Hacker News: mprovost

New comment by mprovost in "Ghostty 1.4"

mprovost — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 22:43:24 +0000

It's not a VAX that you're physically plugging a terminal into. The remote machine is totally capable of communicating with a newer terminal, it just needs to know how. You're being nice by giving it that information. You can also just install it locally in your home directory (~/.terminfo). (You used to be able to stuff the entire entry into the TERMCAP environment variable and not install anything.)

New comment by mprovost in "Ghostty 1.4"

mprovost — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 22:37:12 +0000

Every terminfo is custom, to the terminal it applies to. It's just that most entries are 20+ years old and even glacial distros have converged on some version of the database that mostly worked, until the recent resurgence of interest in actually writing new terminal software.

New comment by mprovost in "A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501)"

mprovost — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:30:04 +0000

Wuff, Wuff!!

New comment by mprovost in "How the Chorleywood Bread Process transformed British bread"

mprovost — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:04:07 +0000

During Covid, the local corner shop in London managed to source some amazing Bulgarian white flour. It must have been high protein, and made the best bread. Once supply chains went back to normal, they went back to British and Canadian flours, and my bread has never been as nice.

New comment by mprovost in "Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters"

mprovost — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:58:28 +0000

Most of Uber's "platform" seemed like pet projects that engineers used to justify promotions, and then were quietly abandoned.

New comment by mprovost in "A better way to tie your gym shorts. (Or any drawstring) [video]"

mprovost — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:35:18 +0000

The bowline is great because you can tie it one handed.

New comment by mprovost in "HP re-releases classic computer science calculator: The HP-16C"

mprovost — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:59:15 +0000

I think HP sold their calculator business to this company. I bought the iOS version of the 15C emulator directly from HP many years ago, but the app store changed it to this company.

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.