Hacker News: pilif

New comment by pilif in "The history of development of Norton Commander (2011)"

pilif — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:00:10 +0000

It's not just about two independent panes. It's about two panes in a single context. With this, there can be shortcuts that act in files and which now don't just have a source (the selected files in the active pane) but also a destination (the inactive pane), so copying, symlinking and moving all can be done with a single key without the need to provide a destination.

Two explorer windows are independent of each other. Any move or copy requires two keyboard actions or the use of the mouse

New comment by pilif in "WSL3 Performance is about 5-60% faster than WSL2 depending on the workload"

pilif — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:40:32 +0000

Looks like a different version of WSL2 with a newer kernel and newer VM host software

New comment by pilif in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

pilif — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:50:19 +0000

non-paywalled link: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1095425/c466ce1971e0e1df/

New comment by pilif in "Apple Watch Ultra 4"

pilif — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:14:51 +0000

The Ultra 2 was sold to me as the watch that can do Siri without network connectivity. That was very useful to me to leave reminders for stuff I think about while on a run without the phone.

3 years later, Apple releases the OS 27 versions and Siri got improved to the point where it can’t work on-device any more on said Ultra 2

So to get the feature back which I paid for and which was specifically used to sell me the device and which now has been taken away from me, I just have to… buy the next hardware generation?

And how long will that last before they decide to remove the feature again?

Thankfully, the Ultra 4 provides some other compelling features making this less painful, but I would have expected at least a toggle to keep old Siri on the old watch. New Siri over the network is impossibly slow and buggy (I made the mistake of installing the betas, so there’s no way back now)

New comment by pilif in "Vehicle Motion Cues"

pilif — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:24:55 +0000

Once this was announced a few years back, I was very skeptical that a few dots on the screen would be all that's needed to help me.

And yet, apparently it was.

It's not perfect, but the dots help me to go from instantly feeling sick to lasting 30-40 minutes before I have to stop looking at the screen.

New comment by pilif in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

pilif — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 03:01:05 +0000

That’s not true for Postgres however: due to its usage of a shared memory pool, whenever a subprocess is terminated unexpectedly, Postgres will kill all other processes and enter recovery mode, replaying the WAL, during which time it will not accept connection requests.

It does this because it can’t possibly know whether the dying process did bad things to the shared memory pool.

New comment by pilif in "IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake"

pilif — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:47:57 +0000

This response to the post announcing the article is very telling:

https://oldbytes.space/@mrrmot/116694151801834138

New comment by pilif in "GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability"

pilif — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:07:10 +0000

A migration like this is a monumental undertaking to the level of where the only sensible way to do a migration like this is probably to not do it. I fully expect even worse reliability over the next few years before it'll get better.

New comment by pilif in "The way CTRL-C in Postgres CLI cancels queries is incredibly hack-y"

pilif — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:25:55 +0000

it's also very tricky to do given the current architecture on the server side where one single-threaded process handles the connection and uses (for all intents and purposes) sync io.

In such a scenario, listening (and acting) on cancellation requests on the same connection becomes very hard, so fixing this goes way beyond "just".

New comment by pilif in "Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari"

pilif — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:45:11 +0000

Firefox is not in a position where it is the only browser allowed to run on a platform.

On iOS, you’re either doing a native app, sharing 30% of your income with Apple, or you’re restricted to Safari’s feature set. No browser in iOS can use anything but WebKit

The Discourse has been Automated

pilif — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:00:44 +0000

Article URL: https://xeiaso.net/notes/2026/the-discourse-has-been-automated/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990444

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by pilif in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

pilif — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:17:32 +0000

On the other hand, by erroneously treating a SHOULD as a MUST, I would say that Google is the one who's not RFC-compliant

New comment by pilif in "Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine"

pilif — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 04:28:19 +0000

It’s open source and runs on all kinds of platforms. Original HL1 runs on old Windows and IIRC DOS. Nowhere else

New comment by pilif in "Vulnerability Unauthenticated MQTT Broker Access in Molekule IoT Air Purifiers"

pilif — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 08:30:25 +0000

I wouldn’t post some random vulnerability report, but the disclosure timeline at the end was very interesting to me and not putting the vendor in a great light

Vulnerability Unauthenticated MQTT Broker Access in Molekule IoT Air Purifiers

pilif — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 08:29:34 +0000

Article URL: https://zuernerd.github.io/blog/2026/01/29/molekule-re.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46834641

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by pilif in "The Holy Grail of Linux Binary Compatibility: Musl and Dlopen"

pilif — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:17:59 +0000

Isn't this asking for the exact trouble musl wanted so spare you from by disabling dlopen()?

New comment by pilif in "Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update"

pilif — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 04:13:18 +0000

You should care because once your PC is part of a bot network, it’s part of the problem

New comment by pilif in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

pilif — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:56:30 +0000

what's especially strange to me is that in the more distant past, he was a pretty normal guy - at least as normal as any other linux user. Heck, he had a super great podcast (Linux Action Show).

Something changed in the 2014ish time-frame when it got more and more politically extreme.

New comment by pilif in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

pilif — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:06:58 +0000

> As for the fact that one cannot resize from inside the window,

if you check the screencast I posted, you'll see that you can indeed resize from inside the window. Not by a huge margin, but definitely from inside the actual window boundaries.

New comment by pilif in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

pilif — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:06:02 +0000

It wasn't meant as a rebuttal. Just as a point of thought: By showing that at least one application doesn't exhibit the problem, I thought I was showing that the problem might not be related to the Tahoe redesign at all but might have other causes.

It definitely serves to prove that this is not a design-issue but just a simple bug and thus has at least some chance of being fixed.

FWIW, I cannot reproduce the issue demonstrated in the original article with any window of any application on my machine (M1 Mac Studio), but I thought that listing a very commonly used application alone would be enough to challenge the article's assertion ("the macOS designers are stupid because they make me do something that doesn't make sense in order to resize windows").