JdeBP

The arrow keys can be used as motions for operators in VIM. Try them. This is also true for nvi.

Yes, hjkl navigation is certainly one of the things that should learn about a vi clone. But are novices well served, in the 2020s, by that being the primary thing that they learn before anything else?

This is not a criticism of this WWW site specifically. The VIM doco has the same priorities, teaching hjkl navigation before arrow keys. (So do nvi2 and NeoVIM.) The problem is that the received wisdom, that arrow keys are some newfangled idea that might not have reached your terminal manufacturer yet, is massively out of date.

Even if one does not teach the arrow keys first, the BS SPC SO (Control+N) DLE (Control+P) set is surely worth teaching early on. One cannot make any reasonable argument that terminals might not have spacebars. (-:

Given what is discussed in the commentary to the post, I wonder whether the author would be amenable to some Doxygen.

Also: You boot from the 'system' volume, and the operating system is stored on the 'boot' volume. (-:

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/boot-and-system-volumes.html

'Windows subsystem for' actually has a similar sort of logic behind it.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417059

Although Microsoft then spoiled that explanation a couple of years later by switching to a virtual machine system instead of the NT kernel emulating the not-present Linux kernel.

I wonder how many people immediately thought about whether similar things had been snuck into xfishtank and xpenguins.

The naïveté of that position is that the users are not informed ahead of time that there's a random chance of a political protest popping up on their screen, so do not get to make an informed choice before it is perhaps too late. It's not mentioned in the doco. It's obfuscated in the source code as an 'extra tree' in an array of xpmtrees. The commit that added this had the commit message 'willem'.

It is interesting to read M. Allbery's comment side by side with the discussion here on Hacker News about a CLAUDE.EXE program with hidden behaviour that subtly changes the way that it outputs an information banner based upon timezones, hostnames, and domain names.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

Further LWN commentary (as observed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518) is that the result would not be solely drama but potentially some fairly nasty real world consequences for some people.

I am sure that DARPA, BBN, USC Information Sciences Institute, and many others will be overjoyed to learn that they've been erased from history by the new narrative that Venture Capitalists Built Everything. (-:

I am wondering whether there will be any effect to petition e-7124. It seems unlikely, to me.

* https://noscommunes.ca/petitions/fr/Petition/Details?Petitio...

We probably should not read too much into the fact that the Daily Mail's guide to what's currently on television no longer lists a documentary from 2023. Except, perhaps, that the Daily Mail's search engine gaming is clearly quite effective.

That's a television guide for what's currently being broadcast, published by the Daily Mail, not the actual documentary from 2023.

It's wild to see people having this argument in the subjunctive in 2026. I've had a convert-systemd-units tool since 2014, and provided Debian packages for the toolset that it is part of for around that long.

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/convert-syste...

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/converting-systemd-uni...

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/debian-binary-packages.html

The annoying thing, looking at that, is that libnsfb (the library that netsurf-fb uses to construct its UI) once had a driver, deleted back in 2018, that could work directly with a Linux framebuffer device. This could have been easily adapted into a similar driver for wscons/wsdisplay/wskbd on OpenBSD and NetBSD.

* https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/commit/b2bb565402...

Instead, libnsfb is now layered on top of SDL in the non-X11 non-Wayland case, with all of the dependencies and extra stuff that that entails, which of course you'll have to build. SDL3 explicitly doesn't handle dumb framebuffers and full wscons, explicitly requiring foreign KMS systems from Linux on the BSDs.

* https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-kmsbsd

libnsfb then proceeds to ignore almost all of SDL anyway and draw its own UI directly, with SDL being little more than a glorified framebuffer-as-bitmap system with a couple of basic blitting operations.

* https://github.com/netsurf-browser/libnsfb/blob/master/src/s...

The OpenRC people in Debian only really noticed the discussion when it reached the technical committee. There was an effort to put OpenRC into contention, and all of the technical committee people who did evaluations included it in their evaluations. The problem was that OpenRC as it existed on Debian at the time was lacking. People argued that it could with a little work do the things that the technical committee people pointed out, but the counterargument was that the decision really had to be made at that point, given the argument that had built up. I do recommend reading the discussions by Russ Alberry and others about OpenRC on the technical committee mailing list back then.

