Hacker News: omoikane

New comment by omoikane in "The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners"

omoikane — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:45:16 +0000

Capture the flag has clear objectives while obfuscated C contest does not. I understand improvements in AI for goal-orientated contests, I am not sure what would be considered improvements in open-ended contests with artistic flair.

Maybe you are asking "can't someone think up a clever idea and ask the AI to implement it according to IOCCC constraints?" And I believe current AI tools are still unable do that at a level that the human judges find worthy.

New comment by omoikane in "The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners"

omoikane — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:15:26 +0000

This primarily affects the judges who are opening themselves up to potentially a flood of shoddy code, but given the nature of the contest, I suspect they are very good at differentiating interesting code from low quality code.

I think it's great that IOCCC accepts code that might have been built with machine assistance, because it makes the purely handcrafted winners seem even more valuable.

New comment by omoikane in "The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners"

omoikane — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:09:40 +0000

There are two Frieren references, the other one is https://www.ioccc.org/2025/yang1/index.html

New comment by omoikane in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

omoikane — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:40:43 +0000

Launching git repeatedly was probably not the best example. But it's hard to think of good examples where launching processes repeatedly is the most performant thing to do, probably because launching processes had been expensive and everyone has learned to do something else (libraries, zygotes, etc). Maybe a different question is: if launching processes were cheap, is there something we would implement as processes instead of libraries?

I can recall just one program that's intentionally not implemented as a library, but I think people have since built a library on top of it:

https://dechifro.org/dcraw/#:~:text=Why%20don%27t%20you%20im...

New comment by omoikane in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

omoikane — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:11:40 +0000

Discussion at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19621799 - A fork() in the road (2019-04-10, 178 comments)

New comment by omoikane in "The intracies of modern camera lens repair (2024)"

omoikane — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:23:09 +0000

Placing disassembled screws on double sided tape is such a great idea, I am going to try that next time I disassemble my electronics (as opposed dropping everything in a container and spend time finding the original size screws during reassembly).

New comment by omoikane in "Coreutils for Windows"

omoikane — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:58:12 +0000

What about "ln" (make symbolic links)?

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/ln-i...

https://uutils.github.io/coreutils/docs/utils/ln.html

New comment by omoikane in "It's Not Just X. It's Y"

omoikane — Sun, 31 May 2026 23:21:56 +0000

> It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them

That's really unfortunate though. It's like Michael Bolton from Office Space: "No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."

New comment by omoikane in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

omoikane — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:03:47 +0000

UTF-8 has the same issue ("overlong encoding") where multiple representations are possible the same code point. Someone proposed a similar tweak to remove the overlapping ranges by adjusting the base offset for byte sequences that are longer than 1. That was discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44456073 - Corrected UTF-8 (2025-07-03, 54 comments)

This "corrected UTF-8" has other problems, but I thought it's interesting how the shifted-offset idea carries over.

New comment by omoikane in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

omoikane — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:52:32 +0000

The article says "approximately 303 gold bars, each of which weighed approximately one kilogram"

I guess the gold bars aren't uniformly sized, which would agree with your ~280kg number.

New comment by omoikane in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

omoikane — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:27:00 +0000

> Coral Pixels

The version at Github and Google fonts seems old, the one from the font maker's website is at version 1.01, which includes Kanji characters:

https://tanukifont.com/sango/

("sango" is coral in Japanese)

New comment by omoikane in "The Art of Money Getting"

omoikane — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:48:24 +0000

Book is available here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm

Previous discussion (2023-01-20, 69 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447945

New comment by omoikane in "Don't just paste the AI at me"

omoikane — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:42:31 +0000

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992 - Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations (~1 day ago, 414 comments)

New comment by omoikane in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

omoikane — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:35:50 +0000

> pay 40℅ tax

Offtopic but I thought your percent looked weird. Turns out, that's the "care of" symbol (℅, U+2105) and not percent (%, U+0025).

New comment by omoikane in "[dead]"

omoikane — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:47:29 +0000

I think it should be "10 keywords" plus "11 types". In C standards, type names such as "void" would also be listed as keywords.

Also, the toplevel documentation seems to be missing examples for "pub" and "pin". Seems like "pub" is some kind of visibility attribute for structs, I have yet to figure out what "pin" does.

"defer" looks like a nice feature, although there is also a proposal N3852 to add that to the C standard (similar to `__attribute__((cleanup))` that already exists in GCC and Clang).

New comment by omoikane in "Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps"

omoikane — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:48:47 +0000

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40469711 - Ian Clarke explains the next generation of Freenet [video] (2023)

New comment by omoikane in "Additive Blending on the Nintendo 64"

omoikane — Sat, 16 May 2026 03:07:25 +0000

New comment by omoikane in "IPv8"

omoikane — Thu, 14 May 2026 23:46:32 +0000

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788857 - Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) (2026-04-16, 111 comments)

By the way:

> After 25 years of dual-stack effort, IPv6 still carries a minority of global traffic.

It reached 50% last month, I wouldn't call that a minority.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777894 - IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark (2026-04-15, 621 comments)

New comment by omoikane in "Instructure pays ransom to Canvas hackers"

omoikane — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:59:29 +0000

Hackers have an incentive to destroy the data as promised, because if it becomes a trend where the data is leaked despite the ransom being paid, no one would pay ransoms in the future.

Obviously this doesn't stop hackers from selling the data anyway and say "it wasn't us, someone else got the same data through a different hack".

New comment by omoikane in "Discord Incident"

omoikane — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:45:16 +0000

There would have been a server split, and half of the people would be chatting among themselves wondering why the some people suddenly got disconnected, while being unaware that there might be a server problem because they can still continue to chat. The other half of the people would think the same.