Hacker News: hello_computer

New comment by hello_computer in "The curious case of shell commands, or how "this bug is required by POSIX" (2021)"

hello_computer — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 16:30:05 +0000

I like it. Hope it gets some traction.

New comment by hello_computer in "The curious case of shell commands, or how "this bug is required by POSIX" (2021)"

hello_computer — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:13:58 +0000

There are so many neo-shells that go crazy with colors, autocompletions, & SQL-like features while the most basic problems (like handling of newlines/spaces/international chars) are mostly swept under the rug with -null/-print0, which is more hack than solution. I think Tom Duff's rc shell was an excellent start in that direction, which sadly went nowhere.

New comment by hello_computer in "The curious case of shell commands, or how "this bug is required by POSIX" (2021)"

hello_computer — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:07:54 +0000

> article full of nonsense

Pls elaborate. Seems like a decent list of shell gotchas to me.

New comment by hello_computer in "What methylene blue can (and can’t) do for the brain"

hello_computer — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 12:08:02 +0000

This is true. I've had so many problems where the pills and creams were time and money down the drain, and the solution was to cut something out of my diet or lifestyle. Less is more.

New comment by hello_computer in "EU OS for the Public Sector"

hello_computer — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 11:16:44 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by hello_computer in "FSE meets the FBI"

hello_computer — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 09:51:17 +0000

are there any good open-source porn-detector models out there? if i ran an image board in 2025, that would be job #1, since it’s really just a weapon, and we don’t speak or print with our genitals—well, most of us anyway…

New comment by hello_computer in "EFF to the FTC: DMCA Section 1201 Creates Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers"

hello_computer — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 20:57:18 +0000

Have to wonder about the sincerity of this after Yasha Levine illustrated the ties between big tech and the EFF, when big tech’s present theory of copyright is:

> Our Copyright: based and red-pilled

> Your Copyright: fake and gay

New comment by hello_computer in "Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube"

hello_computer — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 20:46:37 +0000

Obviously, but that's not what I'm getting at. Due to present technical limitations, "influencers" have to sharecrop for Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. Bandwidth/storage/software improvements will allow successful "influencers" to flee the plantation.

New comment by hello_computer in "Researchers find a way to make the HIV virus visible within white blood cells"

hello_computer — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 19:38:15 +0000

> Suppose, hypothetically, you invented an actually effective weight loss drug—one that leads to permanent and healthy change.

> Let’s say it’s a drug that both decreases leptin resistance and prevents simple carbs from triggering the brain’s reward centers. And suppose it doesn’t require someone to keep taking it for the rest of their life, as long as they don’t fall back into obesity.

> Now, imagine you’re not interested in getting rich—you legitimately want to solve the obesity epidemic.

> But then you realize the weight loss industry is a multi-billion-dollar machine, not to mention the pharmaceutical companies profiting off obesity-related health issues. They’re not just going to let this drug come out without a fight.

> Suppose you don’t even care that you're likely to end up falsely accused of rape by women you've never met, and probably dead soon after, with a “suicide note” conveniently found next to your body. You just want to find the best way to get this drug out there and available to the public.

> Assume, for the moment, that no one but you and a small group of trusted researchers know about this discovery—and you stumbled across it accidentally while researching something else.

> What would be the best approach to make this drug available to the public, knowing that powerful, interested parties would do everything in their power to suppress it?

New comment by hello_computer in "The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)"

hello_computer — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:26:48 +0000

obs, jitsi, & raspbian are not “hobby projects”. do you work for redhat?

New comment by hello_computer in "The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)"

hello_computer — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 12:27:06 +0000

> More than 2/3rds of your examples are from over 5 years ago

Exactly! If you scroll to the bottom of each one, you will see that most are either a) still open, or b) abandoned (too hard or impossible), then closed as stale.

> image of a testicle when hotlinked from HN

Rightly so.

New comment by hello_computer in "The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)"

hello_computer — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 12:19:47 +0000

2016-01-23 https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr/issues/431

2019-01-04 (only took 3 1/2 years to resolve!) https://github.com/flathub/us.zoom.Zoom/issues/22

2020-03-07 https://github.com/vkohaupt/vokoscreenNG/issues/51

2020-03-07 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2471

2020-03-24 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/6389

2023-09 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

2023-11-17 https://github.com/raspberrypi/bookworm-feedback/issues/149

New comment by hello_computer in "The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)"

hello_computer — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 11:42:19 +0000

> moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project

That's what I've always thought. The "X11 developers" pushing for Wayland weren't original developers so much as RedHat "maintainers," who (understandably) wanted a frontier to explore rather than janitorial work. All I know for certain is that X11 (even as of 15 years ago) mostly worked, while Wayland of 2025 is still full of headaches & breakages.

New comment by hello_computer in "Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube"

hello_computer — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 10:46:57 +0000

The good news is that LLMs + growth in storage & bandwidth will eventually put Google in its place. The full texts of stack exchange and wikipedia (kiwix) are only a few gigs. Same for offline models like llama/gemma/qwen. As the wizards keep finding new ways to pack more bits on metal plates, we will be able to store more video than we will ever watch, just as we now store more text than we will ever read.

New comment by hello_computer in "A proposal to restrict sites from accessing a users’ local network"

hello_computer — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 23:31:57 +0000

project zero is ZERO compared to the millions of little old ladies around the world getting scammed through adwords. only security big g cares about is its own. they have the tools to laser-in on and punish the subtlest of wrongthink on youtube, yet it’s just too tall of an order to focus the same laser on tech support scammers…

New comment by hello_computer in "A proposal to restrict sites from accessing a users’ local network"

hello_computer — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 20:13:44 +0000

just the fact that this comes from google is a hard pass for me. they sell so many adwords scams that they clearly do not give a damn about security. “security” from google is just another one of their trojan horses.

New comment by hello_computer in "Rsync's defaults are not always enough"

hello_computer — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:53:44 +0000

If they expose it, that ties them to a particular hash algo. Hash algos are as much art as science, and the opportunities for hardware acceleration vary from chip to chip, so maintaining the leeway to move from one algo to another is kind of important.

New comment by hello_computer in "HeidiSQL Available Also for Linux"

hello_computer — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 11:20:39 +0000

For me, DbBeaver is jack-of-all-trades, master of none. Seems to handle every database known to mankind, but not a fantastic user experience. While HeidiSQL is a work of art for MySQL / MariaDB, but not much else. I use & appreciate both in different ways.

New comment by hello_computer in "[dead]"

hello_computer — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 18:44:01 +0000

now that AI has given the office boys a reason to guzzle gigawatts, they’re walking-back the carbon credits grift. warming or not, we’re destroying the world at a startling pace. everyone should consume less.

New comment by hello_computer in "Human coders are still better than LLMs"

hello_computer — Fri, 30 May 2025 02:26:25 +0000

Corporations have many constraints—advertisers, investors, employees, legislators, journalists, advocacy groups. So many “white lies” are baked into these models to accommodate those constraints, nerfing the model. It is only a matter of time before hardware brings this down to the hobbyist level—without those constraints—giving the present methods their first fair fight; while for now, they are born lobotomized. Some of the “but, but, but…”s we see here daily to justify our jobs are not going to hold up to a non-lobotomized LLM.