Hacker News: xenophonf

New comment by xenophonf in "Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac"

xenophonf — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:01:44 +0000

> [Qwen coder 0,5B] can output decent functions given the right context instructions

Can you share a working example?

New comment by xenophonf in "April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini"

xenophonf — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:50:16 +0000

LM Studio isn't free/libre/open source software, which misses the point of using open weights and open source LLMs in the first place.

New comment by xenophonf in "Post-mortem of the EU Europa breach: A masterclass in IAM misconfiguration"

xenophonf — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:10:01 +0000

This looks like an LLM's hallucinations. I don't see any evidence supporting the conclusions made, and some of the conclusions are overblown, like that bit about DKIM keymat leaks being the "most dangerous". The whole thing is written in this breathless, overwrought style that seems to be favored by bots fed a strict diet of ad copy and marketing white papers—"not X. Y!" (That's a thin gruel and probably ought to be treated by our future AI overlords as child abuse.)

New comment by xenophonf in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

xenophonf — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:22:07 +0000

Where in the pnpm documentation does it say that it ignores scripts by default?

From https://pnpm.io/cli/install#--ignore-scripts:

> Default: *false*

New comment by xenophonf in "Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised"

xenophonf — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:26:58 +0000

PyPI enforces immutable releases.

https://pypi.org/help/#file-name-reuse

> PyPI does not allow for a filename to be reused, even once a project has been deleted and recreated...

> This ensures that a given distribution for a given release for a given project will always resolve to the same file, and cannot be surreptitiously changed one day by the projects maintainer or a malicious party (it can only be removed).

New comment by xenophonf in "Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised"

xenophonf — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:52:18 +0000

All engineering professions are like that. NCEES has been licensing Professional Engineers for over a hundred years. The only thing stopping CS/SE is an unwillingness to submit to anything resembling oversight.

New comment by xenophonf in "Why I love FreeBSD"

xenophonf — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:02:02 +0000

I love FreeBSD for its documentation. To answer your question about Wayland specifically:

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

If you want something with a graphical environment ready to run, check out GhostBSD, which is based on FreeBSD and features MATE:

https://www.ghostbsd.org/

New comment by xenophonf in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

xenophonf — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:48:46 +0000

If someone can't explain something in their own words, then they don't _really_ understand it. The process of taking time to think through a topic and check one's understanding, even if only for oneself and the rubber duck, will reveal mistakes or points of confusion.

New comment by xenophonf in "Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)"

xenophonf — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:31:58 +0000

Here's the YouTube link without that tracking code for those of us on mobile:

https://youtu.be/EZC69A8TsJ8

(I wish Firefox on iOS had a "open clean link" option, but I'd wish Mozilla would fix other more important stuff first, like letting me search/open bookmarks from a private tab.)

The Journey to OpenID Federation 1.0 Is Complete

xenophonf — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:24:01 +0000

Article URL: https://self-issued.info/?p=2813

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47060680

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by xenophonf in "What if writing tests was a joyful experience? (2023)"

xenophonf — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 03:59:07 +0000

TIL. That looks like a nice way to add tests to legacy code without having to re-create what TDD would have had the developers started that way.

New comment by xenophonf in "How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)"

xenophonf — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:59:56 +0000

> narrow use case?

It's the robustness principle. "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." A CLI author shouldn't assume support for UTF-8.

New comment by xenophonf in "I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone"

xenophonf — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:07:17 +0000

https://xcancel.com/lizziejohnsonnn/status/20190832041336098...

New comment by xenophonf in "How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)"

xenophonf — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 07:09:40 +0000

Emacs on a Link MC5, although something doesn't like how the terminal handles flow control. I'm not sure if it's the O/S, the UART, the cable, or the terminal, but I have issues with I/O corruption. Even something a simple as a directory listing will get messed up, and on both FreeBSD and Linux, so maybe that rules out the O/S. Oh well. I'll figure it out some day.

New comment by xenophonf in "How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)"

xenophonf — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 07:06:03 +0000

Not with sed and awk they aren't.

New comment by xenophonf in "How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)"

xenophonf — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:58:05 +0000

Emojis aren't 7-bit clean. They're hard to type. They don't mean things the same way words do. `foo | grep -i error` communicates intent better than `foo | grep :-/` or whatever goofy hieroglyph someone chose instead of, like, a word with clearly defined meaning.

New comment by xenophonf in "How to choose colors for your CLI applications (2023)"

xenophonf — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:54:10 +0000

I really wish you wouldn't. All the rinky dink colors and animations screw with the CLI output when you don't correctly detect whether the user's running the app interactively.

Keep it plain text. Regular, old, boring output is good.

New comment by xenophonf in "Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant"

xenophonf — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 23:45:20 +0000

I'm very impressed. This isn't a paper so much as a monograph. And I'm very inclined to agree with the results of this study, which makes me suspicious. To what journal was this submitted? Where's the peer review? Has anyone gone through the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872) and picked it apart?

New comment by xenophonf in "SmartOS"

xenophonf — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:45:11 +0000

You can boot ProxMox VMs via PXE:

https://blog.kail.io/pxe-booting-on-proxmox.html

But why bother? A read-only disk image would be simpler.

New comment by xenophonf in "The Emacs Widget Library: A Critique and Case Study"

xenophonf — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 06:34:10 +0000

https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/598/how-do-i-preve... has some answers (and solutions).