Hacker News Reader

JdeBPon Strange Parodies of Atari 2600 Video Game Box Cover Art (2008)

It's Breakout and Super Breakout according to a list that gives the real titles in the comments section.

JdeBPon Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

Not wholly apocryphal. The U.K.'s air traffic control ran, and possibly still is running, on an IBM 4381 substituting for an IBM 9020.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763972

They've reportedly already tried, and failed, to replace it with a more modern system.

JdeBPon Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

That AmigaDOS emulation will almost certainly never run another program. (-:

Far more concerning from a RISKS point of view is the spare parts being physically in the same place as the live machine.

JdeBPon AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?

You probably recall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19848953 .

JdeBPon NATS publishes preliminary report on technical incident of 8 September

It's a decent chunk in most people's.

But we're talking about a system that is also older than most people.

It was first put into operation in 1967 in the U.S.A., and brought over to the U.K. in 1974. It's formally called 'NAS En Route Stage A', and is written in a 1950s language named JOVIAL. It originally ran on an IBM 9020. It runs on IBM 9020 compatible systems today.

For some reason, a couple of years ago someone added a lengthy unverifiable description of it to Wikipedia's IBM 9020 article, even though that very description said that NAS hadn't run on a 9020 for 34 years at the time of writing, but had been running on a 4381.

JdeBPon A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server

A lot of people have already made almost all of the same observations that I was going to make.

Except for: There is no bug that originates in a GNU version of an old networking program and magically makes its way into the NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, and OpenBSD (Yes; I checked.) versions of that program.

History simply didn't happen that way.

This bug goes as far back at least as far as the Jolitz-released 386BSD source for libexec/telnetd , where it can be found and which is credited in the GNU versions of the file. GNU just took the 386BSD code. But BSD had a telnetd before 386BSD. In BSD, telnetd itself goes back to 1983. Although its code to do line mode did not pre-date RFC 1116, which was published in August 1989.

The code to do line mode was written the month after that RFC, by Paul Borman, and the bug is in the very first version of that code:

* https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/dc8d504...

This bug is not 32 years old.

JdeBPon Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2?

It's sad that this is probably going to become canon, now, Raymon Chen being as influential as xe is, when what actually happened was that in 1998 H. Peter Anvin saw UD2 in Intel's doco, and that there was a second opcode that was just described by Intel as merely undefined, so gave it the mnemonic UD1 in the 0.98p3-hpa version of NASM because 'calling it UD1 seemed to make sense'.

* https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.asm.x86/c/ErG5TJEDjiw/...

* https://github.com/netwide-assembler/nasm/blob/nasm-0.98.x/C...

JdeBPon Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

The 'wierd syntax' has finally been getopt-ified. On the C GNU coreutils 'dd', and in a couple of the BSDs 'dd's.

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/dd-with-getopt.html

It only took 52 years. My prediction stands, by the way. (-:

JdeBPon Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

That's is famously not what 'dd' was designed to do. Its description in the original Unix 6th Edition manual was 'convert and copy a file'. It's infamous for people mis-remembering it as a disc copier when it was actually a file transcoding utility that understood EBCDIC and could re-block things.

JdeBPon Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

The Launchpad bug is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bu... .

The apparently related bug in the origin project is https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/2949, filed back in 2022 and which sat unmoved for several years until, probably not coincidentally, almost the same time yesterday that this appeared on Hacker News.

JdeBPon South Park creators rename show 'South America'

One of the few good things to have come out of this repeated silliness, is that for 2 years I've witnessed people reading more about what is being altered by these executive orders and sourced by Google Maps et al. and learning why the U.S.A. GNIS is such a woefully bad data source.

And it's not because of the antics of Donald J. Trump. It's been a shit-show for 50 years: a tale of long-term multiple-phase projects losing funding and changing direction mid-phase, of technical debt never dealt with, of the consequences of data entry methodologies, and of cultural erasure because of magtapes encoded in EBCDIC.

