Hacker News: guenthert

New comment by guenthert in "Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10"

guenthert — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:05:06 +0000

> Theoretically, given a sufficient networking configuration/VPN/etc., you could pull your smart card out of the Sun Ray in your university office, go home, and then drop your smart card into a Sun Ray at home and still have everything back where you left off.

They (well, the late models) had a Cisco compatible VPN client built in. Worked like a charm at my place of work in the late naughts.

New comment by guenthert in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

guenthert — Thu, 07 May 2026 07:57:42 +0000

Well, iSCSI is a standard, so chances are better that it's supported in a non-Linux OS, e.g. MS Windows. Years ago I booted a Windows (7, iirc) client that way, but gave up on it (too much hassle and performance limited by the network) when SSDs became cheap.

New comment by guenthert in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

guenthert — Thu, 07 May 2026 07:50:58 +0000

"I didn’t want to get into the hassle of repartitioning everything that the boot loader works with both Linux & Windows."

Hmmh? I haven't done so in years, but configuring multi-boot used to be considerably easier than disk-less operation.

New comment by guenthert in "Dotcl: Common Lisp Implementation on .NET"

guenthert — Sat, 02 May 2026 14:49:26 +0000

I'm pretty sure it does. I would even think that it tries to optimize such, as a recent check-in comment claims improvements of TCO.

New comment by guenthert in "Dotcl: Common Lisp Implementation on .NET"

guenthert — Sat, 02 May 2026 14:46:50 +0000

Yeah, pity that the early history seems to have been lost.

New comment by guenthert in "Using a 1978 terminal in 2026 (DEC VT-100)"

guenthert — Fri, 01 May 2026 08:30:59 +0000

"generating SIGTERM on Control + C"

That'll be SIGINT, but I understand, he just tests whether we pay attention.

New comment by guenthert in "Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin"

guenthert — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:59:40 +0000

Does session management really belong in the terminal emulator?

New comment by guenthert in "French government agency confirms breach as hacker offers to sell data"

guenthert — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:01:32 +0000

Er? social security covers more than just healthcare and the issue with on-line data in context of healthcare is patients' history, which i) is sensitive and ii) needs to be shared among health care providers.

New comment by guenthert in "Why Not Venus?"

guenthert — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:46:13 +0000

The average lifetime of probes landing on Venus counting in minutes might have something to do with that?

"So that’s the bad part. But once you move past it, you start to notice that everything gets easier on Venus."

If wishes were fishes ...

New comment by guenthert in "Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975"

guenthert — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:23:20 +0000

Indeed. How else would we have been able to know that there is a Mind Prober! Circle 200 on Inquiry card.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n173/...

New comment by guenthert in "Modern Common Lisp with FSet"

guenthert — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:24:09 +0000

Yeah, clojure gets away with it thanks to the high performance of the available gc in the JVM. In the Common Lisp world the compiler puts quite some effort into avoiding heap allocation ("consing"); the language was designed with that in mind. Not sure where it's now, but not too long ago SBCL's gc wasn't its strong point.

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

guenthert — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:41:42 +0000

You'll want part 2 as well for a total of 107 pages.

New comment by guenthert in "Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)"

guenthert — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:29:50 +0000

> However, C on LLVM or GCC should probably be considered the “upper bound” when it comes to how well a program can be optimized, and thus the benchmark for any performance measurement.

Is it? Isn't it rather the case that C is too low level to express intent and (hence) offer room to optimize? I would expect that a language in which, e.g. matrix multiplication can be natively expressed, could be compiled to more efficient code for such.

I would rather expect, that for compilers which don't optimize well, C is the easiest to produce fairly efficient code for (well, perhaps BCPL would be even easier, but nobody wants to use that these days).

New comment by guenthert in "Simplest Hash Functions"

guenthert — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:39:32 +0000

> https://github.com/sahib/rmlint is the one I had in mind.

Ah, right, thanks. I now dimly recall some old project realizing fs-snapshots using hard links, which one could consider some sort of deduplication as well.

> I think you are thinking of block level online deduplicators that are integrated into the file system?

Indeed, I was.

New comment by guenthert in "Simplest Hash Functions"

guenthert — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:54:39 +0000

Now I'm no expert in that matter, but the fs deduplicators I've seen were block, not file, based. Those can clearly not use the file length as they are blissfully unaware of files (or any structure for that matter). Those use a rather expensive hash function (you really want to avoid hash collisions), but (at least some ten years ago) memory, not processing speed, was the limiting factor.

New comment by guenthert in "France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins"

guenthert — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:15:09 +0000

> Linux still doesn't have anywhere near as nice and cohesive as Group Policy, Active Directory etc.

I take your word for it (I know of Kerberos and LDAP and Netscape and Sun trying to make such palatable, but clearly haven't followed that in the last quarter-century).

That assumes however the server to be currently MS Windows. For government agencies, I'd rather expect some Mainframe to be (and remain) in place. Surely IBM (or here rather Groupe Bull) has user authentication/authorization figured out (more than half a century ago, methinks).

New comment by guenthert in "France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech"

guenthert — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:02:43 +0000

I puzzles me to no end why the typical office clerk should care about the OS at all. I understand that secretaries will be trained on MS Word and will then have a strong preference to use such (or at least something which very closely resembles it). Same for accountants with Excel. But clerks in e.g. Revenue Service? Those I expect to interact (perhaps these days via a Web interface) with custom software. Why would those ever see a 'Start' button or somesuch?

New comment by guenthert in "RAM Has a Design Flaw from 1966. I Bypassed It [video]"

guenthert — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:44:18 +0000

And those memory arrays cannot detect access from the bus?

I'm not saying that it's easy or cheap or worthwhile (I'd rather guess it's not in most cases), but I don't see why it couldn't be done.

New comment by guenthert in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

guenthert — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:21:01 +0000

Multiple and dissimilar redundancy is nice and all that, but is there a manual override? Apollo could be (and at least in Apollo 11 and 13 it had to), but is this still possible and feasible? I'd guess so, as it's still manned by (former) test pilots, much like Apollo.

New comment by guenthert in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

guenthert — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:49:35 +0000

I think he refers to SpaceWire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceWire.