Hacker News: listeria

New comment by listeria in "The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners"

listeria — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:33:36 +0000

(1) fails for negative numbers

(2) fails for (x % 32 in [1, 2]) due to UB

(3) fails for x == 2

(4) crashes for x == 0

(5) is the same polynomial, only factorized

(6) always returns 0

(7) is the same polynomail reordered

But this works for any value of x:

  x<2==2-x

or for something shorter:

  x<3&x>0

but that's not bery obfuscated

New comment by listeria in "You can beat the binary search"

listeria — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:17:06 +0000

This reminds me of two excellent articles[1][2] by Paul Khuong, in which he talks about using size-specialized binary search for power-of-two sized arrays (special-casing the first iteration for other sizes).

He uses conditional moves and defines the number of iterations in advance to ellide the often mispredicted branch, and in the second article goes on to fix cache aliasing issues for large vectors using ternary search.

[1]: https://pvk.ca/Blog/2012/07/03/binary-search-star-eliminates...

[2]: https://pvk.ca/Blog/2012/07/30/binary-search-is-a-pathologic...

New comment by listeria in "Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite"

listeria — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 04:00:17 +0000

Apparently there was some talk a few years ago about adding the project to the python standard library[1] and the maintainer seems really[2] interested[3] in that.

But I don't think the standard library maintainers would want to incorporate it considering the way in which the relicensing took place, the controversy, and the implications on software licences in general. So his motivations for the license change seem moot. I certainly wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

[1]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/36#issuecomment-76... [2]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4... [3]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...

New comment by listeria in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

listeria — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:30:05 +0000

Have you tried bringing it up with HR? If you explain why you try to avoid her while she's wearing them, they might ask her to stop wearing them to work.

Meta's own guidelines[1] say that you should "Power off in private spaces."

You can't always tell if you're being recorded since they can be tampered with to disable the LED. And from what I gather, the LED only serves to indicate of video recording, and not necessarily audio.

[1]: https://www.meta.com/ai-glasses/privacy/

New comment by listeria in "Layoffs at Block"

listeria — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 15:30:35 +0000

But the definition of economically active differs between the two: Finland includes people from ages 15-89, while in Spain you need to be 16 or older. And judging from what I read the rise in unemployment in Finland is attributed to more people entering the workforce.

New comment by listeria in "Why is the sky blue?"

listeria — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:43:39 +0000

If you look at the solar radiation spectrum chart in the section "Why isn’t the sky violet?", you can see that sunlight is not evenly distributed along the visible spectrum--it emit more blue than red, and at sea level it's closer to evenly distributed. So the light that reaches the clouds is still mostly white light.

New comment by listeria in "Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)"

listeria — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:17:40 +0000

Global aliases are a zsh feature and not avaliable in bash. So if you want:

  openssl ,v

to expand to...

  openssl --version

readline seems like the way to go.

Then again most of the examples OP gave are usually available as short options, and aliasing ,s to sudo is certainly possible. So the only one which makes sense to me is ,,=$. But it's probably not worth the trouble to my muscle memory.

New comment by listeria in "Doom has been ported to an earbud"

listeria — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:01:58 +0000

and risk having them interpret it as a declaration of war?

New comment by listeria in "Banned C++ features in Chromium"

listeria — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:57:31 +0000

may I introduce you to the nodiscard attribute[1]?

  enum (class)? [[nodiscard]] Error {
    Ok,
    NoMem,
    ...
  };

[1]: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes/nodisc...

New comment by listeria in "Just the Browser"

listeria — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:39:38 +0000

Firefox will read it if it exists[1]. You could use the /usr/lib/firefox/distribution directory (or whatever the installation directory may be), but that may be overwritten by an update.

There doesn't seem to be any way to set per-user group policies, so unless you're installing firefox in a user-controlled directory, it will require elevated privileges.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...

New comment by listeria in "Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian"

listeria — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:53:20 +0000

> The books were translated years ago anyway.

Translated books lack the nuance or tone of the originals, which you would be missing out of, and most of the time you don't even realise.

New comment by listeria in "CLI tool to check the Git status of multiple projects"

listeria — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 14:37:02 +0000

  sh: 1: [[: not found

New comment by listeria in "Rouille – Rust Programming, in French"

listeria — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 16:17:12 +0000

That's all well and good, except the README clearly states:

> rústico (Spanish for Rust)

which is plain wrong.

New comment by listeria in "Rouille – Rust Programming, in French"

listeria — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 14:57:25 +0000

I was immediately put off by the Spanish version when I saw it was called "rústico", which does not translate to rust at all, it means rustic. The Spanish word for rust would be "óxido".

New comment by listeria in "US declines to join more than 70 countries in signing UN cybercrime treaty"

listeria — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:05:23 +0000

you can see at the top of the page it says:

  STATUS AS AT : 30-10-2025 09:16:00 EDT

and the date of the signature says 25 Oct 2025.

New comment by listeria in "US declines to join more than 70 countries in signing UN cybercrime treaty"

listeria — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:36:07 +0000

full list of signatories: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...

New comment by listeria in "987654321 / 123456789"

listeria — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:09:05 +0000

in the b=2 case, you get:

  1 / 1 = 1 = b - 1
  1 % 1 = 0 = b - 2

they are the other way around, see for example the b=3 case:

  21 (base 3) = 7
  12 (base 3) = 5
  7 / 5 = 1 = b - 2
  7 % 5 = 2 = b - 1

New comment by listeria in "Modern Linux tools"

listeria — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:33:07 +0000

Maybe it should be called "lest"? As in a less/most replacement written in rust. Although it does divert from the theme of more/less/most.

New comment by listeria in "Show HN: Kent Dybvig's Scheme Machine in 400 Lines of C (Heap-Memory Model)"

listeria — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 14:47:11 +0000

> I wonder if an LLM would be up to the job of writing the assembly code from this?

I could see a compiler doing that.

New comment by listeria in "Pass: Unix Password Manager"

listeria — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 02:57:06 +0000

presumably the derivation would involve a cryptographically secure, non-reversible function so as to not compromise the secret should one of them be leaked.