Hacker News: phoyd

New comment by phoyd in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

phoyd — Sat, 09 May 2026 18:53:49 +0000

That's literally what this post is about.

New comment by phoyd in "Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight"

phoyd — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:24:55 +0000

I am more shocked by the "overnight" aspect. I tried running clang-format on the Chromium source (68,281 .cc files, 21 million lines according to wc):

$ find chromium-149.0.7826.1/ -name ".cc" -exec cat {} + | wc 21640925 55715244 833460441

And that took less than 6 minutes on a single E5-2696 v3 from 2014:

$ time find chromium-149.0.7826.1/ -name *.cc | parallel -j 16 clang-format $x>/dev/null

real 0m5.666s user 1m13.964s sys 0m13.373s

That’s orders of magnitude faster, especially if we assume they’re not running their workloads on potatoes like mine. Is Ruby’s syntax really that much more complicated than C++, or is this a tooling problem?

New comment by phoyd in "Use singular nouns for database table names"

phoyd — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 07:40:04 +0000

I want to drop here the not very well known fact, that the SQL Standard grammar distinguishes between "SQL language identifier" and "regular identifier". According to the rules, a SQL language identifier can not end with an underscore (copied from ISO/IEC 9075-2:1999 "5.4 Names and identifiers":

::= [ { | }... ]

::= ::= |

So, using names with trailing underscore should always be safe.

New comment by phoyd in "Spectre.Console – create beautiful console applications"

phoyd — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 06:03:35 +0000

.NET Core ran on Linux from version 1.0 on and it was released 2016.

New comment by phoyd in "Ask HN: Device for Music and GPS"

phoyd — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 21:20:10 +0000

Only cellular iPads have GPS IIRC.

New comment by phoyd in "Every company should be owned by its employees"

phoyd — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:54:15 +0000

Giving employees stock options does not solve the "employes should own the company" problem, when there is a market to sell the stock. Shareholders and employees have different goals and interests regarding the company. For example, the employees they may have to decide on the elimination of their own jobs in order to secure the value of their stock holdings (which btw. would make the company not owned by their employees anymore)

A more interesting approach would be a model where being a employee automatically gives you a vote on company wide decisions including. the distribution of profits, just how being a cititzen of a democratic country gives you a vote on the fate of your country (similar to the Mondragon Corporation in Spain)

New comment by phoyd in "A Physical instance of recursion, from 1936"

phoyd — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:38:41 +0000

A nice illustrative example of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brouwer_fixed-point_theorem

New comment by phoyd in "Devzat – Chat over SSH, with some nice quality-of-life features"

phoyd — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 21:12:57 +0000

I'm also interested. Setting up a passwordless SSH account for some public service sounds like a good way to give your machine away to North Korean hackers, because you forgot to set someting in /etc/sshd to "no".

Is there a usable description somewhere on how to do this safely?

New comment by phoyd in "Z80 CPU Microprocessor Instant Reference Card (1981) [pdf]"

phoyd — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 08:47:26 +0000

https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/micro-chart-cpu-reference-...

has a few more charts from the same publisher.

New comment by phoyd in "Raspberry Pi 5"

phoyd — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 06:28:57 +0000

Pi5 is already on Geekbench. Speed seemed to be on the ballpark of a mobile Intel i5 dual core 4xxx IIRC.

New comment by phoyd in "Why did 16-bit _lopen and _lcreat functions return -1 on failure instead of 0?"

phoyd — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 06:22:45 +0000

Under UNIX, the lowest available file descriptor for the process is returned from open/create (also in Posix). So if you close(0) and then immediately open() something, you will (probably) get 0 as the new file descriptor.

This is the way redirection was done in early UNIX versions, at least I think until System 7, where dup2() was introduced to address the race condition lurking here.

New comment by phoyd in "Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates"

phoyd — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 19:06:05 +0000

2008 ThinkPad t400 user here, running Ubuntu. Most business class notebooks are incredibly durable and the market offers replacement parts for 10 of 15 year old devices. A t400 battery is less than 25€ on Amazon and there are dozens of vendors.

New comment by phoyd in "Inmos and the Transputer – Parallel Ventures"

phoyd — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 09:00:17 +0000

Transputer (and Occam) designer David May founded XMOS in 2005 where the ideas of the Transputer are still alive in the the xCore Architecture they make and sell. Their SDK offers offers a programming languages called "XC" which contains Occam features in a C skin:

https://handwiki.org/wiki/XC_(programming_language)

New comment by phoyd in "There's something off about LED bulbs"

phoyd — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 14:40:51 +0000

>If you’re lucky, the LED will have a CRI of 90 or higher

EU has banned incandescent lights years ago and the situation for LED buyers is much different here. My local drug store chain (Rossmann in Germany) sells 1000lm E27 bulbs under their own Rubin brand with CRI>97 for 4.99€. No flickering and available as 2700K or 4000K. My Opple Light Master 3 even reads CRI 100. So for me right now, it's just going to the drug store and buying a bulb, like before the ban.

New comment by phoyd in "Bard uses a Hacker News comment as source to say that Bard has shut down"

phoyd — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 10:50:49 +0000

Hey Bard, ever heard of Descartes?

New comment by phoyd in "Show HN: Unblob – extraction suite for 30+ file formats"

phoyd — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 07:03:48 +0000

I am not seeing an option to pass a password to the archive extractors. Is the any?

New comment by phoyd in "Byte Magazine 1975-1995"

phoyd — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 13:38:11 +0000

Yes, this was awesome. They explained the VM and everything.

New comment by phoyd in "Byte Magazine 1975-1995"

phoyd — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 13:37:25 +0000

I remember how I read about functional programming languages for the first time in the August 1985 Byte issue, which I bought as a teenager because it featured a technical rundown of the new Amiga computer. For me in the early 80'e, Byte was a cornucopia of interesting stuff, much like Hacker News today.

(For example there was a whole issue in 1981 on Smalltalk-80, with an introduction by Adele Goldberg, where the Xerox Palo Alto people from the Smalltalk-80 team explain the implementation, the VM etc.)

https://vintageapple.org/byte/ has a (complete?) archive, albeit with slightly lower resolution scans.

New comment by phoyd in "We asked ChatGPT to write a Sherlock Holmes mystery"

phoyd — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 09:24:51 +0000

Sherlock Holmes stories are almost always narrated by Watson IIRC. ChatGPT missed that too, didn't it?

New comment by phoyd in "There's an ARM Cortex-M4 with Bluetooth inside a Covid test kit"

phoyd — Mon, 27 Dec 2021 07:08:07 +0000

Every Covid self test I've ever used had two red lines for postive and one red line for negative. Why are there tests out there that need color vision?