*

And remember: echo * can be your "ls" in a pinch.

New comment by crackez in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

crackez — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 11:39:02 +0000

Look up Micro Focus Enterprise Server and Enterprise Developer. They are now owned by Rocket.

New comment by crackez in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

crackez — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 22:50:58 +0000

I've used o365 copilot to analyze a COBOL app I had source code to, and it was great at explaining how the code worked. Made writing an interface to it a breeze with some sample code and I swear I am not a COBOL person, I'm just the Linux guy trying to help a buddy out...

It also does a reasonable job of generating working COBOL. I had to fix up just a few errors in the data definitions as the llm generated badly sized data members, but it was pretty smooth. Much smoother than my experiences with llm's and Python. What a crap shoot Python is with llm's...

New comment by crackez in "COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it"

crackez — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 22:38:47 +0000

Negativo friendo.

The mainframe is turning into a middleware layer running on Enterprise Linux. We've containerized the mainframe at this point, and I mean that directly - eg. Running jcl, multiple CICS regions, all in COBOL that originated on z/OS is now running in k8s on amd64.

New comment by crackez in "K8s Service Meshes: The Bill Comes Due"

crackez — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 17:06:12 +0000

With Istio (envoy) you run a "sidecar" container in your pods which handles the "mesh" traffic, so it scales with the number of instances of your pods.