<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: rleigh</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rleigh</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:35:26 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=rleigh" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Louis Rossmann offers to pay legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The enclosure is the real added value, hardware-wise; and the H2D has even better environmental control (active heating and cooling of chamber).<p>While the open-source part of me loves the more open nature of Prusa, the commercial-minded part loves the immediate convenience of the Bambu.  But the environmental control is something which Prusa doesn't really do well yet.  Heated chamber, as well as filament humidity control is something Bambu has done which Prusa has not, and when it comes to printing with "engineering" filaments like PA6CF, PA6GF and other higher-end lubricating plastics for bearings etc, along with support filaments like PVA which are incredibly hygroscopic, the Bambu is the only contender if you want high-quality prints that don't warp.<p>IMO this is where Prusa gave up the race and need to catch up.  Give me equivalent or better environmental control, and I'll be happy to consider it.<p>The accessibility to non-experts, and the fact that it just works out of the box without fiddling around optimising settings, is why I have a Bambu family at work and zero Prusas.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 16:29:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085304</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085304</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48085304</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Statecharts: hierarchical state machines"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Let me just throw in:<p>ETL State Chart and Hierarchial FSM <a href="https://www.etlcpp.com/state_chart.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.etlcpp.com/state_chart.html</a> and <a href="https://www.etlcpp.com/hfsm.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.etlcpp.com/hfsm.html</a><p>Quantum Leaps <a href="https://www.state-machine.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.state-machine.com</a><p>I've used them primarily in safety-critical systems where complexity, timing and the ability to effectively verify behaviour is obviously important.  Being able to separate the decision-making from the actions is a great aid.  Having to strip back the decision making to "what do I do next" when I'm in this state and this event occurs is a bit different to how most programs are structured, but really does aid separation and makes it easy to reason about behaviour under different conditions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:45:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909879</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909879</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47909879</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are plenty of embedded chips which only provide RMII.  No RGMII or alternatives.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Apr 2026 11:20:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900535</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900535</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900535</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in ""cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To truly fix this would require revisiting of some very old fundamentals.<p>The C0 control set (ASCII 0x00 to 0x1F) contains all sorts of esoteric functions, most of which are generally unused, and only a few of which are useful and could be implemented at a higher-level.  ESC sequences are only part of the problem.<p>And this also applies not just to terminals, but to systems programming as well.  None of these have any business in e.g. filenames, but it's all commonly permitted.  Some systems do forbid them, and it should IMO be universal.<p>If we really want to fix this, then we would develop a character encoding that strips out all control characters entirely, including LF and CR, and have text be nothing but graphic text characters.  It's so entrenched and convenient that it's difficult to see that happening.  But I do think routine stripping of all control characters in situations that don't require them would be good for security.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:49:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822532</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822532</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822532</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in ""cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is broadly correct, but not entirely.  Terminals have historically had additional capabilities, be that ringing a bell (BEL) or outputting to a line printer.  There are escape codes dedicated to doing file/tape access and running system commands.  Not in wide use, but they do exist.  See ECMA-48 for some examples from the '80s.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:35:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822477</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822477</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822477</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Your File System Is Already A Graph Database"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>True, I missed that.  I suppose with symlinks you have the reverse problem: you can point to deleted filenames and then have broken links.  The cycle detection is still an issue though--it has indeterminate complexity and the graph can be modified as you are traversing it!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:50:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691037</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691037</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691037</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Your File System Is Already A Graph Database"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Historically, it made deletion rather difficult with some problematic edge-cases.  You could unlink a directory and create an orphan cycle that would never be deleted.  Combine that with race conditions on a multi-user systems, plus the indeterminate cost of cycle-detection, and it turns out to be a rather complex problem to solve properly, and banning hard-links is a very simple way to keep the problem tractable, and result in fast, robust and reliable filesystem operations.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:22:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690642</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690642</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690642</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Our commitment to Windows quality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When they used to have to fit the whole thing onto six floppy discs, it had to be constrained in size and scope.  Today there are no constraints and it really shows.  I think having hard constraints, be it storage, memory, cpu, update distribution, product requirements, drives quality and forces hard engineering decisions to fit within them.  I think a lot that is wrong with Microsoft of today is a complete loss of enginering discipline and focus; you only have to look at the incoherence of their GUI development strategy to see how badly they are doing there.<p>I think it would have been useful for them to have really made a proper effort at modularising Windows along the lines of how Linux distributions and the BSDs do things.  I can't see any way of recovery from the bloated mess they have created; they can't keep cramming any more in, it's an unstable, unusable and untestable mess.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:01:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47468828</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47468828</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47468828</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Store birth date in systemd for age verification"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Likely.  Whenever I see that it usually means it itself created the test failures but won't admit to it!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:31:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47446514</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47446514</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47446514</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just for a bit of balance, another book I bought was the ZYNQ book and companion materials.  It's made by a university in collaboration with Xilinx.  They don't hide that because it's niche and low volume, they used a print-on-demand service.  I even went and looked them up, and it's a small UK printer with pretty reasonable pricing for self-publishing small runs of books.  The quality was great, no problems with it at all.  So it /can/ be done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 06:45:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47395806</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47395806</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47395806</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not just Amazon.  I bought a copy of an ARM assembly book from a proper bookseller (Blackwells) which was a proper hardback for a high price--something like £80, and I received a print-on-demand mess with a hardcover.  The print was there but barely legible, a dotty mess which gave me a headache.  