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wietze

135 karma · joined November 29, 2016

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wietze··on Why bother with argv[0]?
From a living-of-the-land perspective, having to symlink/hardlink/alias a command is much noisier - and thus easier to detect. So although you are right in saying it wouldn't completely solve the problem, making it a system responsibility would still significantly reduce the scope for abuse.
wietze··on Why bother with argv[0]?
For busybox/toybox the argv[0] thing is great, and seems to be the prime example of why argv[0] shouldn't go - yet it is a bit of an anomaly in how argv[0] is used.

If there really is a need for having one executable that comprises multiple commands, is `busybox whoami` instead of `whoami` so much more effort? To me, that would make more sense in terms of what is going on; aliases could be used if one-word commands are preferred. In most non busybox contexts, argv[0] is just an unnecessary addition that, as the linked article shows, can introduce weirdness.

It's clear from the comments there are still many who think argv[0] is a good thing, which is great - I'm glad the post sparked this debate.

wietze··on Ask HN: Why does ChatGPT love the word "eager" so much?
Although "eager" isn't called out, a recent study of academic publications shows that the use of LLMs can be measured through word frequency analysis [1], finding certain words are disproportionally represented:

> We study vocabulary changes in 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010–2024, and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words.

1: https://arxiv.org/html/2406.07016v1

wietze··on PyPy.js: Python in the web browser
The most important import doesn't work, unfortunately:

  import antigravity
wietze··on I'm Joining Report URI
For how Report URI works in your browser, see the original RFC [1] from 2015. The OWASP recommendation for HTTP Security Headers [2] gives some useful extra information on the how the HTTP Security headers hang together.

1: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7469#section-2.1.4

2: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Secure_Headers_Project...

wietze··on Map of coins
It's worth noting that the timeline on the left hand side suggests that the list was last updated September 2015.

This would explain why some more recent cryptocurrencies such as Zcash (ZEC) are missing.

wietze··on Bootstrap 4's mobile-first flexbox grid system, now used by default
Bootstrap V4 introduced spacing utility classes (like a class m-t-1 to get margin-top: 1rem!important), which inspired others to create this great universal.css project: https://github.com/marmelab/universal.css
wietze··on Pwning coworkers thanks to LaTeX
Let me be the guy that brings this article in: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

"LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text, made more typesetting, grammatical, and formatting errors"