Hacker News: poizan42

New comment by poizan42 in "Making Claude a Chemist"

poizan42 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:04:43 +0000

I have been trying to work on debugging tools using Opus 4.8. As it turns out working with low-level techniques that inspects and alters behavior of other processes is bordering close enough to cybersecurity research that it often hits the guardrails.

New comment by poizan42 in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

poizan42 — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:00:34 +0000

That's cool and all if you are writing GCC or Clang dialect C, but it doesn't change the fact that it is UB in the C standard.

New comment by poizan42 in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

poizan42 — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:33:07 +0000

It's not difficult not to lie to your customers. If you are actually selling a subscription then don't claim the customer is buying the game, and this law won't apply to you.

New comment by poizan42 in "Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features"

poizan42 — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:10:34 +0000

NTSYNC seems quite cumbersome to use for your own linux software though

> The ntsync driver creates a single char device /dev/ntsync. Each file description opened on the device represents a unique instance intended to back an individual NT virtual machine. Objects created by one ntsync instance may only be used with other objects created by the same instance.

So you need a server process that can open the char device and hold onto the fd that you can then request through a Unix domain socket.

New comment by poizan42 in "First tunnel element of the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel immersed"

poizan42 — Mon, 11 May 2026 05:53:42 +0000

They are GINA gaskets[0], they were supposed to last 120 years[1], but it has recently been shown that they may deteriorate faster than previously expected due to being under constant compression[2][3]

[0] https://www.trelleborg.com/en/marine-and-infrastructure/medi...

[1] https://www.trelleborg.com/marine-and-infrastructure/-/media...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08867...

[3] https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/03/rubber-used-in-undersea-tunn...

New comment by poizan42 in "How do I inform Windows that I'm writing a binary file?"

poizan42 — Thu, 07 May 2026 03:19:11 +0000

And if you switch the tty from "cooked" to "raw" mode then it doesn't do the conversion, and a CR just moves the cursor back to the start of the line and a LF just moves the cursor one line down.

New comment by poizan42 in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

poizan42 — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:38:40 +0000

You can tell people what something is, that is nominative use of the trademark. Actually putting it in center of the branding might be infringing, but Don Ho gave their blessing to use that, so that point is moot anyways.

New comment by poizan42 in "Veracrypt project update"

poizan42 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:52:06 +0000

That was 11 years ago, under DHI Group though. I don't think Slashdot Media have been up to the same shady stuff.

New comment by poizan42 in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

poizan42 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:49:49 +0000

Is the "genetic testing" for the presence of a Y chromosome or the presence of the SRY gene? And what about people with AIS?

If it's just karyotype, are men with XX male syndrome (SRY gene without an Y chromosome) then allowed to participate in women's sports?

New comment by poizan42 in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

poizan42 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:36:18 +0000

They haven't pierced the corporate veil as far as I can tell - it's not moot or any other executives that have been personally fined. Also as far as I'm aware the UK doesn't have debtors jail.

New comment by poizan42 in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

poizan42 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:32:37 +0000

See https://reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billi...

AutoModerator on /r/linux is set up to automatically remove posts after a set amount of reports.

New comment by poizan42 in "U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth"

poizan42 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 02:16:18 +0000

Okay, but what does any of that have to do with knowing that the glyph at U+237C originated as a symbol for azimuth?

New comment by poizan42 in "The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database"

poizan42 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:35:53 +0000

Hmm the comment was a bit difficult to parse, but I think they got it correct. Remember that we have arbitrarily defined the time during local winter as the "standard" time. If we want to keep to that then "permanent daylight savings" is a contradictory term. So what is actually meant is abolishing DST while at the same time changing the standard time to be at the offset of DST before the change. So what I think they are saying is that DST is being abolished, but the actual effective offset at the time when it's abolished is unchanged.

New comment by poizan42 in "A ternary plot of citrus geneology"

poizan42 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:01:40 +0000

You might need several more dimensions (assuming this quoted claim is correct - it does come with a Citation Needed)

> Recent genetic analysis shows the papedas to be distributed among distinct branches of the Citrus phylogenetic tree, and hence Swingle's proposed subgenus is polyphyletic and not a valid taxonomic grouping, but the term persists as a common name.

New comment by poizan42 in "A ternary plot of citrus geneology"

poizan42 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:21:39 +0000

According to wikipedia they are cultivated from a hybrid of mandarin orange and Ichang papeda, the latter being from another wild lineage than the three shown.

New comment by poizan42 in "100M-Row Challenge with PHP"

poizan42 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:21:54 +0000

It sounds plausible, but they really need to spell out exactly what the formatting requirements are, because it can make a huge difference in how efficiently you can write the json out.

New comment by poizan42 in "100M-Row Challenge with PHP"

poizan42 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:13:27 +0000

> The output should be encoded as a pretty JSON string.

So apparently that is what they consider "pretty JSON". I really don't want to see what they would consider "ugly JSON".

(I think the term they may have been looking for is "pretty-printed JSON" which implies something about the formatting rather than being a completely subjective term)

New comment by poizan42 in "100M-Row Challenge with PHP"

poizan42 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:04:42 +0000

> The output should be encoded as a pretty JSON string.

...

> Your parser should store the following output in $outputPath as a JSON file:

    {
        "\/blog\/11-million-rows-in-seconds": {
            "2025-01-24": 1,
            "2026-01-24": 2
        },
        "\/blog\/php-enums": {
            "2024-01-24": 1
        }
    }

They don't define what exactly "pretty" means, but superflous escapes are not very pretty in my opinion.

New comment by poizan42 in "Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants"

poizan42 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:34:01 +0000

I can't make any assesment on the quality of the paper as that is far outside my expertise, but as far as I can tell from a quick skim it does indeed make the claim that recommendations for supplements should be significantly increased.

From the abstract:

> The safe upper limit for children can easily be increased to 2,000 IU of vitamin D/day, and for adults, up to 10,000 IU of vitamin D/day has been shown to be safe. The goal of this chapter is to give a broad perspective about vitamin D and to introduce the reader to the vitamin D deficiency pandemic and its insidious consequences on health that will be reviewed in more detail in the ensuing chapters

The full article is available on researchgate[1]. Direct link to PDF [2].

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226676251_Vitamin_D...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Holick/publicat...

EDIT: I just looked up the author, Michael F. Holick. Apparently he is one the people who identified calcitriol in 1971. I know appeal to authority doesn't prove anything, but it might be prudent to at least consider his findings.

New comment by poizan42 in "Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants"

poizan42 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:04:23 +0000

Not OP, but the paper says on page 8

> An adult in a bathing suit exposed to 1 minimal erythemal dose of ultraviolet radiation (a slight pinkness to the skin 24 h after exposure) was found to be equivalent to ingesting between 10,000 and 25,000 IU of vitamin D (Fig. 6).

Doesn't say 30 minutes, but it may be 30 minutes depending on your skin colour and the local strength of the sun.