Hacker News: mzs

New comment by mzs in "Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)"

mzs — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:00:10 +0000

You'll probably dislike this too:

  $ {
  >     echo foo \
  >     && echo bar \
  >     || echo baz ;
  > }
  foo
  bar
  <^P><^A>$<^F>IFS
  ${IFS#   echo foo   && echo bar   || echo baz ; }
  $ _

There's good and bad to both approaches. I like how I can use () and {} to bracket things and otherwise every line that end in \ is continued. I line-up on the left with the operator, you with indentation. When you use a # style comment, you have to look up and back and forward to see what the operator is you are continuing over to the next line:

  $ foo |
    bar | # ?Do? *the* $bar$ && [do] {it!}
    baz

Which only takes an extra neuron or so, but then history...

  <^P>
  $ foo |   bar | # ?Do? *the* $bar$ && [do] {it!}
  baz

New comment by mzs in "Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)"

mzs — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:06:56 +0000

Wow I hate* that. I use bracket comments. They're cool cause they are bracket comments, so I use it in scripts to document pipelines. They are annoying cause they are bracket comments, in an interactive shell I have to type more and in TWO places. It's fun to reason-out how it works ;)

  $ echo foo | tr fo FO | sed 's/FOO/BAR/'
  BAR
  $ echo foo | ${IFS# tr fo FO | } sed 's/FOO/BAR/'
  foo

It's nice to have a way to both /* ... */ and // ... in shell scripts though:

  foo \
  | bar ${IFS Do the bar. Do it. } \
  | baz

* in the best possible way, like it's awful - I hate I didn't think of that

New comment by mzs in "Tracy Kidder has died"

mzs — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:24:40 +0000

indeed: B. Joshua Rosen https://www.polybus.com/hdlmaker/Resume.html

New comment by mzs in "A Compiler Writing Journey"

mzs — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:47:13 +0000

"Part 64: Self-compilation on an 8-bit CPU"

Unlike how a bunch of projects end right as they start to get good, this has a great ending. Thank you

New comment by mzs in "Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]"

mzs — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:37:34 +0000

the code from 1995

https://github.com/thomas-hori/mirror-cwi-stdwin

New comment by mzs in "(Media over QUIC) on a Boat"

mzs — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:38:03 +0000

1. is? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1659672

LHCb Collaboration discovers new proton-like particle

mzs — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:11:02 +0000

Article URL: https://home.cern/news/news/physics/lhcb-collaboration-discovers-new-proton-particle

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411577

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by mzs in "Building a Shell"

mzs — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:39:15 +0000

Had an assignment to build a shell in a week, how hard could it be?

  controlling terminal
  session leader
  job control

The parser was easy in comparison.

New comment by mzs in "Strip mining of Illinois' coal deposits reveal the secret of the Tully Monster"

mzs — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:52:15 +0000

Solving the mystery of the Tully Monster: https://www.anl.gov/article/solving-the-mystery-of-the-tully...

Strip mining of Illinois' coal deposits reveal the secret of the Tully Monster

mzs — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:50:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.uhaul.com/SuperGraphics/illinois/learn-more/introduction/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366080

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by mzs in "A few CPU hardware bugs"

mzs — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:20:45 +0000

links to this entertainment: https://crackhead.technology/anjoy-ssc338q-libtools/

New comment by mzs in "221 Cannon is Not For Sale"

mzs — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:05:54 +0000

Who was the 222nd commentator?

https://imgur.com/a/i5YQ2c4

New comment by mzs in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

mzs — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:48:29 +0000

This might be a Polish thing but hero has to die. Does not matter if accomplishes a goal, just that hero put it all on the line against incredible odds.

Exploring the chip on a contactless payment card

mzs — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 03:08:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ElectronicParts/posts/2955721817950467/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240446

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mzs in "How can I read the standard output of an already-running process?"

mzs — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:47:24 +0000

vxworks 6.x:

(one login session, say over serial)

  -> ioTaskStdGet 0, 1
  value = 3 = 0x3
  -> taskIdSelf
  value = 13600784 = 0xcf8810

(another session, say over telnet)

  -> ioTaskStdSet 0xcf8810, 1, 0x9
  value = 0 = 0x0

(first session ie SERIAL)

  -> printf "foo\n"
  -> taskIdSelf
  -> i

(otherone eg TELNET)

  -> foo
  value = 4 = 0x4
  value = 13600784 = 0xcf8810


     NAME         ENTRY       TID    PRI   STATUS      PC       SP     ERRNO  DELAY
  ----------  ------------ -------- --- ---------- -------- -------- ------- -----
  ...

teeheeheehaw!

New comment by mzs in "How the Brain Parses Language"

mzs — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 17:57:43 +0000

I completely understand! I'm also Polish American. I have to say it helps when mother's side of family is Gdańsk+west and father's Lublin+east. My wife's family is all from Warsaw area and I had to translate for my father-in-law during a holiday to Władysławowo-Hel (probably helps my aunt's father's side is Kashubian too, mmm... dessert first).

I was blown-away on holiday to Croatia. It was so unexpectedly relatively easily understandable after Czechia, Austria, and Slovenia. I was all, "What just happened!? Shouldn't this be something more like Italian?"

It took only a month for me to be able to communicate in Ukrainian with my ESL students, you're totally right about Cyrillic. And I too think in concepts but switch my brain to express them externally via language, whatever that language may be at the moment. I am terrible at translating OTOH, so unnatural!

But it has it's limits, I got to a point after German and Norwegian that I thought I harbored a super-power. Then I went to school in Hungary ;) I also had an ESL student from Lithuania, yep incomprehensible.

New comment by mzs in "Kernel Float: Unlocking Mixed-Precision GPU Programming"

mzs — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:17:22 +0000

https://github.com/KernelTuner/kernel_float

New comment by mzs in "The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered"

mzs — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 21:19:05 +0000

insightful footnote, thanks: https://web.archive.org/web/20190301193516/http://www.drdobb...

The Vault Guy

mzs — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:44:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.science.org/content/article/biologist-aims-solve-cell-s-biggest-mystery-could-it-help-cancer-patients-too

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208797

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mzs in "The effect of shingles vaccination at different stages of dementia"

mzs — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:16:35 +0000

from one of the previous papers:

"To provide causal as opposed to correlational evidence, we take advantage of the fact that, in Wales, eligibility for the zoster vaccine was determined on the basis of an individual’s exact date of birth. Those born before 2 September 1933 were ineligible and remained ineligible for life, whereas those born on or after 2 September 1933 were eligible for at least 1 year to receive the vaccine."

Eyting, M., Xie, M., Michalik, F. et al. A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia. Nature 641, 438–446 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08800-x