(Yes, EBCDIC. There wasn't a systematic deliberate plan to eliminate diacritics from the U.S.A. in the 1970s, as one might guess from observation. There was EBCDIC. In fact, there was initially a plan to put the accents back on, with extra data fields to record the correct names from state-level sources, after moving away from EBCDIC. During the Reagan Era. You can see today how that turned out.)

One bizarre thing, almost as bizarre as the re-spelling of an entire country by EBCDIC, is that the name change from South Park to South America is tame in comparison to the sort of shenanighans that went on in the GNIS. Ghost towns that never existed got named after rural post offices in wide open unpopulated country, railway stations, steam train water stops, local stations serving farms, company executives, loads of springs in California, and in extreme cases things like a fish pond, survey marker trees, and a cage for a monkey. Or a lone building at a crossroads got the name of something else because a map font was difficult to distinguish, or a name printed by something else just happened to run over it.

And then some people handy with computer automation enshrined this rubbish, by mass-importing it into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is still cleaning this up by hand almost two decades later. Oh the wonders that we have collectively done with computers! (-:

The creators of South Park have a long way to go before they are anywhere near as mad as actual history is.

* https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/USGS_GNIS

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliability_of_GNIS_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_Names_Information_S...

JdeBPon The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

I read the article thinking that it was not going to mention Dymaxion. Articles like this rarely do. The BBC has an article on the U.N. resolution (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5r60v4mro), and it does not.

And then right at the bottom it went and mentioned Dymaxion.

Dymaxion is one of the few projections that actually shows Antarctica with something resembling its actual shape. Interestingly, to counter the people who say that the best thing to learn from is an actual globe, a couple of children's globes of the world that I had as a child had large metal caps around the axle that obscured most of Antarctica.

Any decent atlas uses a variety of projections, of course. The tatty, second-hand, older-than-I-am atlas that I had at school was already on to Interrupted Mollweide's Homolographic by page 3. (-:

JdeBPon bzip3

An interesting unintentional benchmark is to go to https://github.com/iczelia/bzip3/releases and see to what degree bzip3 compresses its own release archives; and go to https://github.com/iczelia/bzip3/blob/master/.github/workflo... to see what options have been chosen for the other compressors here.

JdeBPon Unplug America [Tod Maffin]

There are several interesting things about this.

1. WordPerfect‽

I last personally encountered WordPerfect in the early 1990s, when a marketing bod assured me that WordPerfect users never wanted to see the desktops of their graphical operating systems, so there was no reason to integrate with them. For me, it was not unexpected that I never heard of it again, except in nostalgic discussions of the 1980s. Until today.

It turns out that the boycotting U.S.A. movement missed the spot when it was both Canadian-owned and Canadian-made by some years. I myself am just amazed that it still exists, and equally amazed to find under the #WordPerfect hash-tag on the FediVerse someone posting a picture of a shop selling WordPerfect off the shelf, in boxes, in 2026. (https://pixelfed.social/p/rl_dane/972538257736811779)

1. Social media

It's interesting that https://Mstdn.CA , owned by Canadians, moderated by Canadians, hosted in Canada, does not get a mention. GuardTheLeaf promotes Hey.Cafe as well, but it is not a federated site.

1. Maps

Today's news about Apple Maps (9 Hacker News submissions already) has already hit this list, it appears; with several things listed as alternatives to Apple Maps. So it's up to date at the time of launch. The question is whether the list as a whole will be kept up to date, or be added to, as events unfold. And as noted, there are prominent omissions.

JdeBPon C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior

This is a semantic quagmire, and the threads on what undefined behaviour is are interminable. But just note this time around that correctness is not the same as conformity.

JdeBPon NetBSD 11.0

The old fallacies of WWW site changes equals software changes, and unchanged code equals non-existence, and Wikipedia being gospel for computing topics, rear their ugly heads again.