Yes, everyone who has, in the succeeding 12 years, framed this as a choice between van Smoorenburg init+rc and systemd either didn't pay attention or is being woefully slapdash. Debian's choice was between Upstart, as established on Ubuntu at the time, and systemd, with OpenRC as a late entry.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/debian-systemd-packaging-hoo-hah.html

Interesting tidbit:

People also made the argument that van Smoorenburg init+rc could be fixed. And in fact they did address some of it, The same year (2014), the sprawling shell scripts so characteristic of van Smoorenburg init+rc were being replaced by a new system, modelled somewhat after Mewburn rc on NetBSD and FreeBSD, where the scripts were much shorter, largely declarative, and reliant upon a new init-d-script interpreter that did all of the repetitive common stuff.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/480897/5132

* https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/sysvinit-utils/init-d-scr...

One of Masayoshi Son's recent slideshows has been doing the rounds on the FediVerse this week. If you've seen people making odd comments about 'Goose was not valued.' or 'Goose value 71.' or 'eggs do not lay eggs' over the past few days then Son's 2026 presentation to shareholders is what they are going on about.

* https://discuss.systems/@dev/116807460725864716

This is the context that a lot of us didn't have. Son has been doing this since 2010, the goose laying golden eggs going back to at least 2014, and the 2020 earnings report having a run of 23 slides of geese and eggs. Other weird things over the years have included dog telepathy and a representation of COVID-19 as flying unicorns jumping out of a ditch. As the Bloomberg people pointed out, this significantly came to the attention of the world outwith Japan, which largely boggled at some of the slideshows sans context, in 2019 and 2020. Part of the world is discovering this afresh in 2026.

* https://vice.com/en/article/these-delusional-powerpoint-slid...

* https://trillium.substack.com/p/golden-geese-stirring-the-po...

* https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/ir/presentations/202...

* https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/presenta... (https://group.softbank/en/news/webcast/20100625_01_en)

Some of the criticism over the years has focussed not on the more oddball aspects of these slideshows, but on the stereotypical way in which the graphs with projections just suddenly make lines shoot upwards.

Stéphane Chazelas would agree,

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/496642/5132

because the problem here is educating people with slipshod ideas about 'sh' being 'the POSIX shell' or (worse) 'the Bourne shell'. Both M. Chazelas and M. Gaigalas are making the point that 'sh' is a language that one aims to write in, not one of the many programs that sort of, sometimes, if invoked in the right way, implement that language; and a subordinate point that people are generally very poor about doing that when yet they insist that they are writing 'POSIX shell script'.

Fun facts: Standardization led by existing practice is not a simple process.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/493743/5132

POSIX/SUS standardization is not a static thing. The long discussed thorny issue of echo has now subtly changed from all of those explanations given about it over the years, because in 2024 the standard was changed.

* https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/e...

M. Chazelas's own quite famous 2013 StackExchange answer on the subject has not yet been updated with the change that now incorporates -e and -E into the rule. Amusingly, it was M. Chazelas that raised defect 1222 that caused this change.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/65819/5132

* https://www.austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=1222

The wsconscfg problem with multiple screens, whatever it exactly is, is decidedly odd. According to this, the display is being driven as smfb0 in what is largely a dumb framebuffer mode, no acceleration, no GPU, no fancy high jinks whatsoever. wscons/wsdisplay should have no difficulty with multiple screens on that sort of thing.

The author doesn't actually cover the caveat (3 newly valid backslash escapes in BREs) at all, so that's not the case.

It isn't really primarily about organization oversight, though. The weird goings on are in practice usually at the behest of the people paying the salaries of all of the people involved (which includes law enforcement, which goes through corporate channels). There's no real independent oversight for that common case. Everyone is on the payroll. (-:

As a concrete thought experiment, consider if (say) a WWW/DNS hosting company providing such free proxy DNS service decided to covertly record the domain name lookups from the general public that fail in order to compile a list of domain names for the company to prospectively squat on. Having multiple employees handling the public service doesn't stop this if it is the company's actual business decision to sneakily do this.

It really is a statement of bus factor, not about oversight. To make a statement about oversight one has to take into account something else not covered by this list: which of the list entries has attempted to show some level of independent auditing or oversight of its data protection.

* https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-the-results-of-the-1-...

