Hacker News: sfoley

New comment by sfoley in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

sfoley — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:34:01 +0000

That's not what fraud is.

New comment by sfoley in "DEC64: Decimal Floating Point (2020)"

sfoley — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 12:31:16 +0000

Near the end of the article, under Motivation:

> The BASIC language eliminated much of the complexity of FORTRAN by having a single number type. This simplified the programming model and avoided a class of errors caused by selection of the wrong type. The efficiencies that could have gained from having numerous number types proved to be insignificant.

DEC64 was specifically designed to be the only number type a language uses (not saying I agree, just explaining the rationale).

New comment by sfoley in "Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26"

sfoley — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 12:40:52 +0000

> But there's no way to tone down the new animations

Does Reduce Motion (under Accessibility) not work? I haven't updated to 26 yet, and probably won't for a while.

New comment by sfoley in "Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26"

sfoley — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 12:35:18 +0000

> In iOS 26, controls insist on animating themselves, whether or not the user benefits. Carousel dots quietly morph into the word Search after a few seconds.

This has been the case for several years now (started in iOS 16 IIRC); it is not new in 26.

New comment by sfoley in "Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers"

sfoley — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 13:10:53 +0000

No it isn't. This line of comments is explicitly in response to your claim:

> Isn't a larger issue the number of immigrants who are NOT contributing to the economy, living at taxpayers' expense

No one has yet mentioned illegal immigrants except you.

In any case it doesn't matter, since GP was specifically replying to:

> In my experience, immigrants have low paying jobs and regularly use cash to avoid paying taxes. Most have no sense whatsoever of cohesion with the country they live in and instead make groups of similar culture that don't really try to fit in.

They were simply giving their own opposite experience on the subject of immigrant wages and taxation, which is equally as valid.

If this thread was actually about illegal immigrants, both comments would be equally off topic. I find it interesting which one you decided to respond to.

New comment by sfoley in "Fixing Ctrl+C in Rust terminal apps: Child process management"

sfoley — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 10:35:02 +0000

SIGINT, not SIGTERM.

New comment by sfoley in "Fstrings.wtf"

sfoley — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:26:55 +0000

Yeah I consider that one to be a trick question. I knew same-quote-style nested f-strings were coming, I just didn't know which version, and I still use the `f'{f"{}"}'` trick because I want my code to support "older" versions of python. One of my servers is still on 3.10. 3.11 won't be EOL until 2027.

New comment by sfoley in "ChatGPT creates phisher's paradise by serving the wrong URLs for major companies"

sfoley — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 11:11:22 +0000

leftpad was 2016

New comment by sfoley in "Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor"

sfoley — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:40:42 +0000

I cannot reproduce this.

New comment by sfoley in "Everyone knows all the apps on your phone"

sfoley — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 10:49:26 +0000

It's a clickbait title that needs to be changed to stop spreading misinformation.

New comment by sfoley in "Pointers Are Complicated II, or: We need better language specs (2020)"

sfoley — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 13:17:05 +0000

> > If after the above I created an array like so `char str[n]` and then assigned such that it pointed to the same region of memory that malloc() returned, then would the provenance of both pointer be equal?

> Yes.

Uh, no. This is flatly untrue. You cannot "assign an array such that it points to a region of memory". Arrays are not pointers, they do not point to anything.

The Eval Game

sfoley — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 17:33:45 +0000

Article URL: https://oskaerik.github.io/theevalgame/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38534087

Points: 37

# Comments: 32

New comment by sfoley in "Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed"

sfoley — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 16:56:59 +0000

> With Safari providing this, it can be used by some providers, but nobody can block or behave differently with unattested clients.

What mechanism prevents websites from blocking or behaving differently for unattested clients? The article doesn't make that clear.

Also: Apple's attestation implementation introduces an external real-time single-point-of-failure, but given that the failure mode is just "show a captcha", it doesn't seem too severe. Is it even possible to implement a broader attestation infrastructure without introducing a similar single point of failure? TLS PKI, for example, does not rely on an external "live" server; the private keys live on the origin.

New comment by sfoley in "Ask HN: Why are toggle switches replacing checkboxes? Isn't on/off less obvious?"

sfoley — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 16:11:28 +0000

That's not what the word "need" means.

New comment by sfoley in "Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)"

sfoley — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 13:00:52 +0000

Brilliant feature, but this is the sort of thing that reinforces the idea that CLIs have awful discoverability compared to GUIs.

New comment by sfoley in "Bashing the Bash – Replacing Shell Scripts with Python (2017)"

sfoley — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 13:20:09 +0000

> This failed, b/c bash can't represent an empty array!

It absolutely can, I have no idea where you’re getting this idea.

New comment by sfoley in "White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug"

sfoley — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 12:57:00 +0000

Wtf is a “blockchain-based VPN”?

New comment by sfoley in "Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one"

sfoley — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 21:10:03 +0000

Base64 costs 1.3x space, not 4x.

New comment by sfoley in "Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again"

sfoley — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 10:05:22 +0000

Who says this? I have literally never once seen this.

New comment by sfoley in "Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation"

sfoley — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 20:51:44 +0000

You can’t think of healthcare costs?