I follow the FediVerse robot that announces MirBSD CVS updates, which is quite active. The last major change, apart from some doco, was a fix to rdate at the end of May 2026, just 2 months ago. And even if MirOS BSD were unchanged for longer than that, it would very much still be around.

JdeBPon NetBSD 11.0

For comparison: NetBSD, as headlined, supports Berkeley LFS and WAPBL journalling on FFS.

JdeBPon NetBSD 11.0

MirOS BSD is still around, too.

JdeBPon NetBSD 11.0

As someone who has used old BSDs, I can say from direct experience that it does not.

For starters, on the old BSDs there was no Almquist shell, unless you went to Usenet, grabbed the shar, and built it. The TENEX C shell was the hot new thing, as were BIND and Sendmail. And we got genuine Joy+Horton vi.

Whereas modern NetBSD does not have Sendmail any more, has nvi2, and supports access control lists. And of course under the covers has lots of things that the old BSDs didn't have, like UFS for TiB disc volumes and kqueue.

I've heard tell that they're even thinking of finally doing away with BIND in base.

JdeBPon LLM Honeypot

Did you read the JSON file?

JdeBPon Show HN: Sigwire – a live TUI switchboard for every signal on your Linux box

If you're going to support the ADM-3A terminal up/down navigation characters k and j, also support the vi navigation characters Control+N and Control+P. And Control+S and Control+Q for pause/resume as well.

JdeBPon DNSGlobe – Rust TUI to watch DNS propagate around the world

Forwarding proxy DNS servers leading to a (yes) single resolving proxy DNS server at the end.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/dns-server-roles.html

JdeBPon Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux (2019)

It's bad the other way, too. btop on a 50×232 terminal over an actual 57600 BPS serial line is unusable, even in 16-colour mode. It does not have even the most basic of full-screen TUI redraw optimizations, and outputs the entire screen again and again.

JdeBPon Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux (2019)

Well, unless one is using FreeBSD or OpenBSD, where the btop code is still using 32-bit integers to calculate 64-bit sizes, and falling prey to unsigned integer wraparound. htop's code calculates using size_t, which ends up as a 64-bit integer on 64-bit architectures.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48778757 (https://crocidb.com/post/freebsd-ate-my-ram/)

* https://github.com/aristocratos/btop/pull/1728

JdeBPon Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux (2019)

Screws have been around for about 3 millennia at this point. They have patently failed to obviate the use of nails. So by this analogy we can expect the 'Only GPUs do the work.' believers to be still promising this, any day now, about three thousand years hence. (-:

JdeBPon Commodore 64 Basic for PostgreSQL

It's already C64 BASIC inside an SQL server. Don't give them ideas of emulating a cassette tape, with Datasette for PostgreSQL, too! (-:

JdeBPon FreeBSD ate my RAM

Ports is on 1.4.7.

* https://freshports.org/sysutils/btop/

The fix is still pending being even made to the origin version.

* https://github.com/aristocratos/btop/pull/1728

JdeBPon Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives

It's the version where a committee put in em-dashes to replace Jefferson's semi-colons, if those pictures are accurate. This is not unexpected given the provenance; but a semi-colon version would have made for a more interesting discovery.

JdeBPon This is my attempt to get Vulkan going on NetBSD

Actually, it's orthodox; and it's fetch that isn't. FreeBSD is actually the odd one out, for having an extra tool for doing the same thing. The ftp tool in all of the BSDs, including FreeBSD, speaks HTTP, and has done since Luke Mewburn did lukemftp (later to be named tnftp) and Theo de Raadt did likewise, both based on the original 4.2BSD ftp, back in the middle 1990s.

* https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/contrib/tnftp/ChangeLog#n1...

* https://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/ftp/main.c?...

* https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/log/src/usr.bin/ftp/main.c,v?sort...

JdeBPon Learn Vim motions with an ice-cream van

That does not really present any argument that we should be teaching your way of working to VIM novices, instead of teaching them the obvious arrow keys first and the hjkl navigation later.