Hacker News: ptx

New comment by ptx in "Why a program doesn't work when run from a batch file, but works when clicked"

ptx — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 10:49:10 +0000

Yes, the link shows that the application loads DLLs from many places, one of which is the working directory, which is placed earlier in the search order when safe DLL search mode is disabled, which is less safe than the safe mode.

As the second link says, the safe DLL search mode is "increasing the chances that Windows will find a legitimate copy of the DLL before a malicious copy", implying that the less safe mode, which was the default in earlier versions of Windows, as I said, decreases the chances of finding the legitimate DLL first, i.e. it increases the risk of loading a malicious DLL from the working directory.

New comment by ptx in "Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why"

ptx — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 22:05:20 +0000

Which cross-platform toolkits are more mature than Qt?

New comment by ptx in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3"

ptx — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 09:45:01 +0000

> In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

Attribution is the one and only condition of the MIT license, aside from the disclaimer of warranty, so I don't see how it "explicitly allows" publishing without attribution.

New comment by ptx in "Debian apt security update: man-in-the-middle arbitrary code execution"

ptx — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:43:40 +0000

Is this the right way to specify it when upgrading the vulnerable apt?

  # apt -o 'Acquire::http::AllowRedirect=false' update
  # apt -o 'Acquire::http::AllowRedirect=false' install apt

New comment by ptx in "Why a program doesn't work when run from a batch file, but works when clicked"

ptx — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 10:37:25 +0000

But they do load from the working directory by default [0] and until XP SP2 they put it before system32 in the search order [1] by default.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlls/dynamic...

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlls/dynamic...

New comment by ptx in "Why a program doesn't work when run from a batch file, but works when clicked"

ptx — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 22:37:04 +0000

Yup. And since applications load DLLs from their working directory by default, and opening a document sets the working directory... you'd better make sure you never open a document from an untrusted folder.

New comment by ptx in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

ptx — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 22:39:41 +0000

Almost every time I use an AI chatbot it eventually turns out it's lying to me. I would not trust them with any of the things you mention.

New comment by ptx in "`123456' password used in Danish CPR data breach"

ptx — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 22:05:37 +0000

No, because someone else will then come along and mess up your configuration and destroy your work, either accidentally or just to be a jerk, which will set your productivity back significantly.

New comment by ptx in "Tapo (Rust/Python library) now speaks TP-Link's TPAP protocol"

ptx — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:43:32 +0000

The disclaimer at the end of the article says AI was used to "polish" the writing. I would guess it's this polish that can be a little off-putting: It reads like a magazine article written by and for people who aren't particularly interested in the topic.

New comment by ptx in "Why don't more developers “use the platform”?"

ptx — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:22:48 +0000

> More like trying to explain to people who have only done imperative programming (and that also in JS of all languages) why a render function was necessary.

It doesn't seem all that different from doing your rendering in the WM_PAINT handler, which was already how things were done in the ancient Win32 API (although it's possible [0] to draw outside WM_PAINT).

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdi/drawing-...

New comment by ptx in "Show HN: Thoreau BASIC – What if BASIC hadn't gone out of fashion?"

ptx — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 10:03:39 +0000

It doesnt't seem to be open source, though. A proprietary language with a proprietary implementation is a dead end.

Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0 (2007) [pdf]

ptx — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:07:57 +0000

Article URL: https://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49943569

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ptx in "Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free"

ptx — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 19:13:51 +0000

I think GPLv3 already does this, with its anti-tivoization requirements. People just need to switch to an up-to-date copyleft license rather than permissive licenses.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization

New comment by ptx in "Native apps written in TypeScript and CSS"

ptx — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:03:57 +0000

What do you mean? You were so excited that you didn't want to talk about what excited you and left it to an LLM instead?

New comment by ptx in "Nvidia dismisses "circular financing", says every $1 it invests brings back $100"

ptx — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 13:53:06 +0000

But it seems this "economic value" is often created by depleting actual physical resources (e.g. people's health, clean air and water), usually resources belonging someone other than the person capturing the "value".

New comment by ptx in "JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation"

ptx — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:06:57 +0000

There is with jpackage. The packages it builds could include install scripts (or custom actions in the case of MSI) to run at install time.

The script wouldn't have to do the training run at install time, as I understand it, just the AOT compilation. See the section on "AOTMode=record" vs "AOTMode=create" in the JEP.

New comment by ptx in "JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation"

ptx — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:47:06 +0000

It would be nice if jpackage could bundle the generated AOT configuration data along with a custom action in the MSI package to run the machine-dependent AOT compilation step at install time.

New comment by ptx in "Extinct Tasmanian tiger's 'snap' unlike any living mammal's bite"

ptx — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:06:41 +0000

That leaves a few questions though (which I'm not implying that I know the answers to):

Did this planted forest (used for logging) replace another forest that was used as a habitat for animals? Is it counted as an equivalent to non-logging forests to justify the destruction of non-logging forests?

Can this sustainable industry sustain suitable living conditions for animals in the forest? Or can the industry only sustain itself and its own interests in future resource extraction?

New comment by ptx in "This Month in Ladybird – August 2026"

ptx — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:00:42 +0000

No, it isn't.

Ladybird [0]: "We will no longer accept public pull requests. From now on, code changes to the Ladybird codebase will only be introduced by project maintainers. [...] There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means."

FreeBSD [1]: "So you want to contribute to FreeBSD? That is great! FreeBSD relies on the contributions of its user base to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital to FreeBSD’s continued growth. [...] If you are submitting a simple patch to the src repo, please consider submitting it to the project’s GitHub mirror as a pull request."

[0] https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/

[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/

New comment by ptx in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

ptx — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:23:42 +0000

As far as I can tell, all the recording, storing and transmitting of audio from the microphone happens after 34 minutes in, after the point where they start hacking the TV and telling it themselves to do these things.

LG's advertising features appear (from what they discover before 34 minutes in and from the clips of the LG execs boasting about their ad platform) to be concerned only with what's played on the TV (and networks, devices, ..., but not microphone audio).

If I'm wrong about this, I would appreciate a timestamp for where in the video they show LG actually storing and transmitting audio recorded from the microphone.