Hacker News: meinersbur

New comment by meinersbur in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

meinersbur — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:31:37 +0000

It has nothing to so with NTFS, but all with the Win32 API. The Windows kernel supports this file model, proven by WSL1. There is a blog post somewhere (Old New Thing?) stating the engineers would like to e.g. allow deleting a file even if there is still a program with with a file handle to it, but are concerned deviation from current behavior would cause more problems than it solves.

The reason that they want a reboot is that they do not want to support a system using two versions of the same library at the same time, let's say ntdll. So they would have to close any program using that library before programs that use the new version can be started. That is equivalent to a reboot.

And I completely understand the reason. For a long time when Firefox would update on Linux, the browser windows still open were broken; it opened resources meant for the updated Firefox with the processes runnung the non-updated Firefox. The Chrome developers mentioned [2] that the "proper" solution would be to open every file at start and pass that file descriptor to the subprocesses so all of them are using the same version of the file. Needless to say, resource usage would go up.

[2]: https://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/08/zygote...

New comment by meinersbur in "WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?"

meinersbur — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:03:37 +0000

This is the WolfSSL maintainer's response[1]

> This ticket is rather long and has a lot of irrelevant content regarding this new topic. If I need to bring in a colleague I do not want them to have to wade through all the irrelevant context. If you would like, please open a new issue with regards to how we support middlebox compatibility.

The author turns this into:

> The GitHub issue comment left at the end leads me to believe that they aren't really interested in RFC compliance. There isn't a middleground here or a "different way" of implementing middlebox compatibility. It's either RFC compliant or not. And they're not.

This is a bad-faith interpretation of the maintainer's response. They only asked to open a new, more specific issue report. The maintainer always answered within minutes, which I find quite impressive (even after the author ghosted for months). The author consumed the maintainer's time and shouldn't get the blame for the author's problems.

[1]: https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfssl/issues/9156

New comment by meinersbur in "Do not put code diffs into Git commit messages"

meinersbur — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 11:12:21 +0000

Reminds me of prompt injection: A tool that cannot distinguish between data and instructions.

New comment by meinersbur in "A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs"

meinersbur — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:24:25 +0000

The time advantage of faking a scan becomes better the more pages you have to scan.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

New comment by meinersbur in "France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US"

meinersbur — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:02:23 +0000

It doesn't matter whether OSS is American (in whatever sense) -- anything that is America-specific (e.g. server addresses) can be patched for a localized European version. The different commercial model does matter: American law does not apply (Cloud Act, National Security Letters, ...)

New comment by meinersbur in "Windows 8 Desktop Environment for Linux"

meinersbur — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:10:20 +0000

Live tiles are nearly universally praised in retrospect, but it might be a case of hindsight bias [1]. The video [2] brings up some problems of the concept and why no other company copied the concept.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

[2] https://youtu.be/OgXlNaYXRu4

New comment by meinersbur in "Bricklink suspends Marketplace operations in 35 countries"

meinersbur — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 10:47:03 +0000

The patent expired, but the minifigs is also a EU 3D trademark. This is not possible for the brick which (only) serves a technical function, namely to hold on each other. Trademarks do not expire while in use. Another example for a 3D trademark, also in this US, is the Coca Cola bottle.

[1] https://www.chaillot.com/ip-news/validity-of-3d-trademarks-f...

New comment by meinersbur in "US cities pay too much for buses"

meinersbur — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 23:06:40 +0000

What is your alternative explanation for why people rent public storage space? Urban growth and growth in suburbs are not mutually exclusive.

New comment by meinersbur in "DXGI debugging: Microsoft put me on a list"

meinersbur — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:02:50 +0000

Changing execution behaviour based on filename is common in Linux environments too. Some examples:

1. BusyBox is a single executable that executes different commands based on which symlink was used to call it

2. Bash puts itself into compatibility mode if invoked as "sh"

3. "ping" can be invoked as "ping4" or "ping6"

4. Some of git's subcommands are symlinks back to the main executable

5. Clang switches to C++ mode if invoked as "clang++"

6. AppArmor profiles activate on file paths

New comment by meinersbur in "YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers"

meinersbur — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 22:30:31 +0000

From the GitHub issue it becomes clear that blocking happens by the EasyPrivacy blocklist. The blocked URL youtube.com/api/stats/atr is/can also be used for tracking users, this is why some are arguing that it legitimately on that blocklist.

