Hacker News: mprovost

New comment by mprovost in "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark"

mprovost — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:09:44 +0000

There were backwards-compatible protocols proposed, such as EIP, but the committee chose a backwards-incompatible protocol for v6. Their assumption was that v4 would run out of space in a single-digit number of years and everyone would be forced to migrate. The past 30 years have shown that not to be the case.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1385

New comment by mprovost in "Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)"

mprovost — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:57:14 +0000

It looks like almost the same colour of those David Clark headsets which seem to be ubiquitous in airplane cockpits or helicopters. It's even the background of their corporate logo.

New comment by mprovost in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

mprovost — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:47:13 +0000

The original Mac with 128KB of memory cost $2,495 when Apple released it in 1984. It would be about 3x that in today's money.

New comment by mprovost in "Luce: First Electric Ferrari"

mprovost — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:09:33 +0000

> I wonder if, in 20 years, petrol cars will the preserve of the very rich and the very poor.

That's certainly the way it's worked out with horses after petrol cars took over.

New comment by mprovost in "31-year old VT220 terminfo curses bug"

mprovost — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 19:52:24 +0000

The latest terminfo contains a fix for a bug in the VT220 entry from ESR's 1995 version.

31-year old VT220 terminfo curses bug

mprovost — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 19:52:24 +0000

Article URL: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2026-02/msg00004.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46937857

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by mprovost in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

mprovost — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 07:52:23 +0000

Usually RDMA is over a network that is supposed to be lossless, but it does have checksums to detect corruption and recovers with retransmission. Infiniband NICs handle all of that.

New comment by mprovost in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

mprovost — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:49:16 +0000

FASP uses forward error correction instead of retransmission. So instead of waiting for something not to show up on the other end and sending it again, it calculates parity and transmits slightly more data up front, with enough redundancy that the receiving end is capable of reconstructing any missing bits. This is basically how all storage systems work, not just Weka. You calculate enough parity bits to be able to reconstruct the missing data when a drive fails. The more disks you have, the smaller the parity overhead is. Object storage like S3 does this on a massive scale. With a network transfer you typically only need a few percent, unless it's really lossy like Wifi, in which case standards like 802.11n are doing FEC for you to reduce retransmissions at the TCP layer.

New comment by mprovost in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

mprovost — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:38:45 +0000

I suspect mostly Aspera because there are still no good alternatives.

New comment by mprovost in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

mprovost — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:37:56 +0000

High performance means transferring files from NZ to a director's yacht in the Mediterranean with a 40Mbps satellite link and getting 40Mbps, to the point that the link is unusable for anyone else.

New comment by mprovost in "4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)"

mprovost — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 16:00:41 +0000

In general TCP just isn't great for high performance. In the film industry we used to use a commercial product Aspera (now owned by IBM) which emulated ftp or scp but used UDP with forward error correction (instead of TCP retransmission). You could configure it to use a specific amount of bandwidth and it would just push everything else off the network to achieve it.

New comment by mprovost in "Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires"

mprovost — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:07:04 +0000

Even if they are available on your street, each building and individual flat has to be connected. For blocks of flats that's not always straightforward.

New comment by mprovost in "Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires"

mprovost — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 13:49:09 +0000

Even if the cable is cat 5, telephone sockets are often daisy-chained from room to room. So it can still be a pain to get a point to point connection if it goes through several sockets.

New comment by mprovost in "IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world"

mprovost — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 19:50:45 +0000

I was in college when v6 was going through the RFC process. In my networking class we had to learn Netware (IPX) and v6, which have both turned out to be equally irrelevant, for different reasons. At this stage, I fully expect to retire having never deployed a single resource using v6.

New comment by mprovost in "Why users cannot create Issues directly"

mprovost — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 19:22:50 +0000

The terminfo database is one of those thankless xkcd dependencies. In this case, it's been thanklessly maintained since forever by Thomas Dickey.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

New comment by mprovost in "StardustOS: Library operating system for building light-weight Unikernels"

mprovost — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 09:58:35 +0000

It reminds me of the old OSKit project from the Univ of Utah, which was also developed for research and teaching.

https://www-old.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/

New comment by mprovost in "A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution"

mprovost — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 11:48:29 +0000

I don't think either SCCS or RCS tracked merges, so everything looks like a new revision.

New comment by mprovost in "The R47: A new physical RPN calculator"

mprovost — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:53:49 +0000

There's a really good emulator for the iPhone! Back when I bought it, it came from HP themselves, but a few years ago they sold it to another company which actually maintains it. They just released a major new version a few weeks ago.

New comment by mprovost in "Nvidia takes $1B stake in Nokia"

mprovost — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 10:12:01 +0000

Yes but they're using this fund to prop up their core business (and share price) by artificially creating demand for their own products. Most of the money that they invest comes back to them when these companies buy GPUs.

New comment by mprovost in "Use the Saw, Fear the Saw"

mprovost — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 10:07:48 +0000

This is a shorter version of Neal Stephenson's metaphor of Unix as a Hole Hawg drill from "In the Beginning was the Command Line".