Hacker News: reacweb

New comment by reacweb in "Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs"

reacweb — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:22:12 +0000

I think the current intellectual property system is flawed. Books are knowledge, and we shouldn't be able to limit the spread of knowledge. I imagine that books could be sold at the cost of printing, and there could be a QR code inside so that readers could freely donate money to the author if they enjoyed the book. Strangely enough, I imagine that with such a system, authors would be better paid.

New comment by reacweb in "Ubuntu 26.04"

reacweb — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:47:04 +0000

IMHO, Ubuntu is trying to gain market share by targeting non-experts — making Linux simple enough for normies and casual users. Casual users are generally less likely to mess things up on Ubuntu than on Windows.

New comment by reacweb in "Ubuntu 26.04"

reacweb — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:08:25 +0000

I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.

I have put my parents on Ubuntu (gnome) in 2013 to replace windows XP. My mother is 88 now. I think it is the perfect fit for her (dad is dead years ago).

I use ubuntu gnome because tweaking my computer is not where I want to spend my time. YOLO. Using a "mainstream" desktop that can be explained to "non specialist" has its benefits. I accept to suffer some annoyances and there is always a way to fix the most annoying ones by sacrificing time.

New comment by reacweb in "It's OK to compare floating-points for equality"

reacweb — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:35:17 +0000

I suggest

if a.abs()+b.abs() >= (a-b).abs() * 2f64.powi(48)

It remains accurate for small and for big numbers. 48 is slightly less than 52.

New comment by reacweb in "Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages"

reacweb — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:30:19 +0000

I was student between 1990 and 1993 and Ada was the main language. Compilation speed was not an issue. I remember that Eiffel was very slow to compile, but not Ada. Between 1994 and 1999, I have worked with Ada on Vax machines. The full recompilation took 2 hours because the machine was slow, not because of the language. Other languages were similarly slow (pascal, C). C was slow because of the lack of precompiled headers (many headers had to be parsed many times). With Ada (alsys ada), there were "libraries" that were black boxes directories containing object code and already parsed package specifications. Between 1999 and 2002, I have handled projects in Ada, C++ and Java. C++ was slightly slower than Ada (slow link). Java was a lots faster. Nowadays, Ada compilation is faster than C++.

New comment by reacweb in "The normalization of corruption in organizations (2003) [pdf]"

reacweb — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:37:11 +0000

Yes, the slogan "America first" is a forerunner of the worst kind of imperialism.

New comment by reacweb in "Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993"

reacweb — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:31:06 +0000

Yes, before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

At that time, there was almost no spam because we could report them to abuse@domain...

There was no firewall in front of our campus and we were using rlogin to connect outside. I used export DISPLAY from Brest to Paris (to use xdvi that was not installed locally).

IMO, the security (ssh and killing rlogin) is the main change that is a really useful progress.

New comment by reacweb in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

reacweb — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 08:11:10 +0000

make 2>&1 | tee m.log is in my muscle memory, like adding a & at the end of a command to launch a job, or ctrl+z bg when I forget it, or tar cfz (without the minus so that the order is not important). Without this terseness, people would build myriads of personal alias.

This redirection relies on foundational concepts (file descriptors, stdin 0, stdout 1, stderr 2) that need to be well understood when using unix. IMO, this helps to build insight and intuitiveness. A pipe is not magic, it is just a simple operation on file descriptors. Complexity exists (buffering, zombies), but not there.

New comment by reacweb in "RFC 3339 vs. ISO 8601"

reacweb — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 08:51:51 +0000

I am french. Everydays, we use DD/MM/YYYY or DD/MM/YY. Sometimes, I encounter YYYY-MM-DD, for example at the beginning of a document reference or in a file name. For me, it feels natural and I have no issue to make this switch mentally. The only problem I encounter is in english: MM/DD/YYYY. Hopefully less and less people are using this insane order.

