Hacker News: ghelmer

New comment by ghelmer in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

ghelmer — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:16:45 +0000

> I sat through a conference session in the late nineties trying to understand the difference between an OLE document, a COM object, and an ActiveX control.

I wonder if we attended the same conference session!

New comment by ghelmer in "Claude Code runs Git reset –hard origin/main against project repo every 10 mins"

ghelmer — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:07:21 +0000

That is not my experience.

New comment by ghelmer in "AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'"

ghelmer — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:00:57 +0000

I find it's helpful to have context to frame what I'm memorizing to help me understand the value.

New comment by ghelmer in "Migraine is more than a headache – a rethink offers hope"

ghelmer — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:56:16 +0000

> one thing that helps me short-circuit it 99% of the time is a high amount of caffeine

The med that helped my dad with migraines was Vanquish (aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffeine.

Your experiences with migraines are interesting and relatable. One thing I have noticed is random scalp tingles in the day before a migraine.

New comment by ghelmer in "Migraine is more than a headache – a rethink offers hope"

ghelmer — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 15:59:13 +0000

I have experienced migraines since my teens, usually starting with annoying visual artifacts, facial numbness, difficulty speaking, and progressing to intense pain. The worst of them would also cause auditory discomfort. In my 20s, I could reliably trigger a migraine by doing something intensely physical (like playing basketball with friends) and drinking lots of cold water or taking a cool shower. Since then, it's been harder to determine a cause other than stress. About 15 years ago, work was really stressful and I had numerous migraines in a four-month period. Once I even got a demerol IM shot, which seemed like much ado about nothing -- I was hoping for great relief, but it didn't seem to do much. Now in my 50s, I only get about one a year, and it's pretty mild.

New comment by ghelmer in "Microsoft Recall still storing credit card, social security numbers"

ghelmer — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 20:24:04 +0000

I'm not apologizing for MS, and I have no idea what PII protection Recall actually has. If Recall does have real PII logic, it should recognize that a legitimate VISA payment card numbers must start with '4' + be 16 digits in length, and AmEx cards must start with '34' or '37' + be 15 digits in length; also, the LUHN algorithm must be satisfied over the card digits.

With Recall, it seems false positives for PII-type protection rules would be more acceptable than false negatives. But with the negative press already around the technology. I'm not sure it will ever gain acceptance.

New comment by ghelmer in "Hacking on PostgreSQL Is Hard"

ghelmer — Mon, 06 May 2024 01:50:58 +0000

The barrier to entry for programmers on projects like PostgreSQL and FreeBSD is high, with good and bad results. It seems you have to be very committed to the project (which may involve support from one’s employer) to join and contribute. It requires deep understanding of the codebase and preparedness to deal with fallout when changes inevitably cause problems. That’s good in that the developers are highly invested in building a quality product. But the high barrier to entry makes it difficult to attract new developers, and it is very difficult for those with a passing interest to get fixes and improvements into the codebase.

New comment by ghelmer in "A 1914 silent film considered lost was rescued from a vault"

ghelmer — Mon, 29 May 2023 15:15:30 +0000

Sounds interesting but behind the WSJ paywall. A story I find very interesting is the recovery of a large number of films found preserved under permafrost under a former ice rink in Dawson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson_Film_Find

New comment by ghelmer in "Most data work seems fundamentally worthless"

ghelmer — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 14:21:30 +0000

"The more things change, the more they stay the same" - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

In the late 1980s, "executive dashboards" were all the rage. Vendors were selling tools to tap data in mainframe databases to provide insights directly to execs to improve business knowledge. It generally felt like a massive waste of resources.

(But, in that timeframe, I did build a tool to scrape data from a mainframe DB and turn it into useful statistics on a weekly basis at a big organization. Not sure how long it lasted, though, because my boss required that the reporting interface be implemented in his favorite tool, Lotus 1-2-3.) (edited for spelling)

New comment by ghelmer in "Time to get the Posix elephant off our necks?"

ghelmer — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 01:01:21 +0000

I have been unpleasantly surprised when I expect Posix semantics from Windows. Think about parent PIDs. You can't assume a process's parent PID is actually still the parent. Think about file open semantics. Try to open to a file when any other process has the file open with no sharing allowed. Think about file delete. (Really, try to delete a file reliably in Windows.) Think about string encoding and code pages. (Well, this is out of bounds for Posix, but closely related to expected filename semantics.)

New comment by ghelmer in "Time to get the Posix elephant off our necks?"

ghelmer — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:51:03 +0000

Windows threw off the Posix elephant, and I spend more than half my time working around the resulting mess when working on Windows code.

New comment by ghelmer in "Magnetic Cooling Cycle"

ghelmer — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 02:51:17 +0000

Saw this effect demonstrated at room temperature by an acquaintance at Ames Laboratory over 20 years ago. Have long wondered about its practicality. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/854806

New comment by ghelmer in "The Unix Magic Poster"

ghelmer — Mon, 03 May 2021 22:05:42 +0000

Love these posters -- the one referenced in the article, and the other (UNIX feuds) noted in the comments. At one time I had both - lost one on a plane, and lost the other in a move. So rich in meaning, as others are noting.

New comment by ghelmer in "Your statement is correct but misses the point"

ghelmer — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 14:30:11 +0000

"They just want to win the argument" is a good summary of what I understood from the article. There are people I regularly encounter who have to inject their opposition or correction to anything anyone else does or says, which feels like they are attempting to prove their superiority or correctness (but instead proving their failure to recognize the context of the original statement). Couching their point in the style "What about X?" instead of making a counter statement would be a more useful communication method IMO. (Edited to fix grammar)

New comment by ghelmer in "How SSH Port Became 22"

ghelmer — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 01:01:15 +0000

I've written a lot of TCP deep-packet inspection code, including parsing FTP control protocol. So I was surprised by this post by Robert Graham: https://blog.erratasec.com/2019/08/hacker-jeopardy-wrong-ans... - FTP control protocol follows the specification for Telnet.

New comment by ghelmer in "“It is never a compiler error”"

ghelmer — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 01:54:23 +0000

A summer spent testing (and breaking) compilers taught me a lot, including: compilers do have obscure bugs. 99.99999% of program errors are bugs in the code, but the rare compiler bug is maddening to diagnose.