Hacker News: murphyslaw

New comment by murphyslaw in "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled"

murphyslaw — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:33:07 +0000

Isn't the fact that you now know that the conjecture is false a huge help? At least it will help convince people to look at the conjecture more closely, no?

New comment by murphyslaw in "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled"

murphyslaw — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:27:59 +0000

BBC iPlayer is not available outside the UK.

New comment by murphyslaw in "OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router"

murphyslaw — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:09:02 +0000

I don't know if the one you're talking about is one of these, but in the many years I worked at Cisco they seemed to buy a company every few weeks. Many of them had decent products which Cisco then meticulously destroyed. Luckily there was always kit to preserve for future generations, which I dutifully stacked in my attic.

New comment by murphyslaw in "The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth"

murphyslaw — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:56:41 +0000

Proctologist General's warning: DO NOT PLACE IN RESTROOM.

New comment by murphyslaw in "The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth"

murphyslaw — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:45:50 +0000

If the end product is something like La Sagrada Familia, I'll pass.

New comment by murphyslaw in "Did my old job only exist because of fraud?"

murphyslaw — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 06:01:07 +0000

Thank you for this tidbit of information!

New comment by murphyslaw in "The AirPods Effect"

murphyslaw — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 05:07:54 +0000

I never take public transport because the noises drive me crazy. Earbuds help, but not enough to make it bearable.

New comment by murphyslaw in "Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai"

murphyslaw — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:18:12 +0000

You used to be able to add your own words to spellcheckers, somehow that went out the window. I rarely see the option for it on a red-lined word now in the context menu, and when it does adding the word seems to make no difference at all.

New comment by murphyslaw in "Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai"

murphyslaw — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:13:37 +0000

Shouldn't it be possible to simply state in the contract to use that tool only? I've had good success with that in my coding.

New comment by murphyslaw in "We Will Not Be Divided"

murphyslaw — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 21:06:42 +0000

I believe that the biggest problem in the US is the constitution. It's next to impossible to change so the only way to fix it is replacing it entirely with a new one. But good luck with that...

New comment by murphyslaw in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

murphyslaw — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:53:32 +0000

You can pipe the fd directly:

# echo 1 >&2 2>| echo

New comment by murphyslaw in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

murphyslaw — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:50:25 +0000

O'Reilly's Essential System Administration [1], I never do a job interview without it.

[1]: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/essential-system-admini...

New comment by murphyslaw in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

murphyslaw — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:43:14 +0000

It always exists on any Unix system. Even a busybox root environment. Why do you want to save a few bytes to compromise portability?

New comment by murphyslaw in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

murphyslaw — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:38:19 +0000

> You can use /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, /dev/stderr in most cases

Never ever write code that assumes this. These dev shorthands are Linux specific, and you'll even need a certain minimum Linux version.

I cringe at the amount of shell scripts that assume bash is the system interpreter, and not sh or ksh.

Always assume sh, it's the most portable.

Linux != Unix.

New comment by murphyslaw in "AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet"

murphyslaw — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:42:01 +0000

Older people like me could say that the Internet was a fun place until AOL came along.

IMO we're going to just have to deal with AI, like it or not.

New comment by murphyslaw in "The Home Computer Hybrids: Atari, TI, and the FCC"

murphyslaw — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:28:55 +0000

I used all of these as a kid, and they were the precursor to my C64 and C128. The TI 99/4A was the first real computer I ever used - real in the sense that it had a keyboard!

New comment by murphyslaw in "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"

murphyslaw — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:39:11 +0000

Just an assumption here, but the project appears to be about the methodology to verify the install. Who holds the keys is an entirely different matter.

New comment by murphyslaw in "Ventoy: Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI Files"

murphyslaw — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:13:46 +0000

All of it is built from source, it's just that the current build process is not easy to audit. The build by definition needs to happen on multiple platforms or cross compiled, a root cert needs to be setup in the windows installer at boot time, and so on.

I agree that this is not an ideal way to boot an ISO, but the general public is unlikely to ever need a multiboot USB stick. I like this project enough to perhaps contribute.

New comment by murphyslaw in "ARM is great, ARM is terrible, and so is RISC-V"

murphyslaw — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:04:17 +0000

The author is specifically talking about Raspberry Pi upstreaming changes. Isn't that about as close as you will get to a general purpose SoC?

New comment by murphyslaw in "The End of Finale"

murphyslaw — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 02:22:57 +0000

I "own" Finale and the Garritan instrument package, which cost me around $600 on a student license. I remember having to guide my music composition teacher through installing his MIDI interface which connects his keyboard to Finale when he upgraded his computer.

He is the conductor of a local musical group and rewrites the scores for different instruments depending on the orchestra he can find/pay.

This guy has spent thousands of dollars over the years, and now he is faced with.... what? Relearning the interface? Can he still open his old scores, and (rather importantly), will the score "work" in its entirety, with all the accidentals in the right place, the lyrics in the right position and split to the correct notes to be sung, the trumpets in the right key, the timpani using the correct symbols, the repeats and coda correctly defined, the personal additions still working? What about linking each instrument to the correct MIDI output or instrument package?

This goes way beyond just cost, even if for a musician who doesn't make tons of money. The intellectual investment over decades is hard to express to someone who doesn't write music for a living.