Hacker News: mrpippy

New comment by mrpippy in "Fun Extending the C Preprocessor"

mrpippy — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:16:51 +0000

> slow compilation, hard to debug code, opaque and fragile code, and incredible complexity

Most people describe C++ in those terms.

New comment by mrpippy in "Python 3.15"

mrpippy — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:01:16 +0000

No, this is not true. macOS 10.15 included Python 2.7 as part of the OS, and it was removed in macOS 12.2 IIRC.

Python 3.9 is still included in Xcode and the Command Line Tools, but not the OS itself. It’s only for running scripts (and for supporting LLDB I think), applications cannot link against it like they could with the old OS-bundled 2.7.

Python 3.9 is getting conspicuously old though, I was a bit surprised Apple didn’t update it in Xcode 27.

New comment by mrpippy in "MXC - a sandboxed code execution system"

mrpippy — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:54:45 +0000

The docs are pretty clear that it’s experimental, and it’s not even exported from a DLL. It’ll be hilarious if some application depends on it and they have to keep it though

New comment by mrpippy in "Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome"

mrpippy — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:15:47 +0000

When Apple adopts jxl-rs? Any source for them doing that? I can’t think of any Rust code that Apple is shipping.

New comment by mrpippy in "OpenSSH 10.6"

mrpippy — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 05:13:34 +0000

Are sandbox profiles (or how to use them) officially documented anywhere (as non-deprecated)?

They just got burned by the documented usage of sandbox_init() going away (which didn’t even get a mention in the release notes), I can understand why they’d be unexcited about moving to a different deprecated/undocumented API.

New comment by mrpippy in "OpenSSH 10.6"

mrpippy — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 03:21:24 +0000

Code signing and entitlements are integrated into the binary.

(Restricted entitlements require a provisioning profile which requires a bundle, but restricted entitlements are pretty rare)

New comment by mrpippy in "California closed the Montana license plate loophole"

mrpippy — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:48:28 +0000

Every time you pay your registration in CA (either online or through the mail) they ask if you want to register PNO or not. Also, it’s not free (like $20) to register PNO, so doing it automatically would still result in an unpaid bill.

New comment by mrpippy in "OpenSSH 10.6"

mrpippy — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 22:43:21 +0000

I look forward to seeing if Apple makes any changes in the fork they ship with the OS: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/OpenSSH.

"Updated sandbox for privilege-separated pre-authorization sshd process" is listed as a modification to the open-source project, but I suspect this is out-of-date.

New comment by mrpippy in "NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart"

mrpippy — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:49:36 +0000

The article says this one was on a pylon (with a spare engine on display on the ground below). Being owned by NASA is important, also being on a military base (the home of USAF test flight!) where it could be removed and easily wheeled into a large-enough hangar without anyone noticing for 5+ months.

Getting any of those planes outside of their museums would be logistically difficult, and of course it would immediately be noticed. And even if you can rent a hangar big enough, and secure it, then you're stuck at BFI/IAD/Wright-Patterson trying to do this impossible task.

New comment by mrpippy in "Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees"

mrpippy — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:10:40 +0000

Or (common in the US) handing your card to a restaurant waiter who walks off with it to do the charge

New comment by mrpippy in "A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts"

mrpippy — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:40:20 +0000

It works, but gives you zero help with dark mode or HiDPI (both are possible, it's just entirely on the developer)

New comment by mrpippy in "Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 series"

mrpippy — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 03:14:50 +0000

This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it…

*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.

New comment by mrpippy in "Comma's hands-off driving tech under investigation after 2 fatal crashes"

mrpippy — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 14:28:06 +0000

Completely predictable. They’ll likely dodge a lawsuit in this case (since the car that was hit was an unoccupied police car) but it will inevitably happen.

New comment by mrpippy in "Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser"

mrpippy — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 05:23:25 +0000

Gerbils! is a demo app for QuickDraw 3D where gerbils are racing on a roller coaster track (or similar…it’s been a few decades). It existed for classic Mac OS too (I remember playing it on a 6100)

New comment by mrpippy in "The scourge of x86 emulation"

mrpippy — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:54:11 +0000

> A potential concern is that when jumping between x86 emulation and ARM code, that the ARM code will pay unnecessary overhead due to all its accesses being TSO now. While this is a reasonable concern, the amount of ARM native code executing under emulation approaches 0%.

This may be true when FEX is executing as a usermode whole-process emulator on Linux, but it is not true when FEX is built for Windows(/Wine)'s ARM64EC mode. With ARM64EC a thread could be running a very small amount of emulated code while everything else is native.

I believe Microsoft Office is built as ARM64EC in order to support x86_64 plugins, in this case the entire suite itself (along with all the system DLLs) are native ARM64EC code and the only emulation would be for plugins. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has an ARM64EC build where the main game EXE is small and x86_64, but the actual game engine is in an ARM64EC DLL.

I don't know of a good solution for this though, enabling/disabling TSO needs a kernel syscall so is too slow to be doing constantly when entering/leaving emulation. With cases like KCD2 where the game itself is ARM64EC, maybe it could be faster to not use hardware TSO.

New comment by mrpippy in "Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP"

mrpippy — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 20:00:24 +0000

That’s possible (never underestimate the bad decision-making of phone makers), but what would they have done instead? Windows Mobile 6 was the only licensable alternative, but it was a known quantity and obviously a generation behind Android and iOS.

New comment by mrpippy in "Steam Frame starts at $1059"

mrpippy — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:48:05 +0000

AFAIK they still aren't shipping an actual ARM64 version of Steam, making it difficult to actually use those (unsupported) ARM builds of Proton. That article is 5 months old.

New comment by mrpippy in "Homebrew 7.0.0"

mrpippy — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:05:45 +0000

Sonoma will be getting its last security update imminently (possibly tomorrow).

New comment by mrpippy in "RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source"

mrpippy — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:50:40 +0000

Yes, real apps use Mach messaging directly. i.e.: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ipc...

New comment by mrpippy in "RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source"

mrpippy — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 19:23:55 +0000

The Mach APIs are available to userland applications, if you used a different kernel you’d have to implement them somehow