New comment by reacweb in "My original Palm IIIx"

reacweb — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 10:48:28 +0000

It is just a cheap chinese usb/serial adaptor used to plug the original serial cable of the dock. Nothing special.

New comment by reacweb in "My original Palm IIIx"

reacweb — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 10:28:34 +0000

Some more patches at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/by-name/pi.... ./configure --enable-conduits && make && make install sudo export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib then it works like a charm. Thank you very much. My usb serial converter is the cheapest chinese one I found.

New comment by reacweb in "My original Palm IIIx"

reacweb — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 06:38:25 +0000

I still have my palm IIIxe I have used it to write my games during Go tournaments. I have a usb/serial adaptor. The software was easy to install on linux. Just to write this comment, I have tried to use it (I have not done any tournament since 7 years), but I got an error when I enter "apt-get install pilot-link". I still have my notes on how to use it:

    https://github.com/jichu4n/pilot-link/blob/master/doc/README.usb
    https://web.archive.org/web/20160226115446/http://www.pilot-link.org/
    apt-get install  pilot-link
    export PILOTPORT=/dev/ttyUSB0
    pilot-xfer --sync=/root/.pilot
    pilot-xfer -i /home/jef/Documents/Jef/old/pilotgone.prc
    pilot-dlpsh -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -i

Does anyone knows how to get back pilot-link package ?

New comment by reacweb in "Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes"

reacweb — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 10:24:56 +0000

I have 1 "big" xsl file in a project I maintain. I have fixed an issue this year. I have tried to use chatgpt prompt. The scope was perfect: I had the buggy xsl, the buggy result, the expected result and a clear explanation. It generated syntactically correct code (almost) that did not work because chatgpt does not understand. This was not a complete loss: a good refresher of the syntax, but I had to do the thinking fully alone and found alone how to use "node-set".

My previous change in this file was in 2017 when I replaced xalan by the xslt processor built in java. I was very surprised I had to make the following changes:

These incompatibility issues with something I considered to be standard greatly damaged my opinion on xslt.

New comment by reacweb in "What went wrong for Yahoo"

reacweb — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 20:14:52 +0000

I think that Marissa Meyer had given yahoo back a bit of its lustre. That meant cutting dividends in favour of investment. Restoring a reputation takes time. I stopped taking an interest when she was ousted by impatient shareholders. I am not an insider, maybe I am wrong.

New comment by reacweb in "The indieweb doesn't need to “take off”"

reacweb — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 11:47:56 +0000

IMHO, indieweb has not taken off because web hosting was dirt cheap and an internet subscription with a good upload was awfully expensive. Nowadays, the balance has changed and it is less true. Cheap web hosting has become complicated trade-offs. 8GBs symmetric (50€/month) is enough for most of uses.

My main hindrance is the fear that a hacker will hack into my home network

New comment by reacweb in "The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time"

reacweb — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 06:43:15 +0000

A linear scale is no fit for a performance graph. Can we switch to a logarithm scale ?

New comment by reacweb in "Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux"

reacweb — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 14:17:07 +0000

I sometimes need to use gdb to investigate bugs in C or Ada, but it is not my main activity. As a result I will not invest days to setup a debugging environment that I will not remember how to use 6 month later. My solution: I use emacs and have a short note with instructions: M-x gdb -i=mi exe_full_name -p 29123 M-x gdb-many-windows set follow-fork-mode child

New comment by reacweb in "Show HN: I built this as a high school student to learn SQL with realistic data"

reacweb — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:50:23 +0000

Found: https://github.com/KingSkyrock/sqlsandbox

New comment by reacweb in "Show HN: I built this as a high school student to learn SQL with realistic data"

reacweb — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 08:23:06 +0000

Hello, I like it very much. I am more a backend guy. Can you please share the code (at least the front end code) ?

New comment by reacweb in "NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive"

reacweb — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 09:25:13 +0000

https://xkcd.com/2115/ The RTGs generated about 470 W of electric power at the time of launch. In 2023, it was 260W.