Hacker News Reader

philkrylovon NetBSD GSoC 2026 Improving RAIDframe

With ZFS support in NetBSD, I would expect one would use ZFS for bigger storage situations, keeping RAIDframe for special cases (e.g. boot/root)

philkrylovon Expanding Swift's IDE Support

bash, zsh, and ksh93 support `exec -a` especially for this case.

philkrylovon SQLite in Production: Lessons from Running a Store on a Single File

Hi, thanks for your project! Do you accept pull requests? https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2616 https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2617

philkrylovon Velxio 2.0 – Emulate Arduino, ESP32, and Raspberry Pi 3 in the Browser

Hi, adding WS2812B LED strips of arbitrary length would be awesome! Scrolling the canvas is sometimes problematic. Otherwise very interesting.

philkrylovon JSON has become today's machine-readable output format on Unix

Hi, I am still blocked with "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0"

philkrylovon Show HN: Chez Scheme txtar port from Go

hrx looks much better, as txtar can't include, e.g., other txtar files

philkrylovon Mathesar – an intutive spreadsheet-like interface to Postgres data

The main problem with them is they are not working yet and there are not enough people working on improving that.

philkrylovon German router maker is latest company to inadvertently clarify the LGPL license

The link shows a list of firmwares. The actual sources are at https://github.com/Freetz-NG/freetz-ng - but it's not the original FritzBox firmware sources:

> Freetz is a toolbox for developers and experienced users to build a modified firmware based on the original firmware for the DSL/LAN/WLAN/VoIP-Routers AVM Fritz!Box and T-Com Speedport (identical hardware) and to transfer this firmware to the device. There are many extension packages available, along with options to remove unwanted functionality from the original firmware.

philkrylovon Getting back into C programming for CP/M

> for (int i = 0; i < strlen (str); i++) {...}

> A modern compiler will optimize this redundancy away

No, it won't: https://godbolt.org/z/xbzz4cEq3

philkrylovon A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability

> yes, ZFS can be configured to use a WAL too for durability

ZFS always uses ZIL for sync writes. You can optionally set `sync=disabled` for a dataset to switch it off. I would not describe it as "can be configured to use WAL".

philkrylovon SSH as a Sudo Replacement

Only with GNU su. A portable though limited replacement would be something like

    alias sudo="su root -c"

philkrylovon My deployment platform is a shell script

The heredoc in the script is never terminated. Probably it's not the production version but one for publishing ;-)

philkrylovon Programming with DOS Debugger (2003)

Actually, using DEBUG for creating anything besides one or two simple DOS/BIOS calls was a PITA due to the lack of symbolic labels. After that, the MASM/TASM boilerplate started to feel bearable.

philkrylovon The ü/ü Conundrum

The article suggests using NFC normalization as a simple solution, but fails to mention that HFS+ always does NFD normalization to file names, and APFS kinda does not but some layer above it actually does (https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/08/explainer-unicode-normal...), and ZFS has this behavior controlled by a dataset-level option. I don't see how applying its suggestion literally (just normalize to NFC before saving) can work.

philkrylovon Why Postgres RDS didn't work for us

Looking at your search results, there's just one recent ZFS corruption case with SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE (in several HN reflections), a 2-year old Ubuntu-only buggy patch story, and some 2008 [Open]Solaris corruption.

philkrylovon Why Postgres RDS didn't work for us

PostgreSQL does not use SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE so they're ok

philkrylovon Ugrep – a more powerful, fast, user-friendly, compatible grep

Although being faster in some cases, ripgrep lacks archive search support (no, transparent decompression ignoring the archive structure is not enough) which works great in ugrep.

philkrylovon Sopwith – a classic bi-plane shoot 'em up from 1984 in the browser

just 4 CGA colors, to be exact

philkrylovon PoW gets his life back after 55 years (2000)

Right. At least for some time...

philkrylovon I only lost 10 minutes of data, thanks to ZFS

> the cost, besides having to actually create the file systems, is that moving data between them isn't instant.

No more the case after block cloning support goes production: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/13392

philkrylovon Dead Brands of Computing Past: Soltek

Soltek SL-75KAV was the first motherboard I've bought on my first salary! Was working great for 5 years or so before getting heavily outdated.

philkrylovon GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

It is not, at least on FreeBSD and NetBSD.

philkrylovon Nim 2.0

At least error reporting has been improved recently: https://nim-lang.org/blog/2023/03/31/version-20-rc2.html

philkrylovon Lightweight SQLite Editor for Windows

Some typedefs were promoted to 64-bit but it's the same Win32 API, even the name has not changed

philkrylovon ZFS 2.1.6

openzfsonosx is a ZoL/OpenZFS2 fork. NetBSD ZFS is a fork of FreeBSD 10 ZFS.

philkrylovon FreeBSD – A Lesson in Poor Defaults

NetBSD has a root-on-ZFS recipe only for amd64.

philkrylovon Why I left Pine64

Tow-Boot SPI installer reports something like this for me:

Expected board: 'pine64-pinebookPro'

Found board: ''

philkrylovon RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

thanks!

philkrylovon The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Makefiles

Check (GNU Make) .RECIPEPREFIX, (GNU Make) .ONESHELL, (POSIX Make) SHELL=

philkrylovon Ternary Computer Emulator

> Many claimed to build a ternary computer, however nobody (to the best of my knowledge) completed the project.

I know of at least one such project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun