Hacker News Reader

xenophonfon On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted

It's hardly a rant. Not once did either author question the birthright of the Neovim developers in Russian.

I think more software engineers should worry about this stuff. If I had to teach a bunch of juniors in a computer science or software engineering degree program, I'd make them read this as a case study alongside good ol' Therac-25. The software we create is _useful_. How it affects other people _matters_. We ought to care about that no matter what the legal disclaimers say.

xenophonfon I don't want to read what you didn't write

E. M. Forster wrote that story in 1909.

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...

xenophonfon Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid)

That was so much fun!

xenophonfon Spaghettifying DRAM

You just need to level-up to ANSI art!

http://www.syaross.org/thedraw/

xenophonfon Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

That link is paywalled.

This might be a better one.

https://medium.com/predict/why-the-dark-forest-theory-is-pro...

This video is pretty good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0SvgT9Lc2M

This post attempts a formal refutation.

https://www.pgmusings.ca/journal/dfh

xenophonfon Let AI Burn

I don't think this guy's blog tries to sell me on a subscription enough. Maybe he could add even more pop-ups or inline pleas for funding. I'm sure he's got a newsletter he's desperate to monetize.

xenophonfon Automating AI Away

> Rewrite this Python code to use match/case instead of if/elif/else chains

Is this a real example of something people use AI to do? If so, I don't understand why that's difficult, because prompting the AI to do stuff with ASTs etc. seems a bit over the top.

xenophonfon Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork

> I forget that what I miss was not the system, but the community on the system.

Same. I had VMS running on an AS200 next to a beautiful X terminal, just like the computer lab at school. But my dad wasn't sitting next to me, hunting and pecking away at his old C.Itoh terminal. None of the usual suspects were across the table, locked into their favorite MUDD. And so on. I miss them all so much.

xenophonfon I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)

Comedy is dead. I can't believe so many folks didn't clock this post.

(Also, the word is "cue", as in "signal". English sucks.)

xenophonfon AI coding is addictive. Engineers are paying the price

https://archive.is/2pKhN

xenophonfon Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

Don't concurrency. forget about

xenophonfon CSSQuake

Every time I click in the window, the menu disappears. I tried both Firefox and Chrome.

xenophonfon Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

> Tree-sitter that just works

Hallelujah and thank you, sweet little baby Jesus. Now I can get rid of this bullshit from my dotfiles:

    rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
    mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter
    set _plat = windows
    if ( `uname` == Linux ) set _plat = linux
    if ( `uname` == Darwin ) set _plat = apple
    set _arch = x86
    if ( `arch` == arm64) set _arch = aarch64
    gh release -R emacs-tree-sitter/tree-sitter-langs download -p "*${_arch}*${_plat}*"
    tar -C ~/.emacs.d/tree-sitter --transform 's/^\(.*\.\(so\|dylib\|dll\)\)/libtree-sitter-\1/' -xzf tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz
    rm tree-sitter-grammars*.tar.gz

That's csh, BTW, just like the Founding Fathers intended.

xenophonfon Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

This is a gift to reactionary gerrymandering and voting restriction efforts, along with things like yesterday's FBI raid of an Ohio voting rights organization.

https://www.statenews.org/government-politics/2026-06-12/ohi...

Representative Joyce Beatty is from Ohio and was instrumental in stopping Trump from illegally renaming the Kennedy Center.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/kennedy-center-b...

xenophonfon Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0

> quite annoying

It's also quite stable, which you'd think more people would prize given the recent and on-going supply chain attacks.

xenophonfon PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you

This commit looks... odd.

https://github.com/pgdogdev/pgdog/commit/36434f93f03dec1d7d4...

I want to have as much fun as the next developer, but that makes me worry, what with supply chain attacks in the news and all.

xenophonfon Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

It took me way too long to realize you were referring to r/localllama.

xenophonfon GTA 6 Developers Unionize

> most people who work in tech do not make good instructors

Guilty as charged, despite my best attempts to the contrary. I wish I had time to go back to school for some kind of teaching degree. Is there something else I can do or read or watch or something to make me a better teacher? Knowledge transfer is probably the most important aspect of my job.

xenophonfon Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

Simon writes:

> To [switch users], /bin/login would need to be setuid, and it certainly isn’t on Linux... _Perhaps_ Solaris (or SolarOS) is different?

The login command is indeed setuid root on SunOS 4, to which the movie pays homage, as its documented behavior is "to [permanently] change from one userID to another". The su command explicitly means "temporarily switch to a new user ID".

Here are copies of the SunOS 4 manual pages, if you're curious:

http://www.typewritten.org/Manual/Sun/SunOS/4.0.2/man1/login...

http://www.typewritten.org/Manual/Sun/SunOS/4.0.2/man1/su.ht...

And here's a link to the relevant bits of the SunOS 4.1.3 source code:

https://github.com/Arquivotheca/SunOS-4.1.3/blob/2e8a93c3946...

xenophonfon Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app

Can someone explain how the ChatGPT Codex Connector works in concert with GitHub access controls? I am not sure how to add it to my GitHub repositories, accounts, or organizations without potentially giving any OpenAI customer access.

xenophonfon Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged

I'm amused at how thoroughly Google adopted Microsoft's playbook. Chrome supplanted Internet Explorer by embracing the open web. But then Google immediately started on extensions, and now they're trying to extinguish the open web with nonsense like Cloud Fraud Defense. All very smoothly done. I mean, people are actually _asking_ for this junk. I'm impressed.

xenophonfon PySimpleGUI 6

I stopped using this when the dev did their rugpull and won't go back.

xenophonfon Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?

Yes.

It's nice to get an easy question every once in a while.

xenophonfon GitHub Actions is the weakest link

"Require actions to be pinned to a full-length commit SHA" applies to composite actions, too. I had to replace pre-commit/action as a result.

xenophonfon FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account

That "inadvertently" desperately needs scare quotes.

xenophonfon Everything we like is a psyop?

I only found out about them via word of mouth, but who knows. At least they're good stuff!

xenophonfon Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

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

Can you share a working example?

xenophonfon April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

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.

xenophonfon Post-mortem of the EU Europa breach: A masterclass in IAM misconfiguration

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.)