Hacker News: king_geedorah

New comment by king_geedorah in "Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)"

king_geedorah — Sun, 03 May 2026 13:21:22 +0000

The funny thing about the glibc situation is that glibc really doesn’t provide improvements to any of the kernel interfaces or really any comfort stuff for developers. If anything the fact that it is bound by the C standards makes it worse than using the kernel API directly besides that for whatever reason the kernel headers seem to lack a fair number of definitions. That could just be a me problem though.

New comment by king_geedorah in "Functional programmers need to take a look at Zig"

king_geedorah — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:12:18 +0000

A theme I found to be common here and in a lot of conversations in this vein on the site is the split between “We (software engineers) are programming actual computers whose behaviors we know” and “We (software engineers) are expressing business problems as abstract computation that should be independent of the computer on which they run.”

The truth is somewhere in the middle but it’s interesting how many ostensibly technical disputes seem to come down to placement on this philosophical axis.

New comment by king_geedorah in "Type resolution redesign, with language changes to taste"

king_geedorah — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:04:49 +0000

The kernel32 -> Ntdll changes are the most interesting thing to me here. A lot of the rationale is applicable also to the linux userspace APIs, especially errors in return at the kernel-userspace boundary vs GetLastError/errno in kernel32/libc. Of course on linux the "problem" is that libc and the kernel API are intimately intertwined and the former mandates using errno. I wonder how the pattern made its way into windows as well. That environment has never seemed to me to promote using libc.

New comment by king_geedorah in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

king_geedorah — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:37:21 +0000

In fact Rust was specifically discussed as a possible alternative to the C++ status quo in Jon's initial "A Programming Language For Games" talk which roughly marks the inception of his current / upcoming language.

New comment by king_geedorah in "I built a 2x faster lexer, then discovered I/O was the real bottleneck"

king_geedorah — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:21:09 +0000

io_uring supports submitting openat requests, which sounds like what you want. Open the dirfd, extract all the names via readdir and then submit openat SQEs all at once. Admittedly I have not used the io uring api myself so I can't speak to edge cases in doing so, but it's "on the happy path" as it were.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/io_uring_prep_open.3.h...

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/readdir.2.html

Note that the prep open man page is a (3) page. You could of course construct the SQEs yourself.

New comment by king_geedorah in "Go-legacy-winxp: Compile Golang 1.24 code for Windows XP"

king_geedorah — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 04:59:48 +0000

As far as I'm aware so long as you limit yourself to APIs that were available in XP you don't actually need an older SDK to develop for it with modern MSVC. The early windows platform layer stuff in the handmade hero series demonstrates doing so without anything like Cygwin or MinGW.

New comment by king_geedorah in "First convex polyhedron found that can't pass through itself"

king_geedorah — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 19:41:18 +0000

Rather interesting solution to the problem. You can't test every possibility, so you pick one and get to rule out a bunch of other ones in the same region provided you can determine some other quality of that (non) solution.

I watched a pretty neat video[0] on the topic of ruperts / noperts a few weeks ago, which is a rather fun coincidence ahead of this advancement.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH4MviUE0_s

New comment by king_geedorah in "We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own"

king_geedorah — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 15:56:38 +0000

I'm not sure what the number of people in the world has to do with whether an open standard does or doesn't promote innovation. The user asked for a case where an open standard didn't do that and I provided one. Whether you think it's a great counterpoint is entirely irrelevant to me.

New comment by king_geedorah in "We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own"

king_geedorah — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 14:53:20 +0000

The web is open and is famously very competitive. We have three whole browser engines and only two of them are implemented by for-profit corporations whose valuations have 13 digits. I mean other ones exist, but the average modern developer claims it's your fault when something doesn't work because you use firefox or safari and also demands the browser rewrap all the capabilities the operating system already provides for you because they can't be assed to do the work of meeting users where they are.

New comment by king_geedorah in "Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos"

king_geedorah — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 14:01:09 +0000

I believe they are referring to the icon that appears in the status bar when an application is using location services (including in the background).

Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software

king_geedorah — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 23:46:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45020581

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

New comment by king_geedorah in "Debdelta"

king_geedorah — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 02:05:54 +0000

I'm curious if anybody has used this for their own systems and if the savings were substantial. Fedora used something seemingly equivalent (deltarpms) by default in dnf until last year[1] and the rationale for removing it seemed to be based at least in part on the idea that the savings were not substantial enough.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Drop_Delta_RPMs

New comment by king_geedorah in "AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions"

king_geedorah — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 20:02:39 +0000

Re: "What about my autocomplete?" which has shown up twice in this thread so far.

> As a small exception, trivial tab-completion doesn't need to be disclosed, so long as it is limited to single keywords or short phrases.

RTFA (RTFPR in this case)

New comment by king_geedorah in "Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move"

king_geedorah — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:31:10 +0000

This is precisely the point I intended to make with my comment. Perhaps my phrasing was unclear.

New comment by king_geedorah in "Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move"

king_geedorah — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:23:04 +0000

If the ignition and door locks in your vehicle were mistakenly designed in such a way that they are trivially shimmed or could be operated by any key it seems absurd to suggest the customer should pay you to replace these mechanisms with ones that are properly secured. This seems roughly analogous to that situation at least to my understanding.

New comment by king_geedorah in "How to Use Snprintf"

king_geedorah — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:48:55 +0000

> If the output was truncated due to this limit, then the return value is the number of characters (excluding the terminating null byte) which would have been written to the final string if enough space had been available.

The initial call with size 0 tells you the necessary length of the buffer for the string you want, but does not include the null byte.

New comment by king_geedorah in "We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application"

king_geedorah — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 23:26:43 +0000

No, there are no protocols intended to implement such a thing at this time. I'm not aware of anybody attempting to spec out such a protocol either, but I do think it's a really interesting idea.

Edit: s/protocol/interface

New comment by king_geedorah in "Illinois limits the use of AI in therapy and psychotherapy"

king_geedorah — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:14:41 +0000

If you take it as an axiom that the licensing system for mental health professionals is there to protect patients from unqualified help posing as qualified help, then ensuring that only licensed professionals can legally practice and that they don't simply delegate their jobs to LLMs seems pretty reasonable.

Whether you want to question that axiom or whether that's what the phrasing of this legislation accomplishes is up to you to decide for yourself. Personally I think the phrasing is pretty straightforward in terms of accomplishing that goal.

Here is basically the entirety of the legislation (linked elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44893999). The whole thing with definitions and penalties is eight pages.

Section 15. Permitted use of artificial intelligence.

(a) As used in this Section, "permitted use of artificial intelligence" means the use of artificial intelligence tools or systems by a licensed professional to assist in providing administrative support or supplementary support in therapy or psychotherapy services where the licensed professional maintains full responsibility for all interactions, outputs, and data use associated with the system and satisfies the requirements of subsection (b).

(b) No licensed professional shall be permitted to use artificial intelligence to assist in providing supplementary support in therapy or psychotherapy where the client's therapeutic session is recorded or transcribed unless: (1) the patient or the patient's legally authorized representative is informed in writing of the following: (A) that artificial intelligence will be used; and (B) the specific purpose of the artificial intelligence tool or system that will be used; and (2) the patient or the patient's legally authorized representative provides consent to the use of artificial

Section 20. Prohibition on unauthorized therapy services.

(a) An individual, corporation, or entity may not provide, advertise, or otherwise offer therapy or psychotherapy services, including through the use of Internet-based artificial intelligence, to the public in this State unless the therapy or psychotherapy services are conducted by an individual who is a licensed professional.

(b) A licensed professional may use artificial intelligence only to the extent the use meets the requirements of Section 15. A licensed professional may not allow artificial intelligence to do any of the following: (1) make independent therapeutic decisions; (2) directly interact with clients in any form of therapeutic communication; (3) generate therapeutic recommendations or treatment plans without review and approval by the licensed professional; or (4) detect emotions or mental states.

New comment by king_geedorah in "Dear String-to-Integer Parsers"

king_geedorah — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 19:09:16 +0000

I take your general point with the caveat that no negatives leaves half of all values for a given integer type unyieldable whereas lack of scientific notation support does not.

I was operating under an unfounded assumption that the blog post existed instead of the code to do the thing for your particular use case rather than in addition to it, which isn’t entirely fair given we have had no prior interactions and I have not investigated your work at all.

New comment by king_geedorah in "Dear String-to-Integer Parsers"

king_geedorah — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 13:22:33 +0000

I’m not sure why this is a “proposal” for other string to int parsers rather than a function the author wrote themselves. It seems rather trivial to implement on top of something like strtol (or whatever your language’s equivalent is).