CloudFlare has had some independent auditing done, by an accountancy firm. DNS4EU holds itself subject to GDPR rules on Personal Data with respect to query data, and so is auditable by the Czech ÚOOÚ. AdGuard likewise, except that it holds Personal Data in Frankfurt. CZ.NIC likewise, except that it hasn't actually updated its legal doco since 2018 and it's only by implication that the Czech ÚOOÚ can audit the Personal Data handling under the GDPR. DNS.SB simply disclaims the existence of any Personal Data whatsoever, which as with AdGuard is overseen by the German BfDI and relevant Land authorities (HBDI for Frankfurt).

* https://legal-documents-dns4eu.s3.fr-par.scw.cloud/DNS4EU-Pu...

* https://uoou.gov.cz

* https://adguard-dns.io/en/privacy.html

* https://nic.cz/files/documents/20180525_Zasady_zpracovani_os...

* https://dns.sb/privacy/

* https://bfdi.bund.de/EN/Home/home_node.html

* https://datenschutz.hessen.de

Even Thomas Steen Rasmussen, who also claims zero Personal Data, would be subject to oversight by the Datatilsynet.

* https://datatilsynet.dk

The author is circling around, but not quite reaching, a statement that POSIX Basic Regular Expressions work everywhere, with the caveat that that not everyone has caught up with version 8 of the Single Unix Specification, which has slightly changed BREs.

Every time that this comes up, be it a general list like this or someone announcing a new service, my reaction, and that that I see of surprisingly many other people on Hacker News, is fairly unmoved. I've run my own proxy DNS service for about a quarter of a century at this point, using three different sets of softwares on six different operating systems, and every single point on the filter tab is something that I can (and do) just do for myself.

The list is not so much interesting for the options that it presents, as far as I am concerned, but for the things that it reveals. Every single entry that is explicitly marked 'China' also has 'operates under Chinese regulations'; which is, in 2026, something that is of concern for more than just the Chinese entries on the list, to people on my continent for starters.

'Run by one individual in Denmark.' is an interesting statement of bus factor, but I don't think that all of the other entries should be assumed to be better just because they are mute on the point. There's far less information about who is behind DNS.Watch than there is about Thomas Steen Rasmussen. And it appears that DNS.Watch went off the air at least once in recent years, so it is a legitimate concern.

Then there are all sorts of things not on this list that might matter to people, such as Quad101 looking like it has geographic restrictions on whom it is available to and Gcore being an AI company.

If your reaction is 'What the Hell is this?', read this for background:

* https://reuters.com/business/media-telecom/talk-bubble-is-an...

Then notice that the metal construction robot needs toe protectors on its boots.

Then notice that the slides have small print.

This is the same press release from the union as at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48663861, and the same discussion points apply as there, including the fact that the press release is conflating 'Wikipedia Workers' and 'British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation'. The two are not the same.

This conflation appears to be the fault of the union. Certainly the people who write Wikipedia well know the difference between themselves and the Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Google isn't. A recent court decision in Germany laid the responsibility for the output of Google's 'AI' software, running on Google's machines, and conflating companies in pretty much this manner, squarely on Google's own shoulders.

* https://posteo.de/en/news/munich-court-google-liable-for-ai-...

Only Ritter vi is really a fork. All of the rest are clones, ground-up reimplementations not forked from the Joy+Horton code.

Of them, and discounting the extreme fringes like vi-likes that run on the BBC Micro, only STEVIE lacks :x, and its derivatives all added it in. All of the other clones from MKS onwards, even neatvi and nextvi, have :x .

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/vi-family.html

I could have told the author that about the message of the day, thirty years ago. (-:

For the people asking what kind of DNS service this is, content or proxy: You have to look 'Bunny DNS' up in the products menu and from there follow the hyperlink to the doco.

* https://docs.bunny.net/dns

So it's content DNS service; with server-side resource record shuffling; and with JavaScript, and badly written examples that don't check the question type, just to make it weird.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is lurking in some part of (say) the TSS that you thought that you'd never have to implement.

So cycle insertion. I presume that the DLY was synthetic, and was not explicitly added to the microcode ROM.

If, as there, one swipe gesture per letter is allowable, rather than a gesture encompassing a whole word, then things like Thumb-Key become options.

* https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

It has a similar sort of 'It doesn't have to have 26 keys on something the size and shape of a mobile 'phone.' thinking as 8vim has, whilst raising a good 'You know 'phones worked fine with a 3 by 4 grid for 60 years, ne?' point, but adding a modern twist of 'We can swipe, in the 21st century.' to the old notion of multiple letters on a button.

There are still these people thinking outside of the typewriter-keyboard-on-a-'phone box. (-: