Hacker News: wpollock

New comment by wpollock in "Deno 2.8"

wpollock — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:37:34 +0000

> Theres no reason to ship TS to an end user browser.

As things are now, developers write code in TypeScript, then debug and update code in Javascript. It might not be much of a reason, but a single language throughout is surely easier on developers and maintainers.

New comment by wpollock in "Deno 2.8"

wpollock — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:55:04 +0000

> Because "it doesn't exist". It's just a layer on top of js, ...

C++ was originally a layer on top of C. The first C++ compiler, "cfront" was actually a transpiler to C.

There is nothing preventing TypeScript from becoming "native" in a similar way.

New comment by wpollock in "When life gives you lemons, write better error messages"

wpollock — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:31:48 +0000

Long ago, I had the insight that not all users are equally technically proficient. Some had the chops to fix some problems if given sufficient information. Other users would be confused with too much detail.

I was writing code for AT&T (in the 1980s), and we were our own customer. So I wrote the error routines to check an environment variable and provide different error messages for different types of users: developers, testers, and a few power users got very detailed error messages, ordinary users got friendly, simplified messages (and weren't told about the environment variable).

New comment by wpollock in "What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting"

wpollock — Sat, 09 May 2026 19:43:17 +0000

I found this article interesting but lacking. Lightning also sometimes travels from the ground up to the clouds. Storm clouds produce red sprites (there are some theories about these) and blue jets, that shoot upwards towards space. Then there's ball lightning. None of these phenomena were discussed in the article.

I don't think scientists fully understand lightning at all. (At least, I don't!)

New comment by wpollock in "Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

wpollock — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:51:24 +0000

> The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society.

An old lawyer joke: What do you call 100 lawyers drowning in the ocean? A good start!

(Told to me by my dad, a former attorney till he retired.)

New comment by wpollock in "Dirtyfrag: Universal Linux LPE"

wpollock — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:32:55 +0000

Or more simply, use

   su -c 'echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'

New comment by wpollock in "How do I inform Windows that I'm writing a binary file?"

wpollock — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:45:10 +0000

Interestingly, the IETF has several published RFCs for text protocols, all of which require \r\n line endings.

<https://www.rfc-editor.org/old/EOLstory.txt>

Note this does not apply to file formats (except for RFCs).

New comment by wpollock in "Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)"

wpollock — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:49:56 +0000

> In general, I find it unacceptable for programs to use (anywhere in) my file system, besides /tmp, as a dumping ground for their caches and downloads, without cleaning it up.

/tmp must be world-writable and for multi-user or multi-tenant systems it becomes a security hole. Storing temporary files in the current user's home directory (or a subdirectory thereof) makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is this blog post about TMP and TEMP, and ending with "I don't know why" (in different words).

The reason is simple: different programmers thought the other name was bad. They were under no obligation to come to a consensus.

Don't forget about TEMPDIR and TMPDIR! Also Windows has its own environment variables for this. But generally, Linux software ported to Windows still use TMP or TEMP.

New comment by wpollock in "The Secret Life of NaN (2018)"

wpollock — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:17:06 +0000

I was thinking of DEL, but was obviously mistaken. Thanks for catching that!

New comment by wpollock in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

wpollock — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:03:59 +0000

Thomas Jefferson famously said that "A coreutils rewrite every now and again is a good thing". Or something like that.

When I was a beta tester for System Vr2 Unix, I collected as many bug reports as possible from Usenet (I used the name "the shell answer man". Looking back I conclude that arrogance is generally inversely proportional to age) and sent a patch for each one I could verify. Something like 100 patches.

So if this rust rewrite cleans up some issues, it's a good thing.

New comment by wpollock in "The Secret Life of NaN (2018)"

wpollock — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 23:02:58 +0000

> ... Unicode says that 0xFF is an invalid character.

Not so. You may be thinking of UTF-8 encoding. 0xff is DEL in Unicode.

New comment by wpollock in "Columnar Storage Is Normalization"

wpollock — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 20:06:51 +0000

My mental model of columnar storage is as the old notion of parallel arrays, which I used in the 1970s with FORTRAN. Whatever you learned first sticks with you and you end up translating everything to that, or at least I do. I believe this is known as the baby duck syndrome.

New comment by wpollock in "The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)"

wpollock — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:34:26 +0000

The source and destination addresses don't change. If a bomb takes out a router in-between (the military scenario DARPA had in mind), it is NOT IP (L3) or TCP (L4) that handles it. Rather it is a dynamic routing protocol that informs all affected routers of the changed route. Since the early days of the Internet, that's been the job of routing protocols.

For smaller internets, protocols such as RIP (limited to 16 hops) broadcast routing information from each still-working router to other routers. Each router built a picture of the internet (simplifying a bit here, RIP and similar protocols used "distance vector" routing, but other more advanced routing protocols did have each a picture of the internet). So when a packet arrived at its router, that router can forward the pack towards the destination. Such protocols are "interior" routing protocols, used within an ISP's network.

The Internet is too big for such automatic routing and uses an "exterior" routing protocol called BGP. This protocol routes packets from one ISP to the next, using route and connectivity information input by humans. (Again I'm simplifying a bit.)

Wifi uses entirely different protocols to route packets between cells.

Fun fact: wifi is not an acronym for anything, the inventors simply liked how it sounded.

New comment by wpollock in "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner"

wpollock — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 01:58:13 +0000

> I notoriously write bad English...

You mean that you write in English badly. :-)

New comment by wpollock in "NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating"

wpollock — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 01:47:28 +0000

This. Except worse, during busy days you had to stand on line for an hour or more for a turn on the machines. I believe the skill of debugging by mentally stepping through a program's execution came from such long run times, a useful skill many younger programmers lack.

New comment by wpollock in "Tactical Success, Strategic Failure? Washington Walks the Path to Defeat in Iran"

wpollock — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 04:03:18 +0000

It's probably not wise to say so on HN, but one possible strategic goal of this war was to distract from the Epstein files.

New comment by wpollock in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

wpollock — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:28:47 +0000

> They don't? It is taught in schools in the early elementary level. I see no indication that most are failing.

Programming in elementary schools typically involves moving a turtle around on the screen. (My mother taught 4th grade in New York for many years, and I believe her when she explained the computer instruction.)

Economically valueable programming is much more complex than is taught in many schools through freshman college. (I taught programming at the college level from 1980 till I retired in 2020.)

New comment by wpollock in "WireGuard makes new Windows release following Microsoft signing resolution"

wpollock — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:55:49 +0000

> If the company makes it impossible for you to communicate with them, the only recourse is to draw public attention to it in order to shame them.

Legal action works too. You'd be surprised how effective a letter from an attorney can be.

New comment by wpollock in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

wpollock — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:06:01 +0000

Your post reminded me when Yahoo IM updated their chat protocol to an incompatible version with a gradual rollout! Half their eight servers used v1 and half v2. A v1 only client would connect half the time depending on which server the round-robin DNS sent you to. This took me forever to figure out, but the fix was to put the IP address of the four v1 servers in the hosts file. (Until the client updated its support for v2.)

New comment by wpollock in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

wpollock — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 04:50:46 +0000

> And, especially what most people call big-endian, which is a bastardized mixed-endian mess of most significant byte is zero, while least significant bit is likewise zero.

In the 1980s at AT&T Bell Labs, I had to program 3B20 computers to process the phone network's data. 3B20s used the weird byte order 1324 (maybe it was 2413) and I had to tweak the network protocols to start packets with a BOM (byte order mark) (as the various switches that sent data didn't define endianess), then swap bytes accordingly.

Lesson learned was Never Ignore Endian issues.