Hacker News: ptspts

New comment by ptspts in "Stinkpot: SQLite-backed shell history"

ptspts — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:13:11 +0000

I have a regular Bash shell history with about 750 000 entries on an SSD on a modern laptop, and would take about 1 second for Bash to load 1 million entries. The startup delay and the memory usage is noticeable.

Storing the shell command history in a database instead of the memory of each interactive Bash shell, it would make Bash start up faster, and also use less memory.

New comment by ptspts in "Stinkpot: SQLite-backed shell history"

ptspts — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 11:04:42 +0000

As indicated in https://tangled.org/oppi.li/stinkpot/blob/cdf87ffcd36e96f3d4... , this software (stinkpot) still uses Bash PROMPT_COMMAND as an entry point to copy new shell history entries to its database.

PROMPT_COMMAND has the following flaw: a command gets recorded as soon as it has finished. So command which never finish (e.g. because they run for a long time, and the user closes the terminal window, or reboots the system) never get recorded. Another flaw: the users starts a long-running command in terminal window 1, and immediately they want to start a variant of it in terminal window 2, but it's not available in the history.

New comment by ptspts in "A way to exclude sensitive files issue still open for OpenAI Codex"

ptspts — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:39:45 +0000

In fact, it's possible to set up bind mounts without root on a modern Linux system, using a user namespace and a mount namespace.

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

ptspts — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:44:38 +0000

It does, so not 100% is reused. The patched parts are in different sections though, so the entire .text (code) section ends up being reused.

New comment by ptspts in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

ptspts — Sun, 03 May 2026 13:14:08 +0000

I hate tiling window managers. After I start a program, I move and resize its window to the perfect position, and it stays there for weeks. I don't ever want it to be moved or resized automatically, which is what tiling window managers do by default.

New comment by ptspts in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

ptspts — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:21:09 +0000

Does the new owner of the domain friendster.com also own the company, the patents and the other pieces of intellectual property? The article seemed to be unclear about this.

New comment by ptspts in "Fuzix OS"

ptspts — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:55:18 +0000

Isn't creating a Docker image containing the right version of GCC or Clang a solution to the toolchain problem?

New comment by ptspts in "The smallest ELF executable (2021)"

ptspts — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:03:21 +0000

Shameless self-promotion: I think I hold the record (83 bytes) for the shortest hello-world Linux ELF executable: https://github.com/pts/mininasm/blob/master/demo/hello/hello...

New comment by ptspts in "Show HN: GDSL – 800 line kernel: Lisp subset in 500, C subset in 1300"

ptspts — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:32:23 +0000

GDSL is written in C++ with use of STL, templates and lambdas, so it's 2600 lines of such C++ source code. There is no self-hosting: neither the LISP compiler nor the C compiler can compile itself. No operating system is implemented, the word kernel in the title means something else.

FYI Here is a 700-line subset-of-C compiler which can compile itself: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/xcc700 . FYI The linker and the libc are not included.

New comment by ptspts in "Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)"

ptspts — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 21:17:35 +0000

It's possible to run WebAssembly programs from the command line (without any GUI) using WASI (see e.g. https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI). Thus if the user downloads pdfconverter.wasi , and the user already has e.g. wasmtime installed, they can run `wasmtime pdfconverter.wasi input.pdf output.pdf` from the command line (see https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/docs/... for details).

In addition to the web site, the Electron app and the Chrome extension, you may want to distribute a command-line version of your tools as WASI-style .wasm program files. If you do so, I would exclusively use the them this way, from the command line.

New comment by ptspts in "Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)"

ptspts — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:02:57 +0000

Your commands to process PDF with Ghostscript are lossy (they lose lots of metadata and in minor ways they also change how the PDF renders), and they produce very large PDF files.

New comment by ptspts in "This game is a single 13 KiB file that runs on Windows, Linux and in the Browser"

ptspts — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:37:54 +0000

It does exclude unused code. But glibc has too many inter-object-file dependencies, so too much code gets used.

New comment by ptspts in "Sandboxing Untrusted Python"

ptspts — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:09:19 +0000

Neither the article nor the README explains how it works.

How does it work? Which WASM euntime does it use? Does it use a Python jnterpreter compiled to WASM?

New comment by ptspts in "A font with built-in TeX syntax highlighting"

ptspts — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 16:59:05 +0000

As a text editor user, I prefer selecting the font and the syntax highlighting independently. This font is not useful for me.

New comment by ptspts in "Single-Pass Huffman Coding"

ptspts — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 10:05:15 +0000

What is the advantage of this circular implementation?

Is it faster than the simple one? Does it use less memory? Is it easier to write? Is it easier to understand?

I think all of the above is false, but I have a limited understanding of Haskell. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

New comment by ptspts in "Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic"

ptspts — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:59:37 +0000

Why is ELF so much slower and/or more memory hungry than a.out on Linux?

New comment by ptspts in "Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions"

ptspts — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:05:59 +0000

Shameless plug: Some of my hobby projects written in C (e.g. https://github.com/pts/bakefat) can be built reproducibly for Linux >=1.0 (1994), FreeBSD (same ELF executable program file as for Linux) and Win32 working on all versions of Windows (Windows NT 3.1 (1993)--Windows 11). The C compiler (running on Linux i386 and amd64 host) used for the release build is self-contained and included in the project, along with the libc.

Doing such backward compatibility is definitiely possible for command-line tools. Once set up, it's automatic, and it needs extra testing after major changes.

New comment by ptspts in "Btop: A better modern alternative of htop with a gamified interface"

ptspts — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 19:05:20 +0000

If a text-mode process monitor is larger than about 200 KiB, then it sounds bloated to me. If it's loaded with tons of features, then my upper limit is 1 MiB.

New comment by ptspts in "Based C++"

ptspts — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:42:38 +0000

This video doesn't explain what the project does and how it does it. Also it's deliberately misleading the viewer, for example it purposefully incorrectly states that C++ is an interpreted language.

Also the music is way is too loud and sudden.

New comment by ptspts in "GNU Midnight Commander"

ptspts — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 12:28:44 +0000

This should have been solved in the last 30 years on Linux console, X terminal emulators and through SSH.