The tracking not malicious. YouTube has a legitimate interest to verify views, e.g. to recommend popular videos to others. If a view counter was increased by just invoking an API, view counts could be manipulated easily. Also see the video [1] from ... 13 years ago ... so it might be slighly outdated. Just slightly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIkhgagvrjI

New comment by meinersbur in "It seems like the AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges"

meinersbur — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 07:40:55 +0000

Please don't downvote comments only because you don't like their opinion (reply to them instead). It cannot be that the same opinion is valueable when someone famous write it [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529

New comment by meinersbur in "Sqlite3 will also read and write ZIP archives"

meinersbur — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:09:14 +0000

Sounds like feature creep. Zip is not a database, at best its just slow. Use a archive utility to handle archives.

New comment by meinersbur in "Python performance myths and fairy tales"

meinersbur — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 11:05:03 +0000

Is it just me or does the talk actually confirm all its Python "myths and fairy tales"?

New comment by meinersbur in "Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down"

meinersbur — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 12:04:53 +0000

They absolutely do have that infrastructure. They implemented every country's content rating system, such as PEGI, ESRB, ... . Games are regionally banned, such as in Germany [1]. Games can also have regionally censored games, typically for violence/gore in Germany [2]. With the strange effect that if you change your account's region, it re-downloads some of the games.

The legal situation with VPNs and traveling between regions is the same as with any internet service.

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/groups/foruncut/discussions/17/41... [2] https://steamcommunity.com/groups/foruncut/discussions/17/39...

New comment by meinersbur in "Tell HN: Gmail tampers with incoming email body content"

meinersbur — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 17:09:23 +0000

https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/8496101927181-What...

I don't think there is an official list. It is security-related and changes over time

New comment by meinersbur in "Tell HN: Gmail tampers with incoming email body content"

meinersbur — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 12:00:12 +0000

GMail (and Fastmail) are rendering the email. It just happens that the email and we webbrowser are both HTML. In no case should they just literally forward the email HTML to the browser. They scrub JavaScript, non-whitelisted HTML elements, rewrite links/external resources including tracking pixels.

You can see the raw email with "show original" in the options

New comment by meinersbur in "Seriously, Why Do Some AI Chatbot Subscriptions Cost More Than $200?"

meinersbur — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 11:22:09 +0000

There is also market separation in play: For the base service you only charge cost+small margin. For higher service levels you charge higher profit margins even though the additional service does not cost that much more to provide.

Best example: flight seats. Economy class fills the plane, but business and first class are the money makers [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc

New comment by meinersbur in "Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)"

meinersbur — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 15:16:54 +0000

Researchers trained a deep learning network on photos to make GTA5 more realistic-looking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0

I was surprised that most of it is is just tone mapping. It looks too green-ish to me, needing some white balancing, but realistic.

I think Video games are intentionally over-saturated and contrasty to make them look better, just as paintings are[1]. I took many screenshots in Horizon Zero Dawn that would be look bland if it was realistic like the modfified GTA5 footage above[2]. You also don't want animation movies[3] with realistic tone mapping. But for a horror game you would do exactly that, it's about immersion (or you would never be frightened), not beauty.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/1ix7ms2/my_hzd_oil...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/x97gi1/this_game_i...

[3] https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0892769/mediaviewer/rm284102...

New comment by meinersbur in "A valid HTML zip bomb"

meinersbur — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 15:49:48 +0000

It will also compress worse, making it less like a zip bomb and more like a huge document. Nothing against that, but the article's trick is just to stop a parser to bail early.

New comment by meinersbur in "Fstrings.wtf"

meinersbur — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 12:13:41 +0000

Just learned about the ellipsis statement and the !a modifier (I already knew !r and !s).