Hacker News Reader

ixtenuon 'Enough Is Enuf' Review: A Dream of Simpler Spelling

English spelling irregularity serves a functional role similar to Japanese kanji. It distinguishes homophones (e.g., night and knight) and evinces the shared meaning of words which have the same root with different pronunciations (e.g., sign and signature). Regularizing the spelling would make the language harder to read for those fluent in it, even for a hypothetical population who learned the reformed spelling from early childhood.

ixtenuon Neverflow: C macros that guard against buffer overflows

> nothing in the language itself dictates this convention.

String literals are nul-terminated, e.g.: "foo"[3] == '\0'

ixtenuon Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden

TFA:

> Checkmating loses the game, as it is always the top engine move. Rather than aiming for checkmate, players seek to force their opponent to make a top engine move. If a player only has one move available, that move will always be the top engine move, which loses the game.

ixtenuon Picolibc: C library designed for embedded 32- and 64- bit systems

What's the rationale for this project? In other words, what makes it different than other embedded libc projects like Newlib or uClibc-ng or musl? Not seeing any documentation which answers this question.

ixtenuon GNU Make 4.4 released

The GnuWin32 port of Make [1] is version 3.81. I've used it when I needed GNU Make on Windows. I know there are other ways to get newer versions of Make on Windows, but the GnuWin32 port is simple, standalone, and it still works despite its age...

[1]: https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/make.htm

ixtenuon Why Is Markdown Popular?

> Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one?

"square the circle"

The Markdown link format is [text](url) and [] is square-ish and () is circle-ish.

Your mileage may vary (as with any mnemonic), but this one works for me.

ixtenuon Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu

No, the recent change [0] was to add non-free firmware to the official installer (instead of relegating it to a separate unofficial installer). GP, however, was talking about the apt repository: the non-free apt repository is disabled by default. This hasn't changed and is unlikely to ever change. The non-free apt repository be enabled via a trivial /etc/apt/sources.list edit.

[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Non-Free-Firmware-Resul...

ixtenuon OpenBSD 7.2

I found it helpful. Just be aware that portions of it are outdated, as summarized by this comment:

https://old.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/q8lsiq/how_relevan...

ixtenuon Ask HN: How to choose a Linux distro?

It's a good idea to pick a relatively popular distro, since it will be easier to find answers to your questions and since having more users/developers tends to result in fewer bugs. Look at lists of popular distros, filter by your requirements and preferences, and try them out.

You said you wanted more up-to-date software. If you want to be on the bleeding edge, you might want to consider a rolling release distro, such as Arch or its derivatives. Arch is great if you want to hand-craft your installation starting from a bare-bones tty. If that's too much trouble, something like Manjaro or EndeavorOS will give you up-to-date packages but with an easier installer and more preinstalled packages.

If you don't want a rolling release, there are other distros which release more frequently than Debian stable. Ubuntu releases every six months (although anecdotally most users seem to stick with the LTS releases). Fedora releases every six months or so. openSUSE Leap releases every twelve months or so.

ixtenuon Are We Wayland Yet?

> most people are already using wayland.

Per [0], as of June 2022, Wayland is at 24.6% versus X11 at 67.7%. It's not a random sample, but it suggests that Wayland is not yet what most people are using. Wayland's usage suddenly doubled in April 2022, presumably due to Ubuntu 22.04.

[0] https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_display_server