Hacker News: icedchai

New comment by icedchai in "Getting silly with C, part and((int*)-8)[3]"

icedchai — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:05:11 +0000

I always forget K&R syntax is still in there. I taught myself C in 1988, during the K&R -> ANSI transition. All my early Amiga C programs were K&R style.

New comment by icedchai in "The little-known winstart.bat batch file"

icedchai — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:47:57 +0000

To be fair, almost all applications in the mid 1980's were real mode, so adding a feature that would allow virtualization of the vast majority of apps makes total sense. Remember, almost no software used the 286's "protected mode" capabilities. Intel wouldn't make the same mistake with the 386.

New comment by icedchai in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

icedchai — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:44:46 +0000

Yep! These unis were smart enough to block telnet from the terminal servers to outside of their local network.

New comment by icedchai in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

icedchai — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:52:21 +0000

"Finger" is how my teenage self got into hacking. I'd dial into local universities, which all had open terminal servers. No authentication needed for the terminal servers. That didn't give me host access though, but I could run "status" or "who" or something and see who was connected and where they were connecting to (CS dept Sun server, etc.) I'd then connect to port 79 (finger) of the host, which let me see the logins and names of who was connected. Because these were college students, they often used their first or last name as a password. I'm sure you can figure it out from there.

New comment by icedchai in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

icedchai — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:46:05 +0000

I'm convinced it's not worth the hassle!

New comment by icedchai in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

icedchai — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:55:28 +0000

Correct! Basically, I excluded the bad range so Linux doesn't touch it. It's been stable for weeks now. I should send the DIMM back under warranty.

New comment by icedchai in "My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup"

icedchai — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:28:28 +0000

I see it ruining interactions at work. There's a lot of meat-proxy-ism going on, where people copy-and-paste back and forth between AI.

It's filling the Internet with trash. Look around anywhere: Reddit, YouTube, individual blogs, it doesn't matter. You'll find generative garbage as far as the eye can see. Not all generative content is bad, but a lot of it is outright crap.

It can be a productive tool though. Still, I don't find it enjoyable to use. If you like the "journey" of programming (tinkering, "figuring things out", problem solving), you won't like AI as much. It removes the fun part. If you like the "destination" (the end result of building a thing), you'll love it.

New comment by icedchai in "My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup"

icedchai — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:52:55 +0000

"You're absolutely right!"

Seriously, I couldn't have said it better myself.

New comment by icedchai in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

icedchai — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:42:08 +0000

I recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.

New comment by icedchai in "Briefing on Extinction-Level AI Threats"

icedchai — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:44:53 +0000

I haven’t seen anyone with a “sysadmin” job title in years.

New comment by icedchai in "RayforceDB – a pure C analytics database with a Lisp-like syntax"

icedchai — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:05:31 +0000

It has the look: fonts, style, layout, too many em-dashes, and weird phrasing like "Every surface reaches the same optimizer and execution core."

New comment by icedchai in "Tim King, AmigaDOS developer, has died"

icedchai — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:43:50 +0000

You can edit the boot script (s:startup-sequence, I think... it's been a while.) so it doesn't start Workbench. However, you can't really disable the windowing system.

New comment by icedchai in "Tim King, AmigaDOS developer, has died"

icedchai — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:26:52 +0000

Same! AmigaDOS (based on TRIPOS) was the first OS with a "real" command line that I used. It was also where I learned C.

New comment by icedchai in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

icedchai — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 03:44:58 +0000

All SSL/TLS interception has the shortcoming. In other contexts, that’s a good thing, when certificate pinning works, I mean.

New comment by icedchai in "To save C, we must save ABI (2022)"

icedchai — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:50:27 +0000

You must grossly underestimate how much C code is out there. It will be alive (though not necessarily well) after everyone here is gone.

New comment by icedchai in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"

icedchai — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:03:51 +0000

Considering every other line of Go is `if err != nil`, this makes sense. I do prefer Go's simplicity, personally.

New comment by icedchai in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

icedchai — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:24:52 +0000

Isn't it that way with most software? "It works", except when it doesn't.

New comment by icedchai in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

icedchai — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:00:46 +0000

Yes, I've worked with people who have run into issues with "security" solutions like ZScaler. I have tried it with some APIs (like GitHub) and it does work. Not to say it will work in your case.

New comment by icedchai in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

icedchai — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 03:06:59 +0000

The docs mention it can be bypassed for configured domains.

New comment by icedchai in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

icedchai — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:50:41 +0000

There is a transparent proxy installed (along with the necessary certificates on the VM.) For an example, see https://docs.microsandbox.dev/networking/tls