I returned it.<p>I can see print-on-demand working very well, but not until the quality issues are sorted out.  Being charged top dollar for something which is substantially inferior is unacceptable.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:08:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47386257</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47386257</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47386257</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If it loads at all.  The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it.<p>The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing.  And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible.  Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 10 Jan 2026 18:59:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568804</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568804</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568804</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I started on the cheapest £15/mo "Pro" plan and it was great for home use when I'd do a bit of coding in the evenings only, but it wasn't really that usable with Opus--you can burn through your session allowance in a few minutes, but was fine with Sonnet.  I used the PAYG option to add more, but cost me £200 in December, so I opted for the £90/mo "Max" plan which is great.  I've used Opus 4.5 continuously and it's done great work.<p>I think when you look at it from the perspective of how much you get out of it compared with paying a human to do the same (including yourself), it is still very good value for money whether you use it for work or for your own projects.  I do both.  But when I look what I can now do for my own projects including open-source stuff, I'm very time-limited, and some of the things I want to do would take multiple years.  Some of these tools can take that down to weeks, do I can do more with less, and from that perspective the cost is worth it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 08:45:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524054</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524054</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524054</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've found it to be terrible when you allow it to be creative.  Constrain it, and it does much better.<p>Have you tried the planning mode?  Ask it to review the codebase and identify defects, but don't let it make any changes until you've discussed each one or each category and planned out what to do to correct them.  I've had it refactor code perfectly, but only when given examples of exactly what you want it to do, or given clear direction on what to do (or not to do).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 08:34:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46523988</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46523988</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46523988</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's the other way around.  It's the GPL which is incompatible with the CDDL (and many other licences).<p>The CDDL is actually very permissive.  You can combine it with anything, including proprietary licences.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 06:38:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446898</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446898</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446898</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Classic GTK1 GUI Library"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, this is a prime example of completely gratuitous breakage.<p>The change adds zero value.  It's a deliberate API break.  And it could have been made a non-breaking change all for the sake of a single one-line macro or inline function.<p>This isn't unintentional.  It's a deliberate choice they have made.  And not just this one, it's happened repeatedly over the years.<p>The thing that really gets me, as an end-user/developer, is that it forces incompatible changes not only in my codebases, but in every other application developer's codebases worldwide.  A small change in GTK+ imposes hundreds of thousands of man-hours of maintenance work upon every application developer.  And this burdensome work not only takes time, effort and money, it doesn't improve our applications one iota, and on top of that, it breaks backward compatibility so our code will not longer build with older GTK+ versions.  Most of us won't be chasing the latest development release, applications might need to target a wide range of distributions with a wide range of GTK+ versions.  So it's a logistical nightmare as well.<p>The lack of concern for the needs of actual application developers is why I eventually had to give up on it entirely.  At some point it doesn't make any sense either commercially or for free software development, it's just masochism.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2025 19:09:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225523</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225523</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225523</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Unofficial Windows 11 requirements bypass tool allows disabling all AI features"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Recently it's got really bad though.  The taskbar is badly broken.<p>* If you use auto-hide, it won't show when some applications are open.  Edge in particular is bad.<p>* Some applications simply don't show on the taskbar at all.  Teams is one.  It's in the alt-tab list.<p>* Sometimes it stops working entirely.<p>The testing and QA of this stuff appears to be largely absent.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Sep 2025 21:16:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45162240</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45162240</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45162240</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "PSA: Libxslt is unmaintained and has 5 unpatched security bugs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And also in QtXmlPatterns (now also retired).<p>Just for the record, Xalan-C is even less maintained than libxslt.  It had no releases for over a decade, and I made a final 1.12 release in 2020 adding CMake support, since the existing builds had bitrotted significantly, along with a number of outstanding bugfixes.<p>I initiated its removal to the Apache attic in 2022 in <a href="https://marc.info/?l=xalan-c-users&m=165593638018553&w=2" rel="nofollow">https://marc.info/?l=xalan-c-users&m=165593638018553&w=2</a> and the vote to do this was in <a href="https://marc.info/?t=166514497300001&r=1&w=2&n=20" rel="nofollow">https://marc.info/?t=166514497300001&r=1&w=2&n=20</a>.  It has now gone nearly four years without any commits being made.<p>It's a great shame we are now in a situation where there is only a single proprietary implementation of the very latest version of the standard, but even the open-source 1.x implementations are fading fast.  These technologies have fallen out of favour, and the the size and complexity of the standards is such that it's a non-trivial undertaking to keep them maintained or create a modern reimplementation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2025 17:04:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066656</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066656</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066656</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Lua beats MicroPython for embedded devs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's more than generous.  You can run it with much less resource utilisation than this.  It only needs a few tens of kilobytes of flash (and you can cut it right back if you drop bits you don't need in the library code).  32 KiB is in the ballpark of what you need.  As for RAM, the amount you need depends upon what your application requires, but it can be as little as 4-8 KiB, with needs growing as you add more library code and application logic and data.<p>If you compare this with what MicroPython uses, its requirements are well over an order of magnitude larger.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2025 06:33:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44557076</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44557076</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44557076</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rleigh in "Creating Debian packages from upstream Git"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The main source of complexity isn't the .deb format, but the tooling and infrastructure <i>around</i> the format.  It's mired in overcomplexity, and it's very much still in a '90s mindset of building locally with multiple layers of Perl-based tools.  If it was rethought to be git-native using docker images or equivalent then it could be of equivalent simplicity to other contemporary systems.  When I look at what you can do with the FreeBSD ports and Poudriere or with Homebrew and other systems, I see how much of the complexity has been added incidentally and incrementally, with good intentions, but a radical rethink of the basic workflows are necessary to consolidate and simplify them.<p>[I used to maintain sbuild and was the author of schroot back in the day]</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 31 May 2025 08:41:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142907</link><dc:creator>rleigh</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142907</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142907</guid></item></channel></rss>