Hacker News: ptx

New comment by ptx in "Thinking in Python"

ptx — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:13:44 +0000

The last pre-AI version seems to be this commit: https://github.com/BruceEckel/ThinkingInPython/tree/76a1310d...

But that version seems to have some remnants left from Java version of the book, such as talking about visibility modifiers in the testing chapter.

New comment by ptx in "Thinking in Python"

ptx — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:37:17 +0000

The author is apparently still in the early stages of revising what the AI wrote, according to the README, so readers might want to hold off a bit on downloading the epub.

But both the license terms (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and the repo's LICENSE.md appear to agree that distributing the epub is OK.

New comment by ptx in "HTML Can Do That"

ptx — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:55:56 +0000

When a form has two sets of mutually exclusive options it might be appropriate? But I find the user experience confusing. It's hard to tell what happened when all the elements moved around, at least without animations.

New comment by ptx in "Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload"

ptx — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:21:12 +0000

Why are developers "inherently expected to run untrusted code"? Running untrusted code on developer machines seems like a terrible idea, given that it will compromise everything they build or deploy and (as you mentioned) all their credentials.

New comment by ptx in "Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload"

ptx — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:14:30 +0000

FreeBSD does this with Capsicum: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum

New comment by ptx in "Thunderbird's Desktop Calendar Visual Redesign"

ptx — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:05:02 +0000

What's going on with those dialogs? Are they real dialog windows with hidden window decorations, or are they fake windows drawn inside the calendar view?

And why do they have what looks like a maximize/zoom button, a "..." menu button and a close button? This is a desktop application – we have real window borders for resizing, real menus for menus and real close buttons provided by the window manager.

New comment by ptx in "Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port"

ptx — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:01:47 +0000

More concretely, Microsoft's license [0] gives you at most one of the four essential freedoms:

0. Freedom to run for any purpose? No.

1. Freedom to modify the program? Maybe; Microsoft can revoke it without cause at any time.

2. Freedom to distribute unmodified? No.

3. Freedom to distribute modified? No.

I'm using the free software definition [1] because it's simpler and clearer than the open source definition [2], which is usually considered mostly equivalent in practice, but as far as I can tell Microsoft's license satisfies zero of the latter's ten criteria, apart from perhaps non-discrimination and technology-neutrality. Most of the criteria of the open source definition have to do with distribution, which is not allowed by Microsoft's license.

[0] https://computerhistory.org/blogs/microsoft-research-license...

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

[2] https://opensource.org/osd

New comment by ptx in "GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability"

ptx — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:42:55 +0000

Does Codeberg support Windows runners at all? Forgejo only seems to have unofficial third-party builds of the Forgejo Actions runner for Windows.

New comment by ptx in "GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability"

ptx — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:21:14 +0000

Are there any other CI providers that offer free cloud-hosted Windows runners?

Or has Microsoft made sure (through Windows licensing terms and pricing) that it's not possible to compete with their own CI offering?

Edit: CircleCI seems to offer 750 minutes/month (whereas GitHub offers 1000 minutes/month).

New comment by ptx in "Critical CVE issued for hallucinated SQLite vulnerability"

ptx — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:44:45 +0000

Or maybe they didn't train it that way to be manipulative (although it's certainly a plausible explanation) but simply as an accidental artifact of trying to make it give honest answers?

LLM-generated images sometimes includes text from the prompt as literal text in the image, so perhaps this is the same sort of artifact? If they've told it to be honest, it responds by talking about being honest instead of actually being honest, because it has no actual understanding of anything.

New comment by ptx in "SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?"

ptx — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:18:45 +0000

This does make some sense if it's considered a valid fix to document that you have verified that Bluetooth is disabled on the servers and therefore not vulnerable. But that assumes that the scanning tool can be told about this kind of fix, so that it stops warning about it, which I guess it might not.

New comment by ptx in "AI migrated legacy COBOL programs to Java, bugs included"

ptx — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:08:47 +0000

Wow, their Java code example [0] makes COBOL look elegant and terse by comparison.

[0] https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/gregory-cerne...

New comment by ptx in "Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption"

ptx — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 20:44:03 +0000

What do you mean? Their package manager allows you to add additional repositories, if that's what you want.

New comment by ptx in "Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub"

ptx — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:17:42 +0000

Doesn't GitHub do this already? If I force push the PR branch, the PR shows a message about this with a link to diff it against the previous version.

New comment by ptx in "Sam Altman is now talking to the White House about decelerating AI"

ptx — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:21:39 +0000

This is the guy, if I'm not mistaken, who was fired for telling different groups people different and contradictory lies depending on what he needed them to believe. And now he's telling a reporter about what he's been telling the whitehouse, so he could be lying to the reporter, lying to the whitehouse or lying to both.

New comment by ptx in "Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word"

ptx — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:55:13 +0000

Well, yes. That LLMs are unable to distinguish instructions from data is a well-known and unsolved problem with LLMs in general.

This is one of the reasons it would be completely insane to give LLMs access to your data or rely on them for important tasks. But apparently that doesn't stop people from doing it anyway.

New comment by ptx in "Don't ask an LLM for a confidence score"

ptx — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:39:59 +0000

Calculon: And you say you can guarantee me the Oscar?

Bender: I can guarantee anything you want.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGZ10kZ4lmE

New comment by ptx in "Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions"

ptx — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:40:53 +0000

Python lets you bundle all the modules in a zip file and run that (no third-party tools needed): https://docs.python.org/3/library/zipapp.html

FreeBSD Status Report Second Quarter 2026

ptx — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:41:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2026-04-2026-06/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073071

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ptx in "Some more things about Django I've been enjoying"

ptx — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:44:23 +0000

This convenience sounds a little dangerous. Would this allow the user to specify e.g. joins or SQL procedure calls using the query parameter?