Hacker News: MertsA

New comment by MertsA in "ICE will release body cam video only when seen in the agency's 'best interests'"

MertsA — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:42:34 +0000

How does this square with FOIA obligations? I get ICE sidestepping transparency by avoiding creating the responsive footage in the first place, but once the body cam footage exists, what basis could they use to withhold it other than redacting footage for the typical reasons?

New comment by MertsA in "Show HN: Echo – Fable-level results at 1/3 the cost using open-weight models"

MertsA — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:49:16 +0000

That's going to be on the $20 plan. IIRC the $100 and $200 plans keep the 50% fable usage.

New comment by MertsA in "24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)"

MertsA — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:41:30 +0000

You need at least twice the frequency range for sample rate in order to represent the original signal. That's slightly misleading though, that's from the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theory and it's a mathematical fact but that is true for exact numerical samples, once you add in quantization that muddies the water a bit. Taken at the extreme, it's straightforward to see why a 1 bit quantization per sample at 44.1 kHz would not capture a perfect representation of some analog signal even if there's only a 1 kHz frequency component to the signal. If we instead decide to sample at 10 MHz but still one bit quantization, now that 1 kHz frequency component can be much more accurately represented even though we're still using the worst quantization possible. Don't think of quantization like a square wave or a step pattern, think of it as "the signal is closer to here than any other discrete value".

Now in terms of realistic audio encoding, 16 bit at 44.1 kHz is designed to be a faithful representation as far as human hearing is concerned. Can someone with a trained ear potentially tell the difference between that and 24 bit at 192 kHz? In a studio environment it's possible. Most audiophile claims are dubious and a blind A/B test catches them out on most of it but the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem does not directly apply to quantized samples, it's about exact samples and with quantization, sampling rate is intertwined somewhat with the quantization depth.

New comment by MertsA in "Boot Naked Linux"

MertsA — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:54:36 +0000

That's a halted firewall setup. Normally as part of shutdown you would tear down networking in SysVinit or systemd but you don't actually have to do that. When shutting down you can choose whether to power off or just to halt. It's basically like the old Windows "It is now safe to power off your PC".

New comment by MertsA in "Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors"

MertsA — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:20:50 +0000

Like when Runescape allowed you to purchase membership via a premium rate number. Lots of fraud going on back when that was a thing and a big part of why it's no longer a thing.

New comment by MertsA in "DDR4 Sdram – Initialization, Training and Calibration"

MertsA — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:32:22 +0000

There are some typos like "if" instead of "of" that seem to imply at the very least, some of it is verbatim written by a person. Given the subject matter, I'd be extremely surprised if this was 100% AI but one thing I've totally done for similar technical writing is ask AI for help refining a rough draft. There's some suggestions I'd ignore but the larger grammatical and sentence structure suggestions I'd usually adopt.

New comment by MertsA in "A bug is a bug, but a patch is a policy: The case for bootable containers"

MertsA — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:52:29 +0000

A bootable container, kernel included, is not a container. Building a whole new OS image for patches isn't a bad idea, but depending on the workload this might be a non-starter. At the very least, make updates to the OS image incremental ala OSTree. kexec can also be a nice speedup on server hardware but that carries its own risks from kexec itself but also from lack of exercising cold boot. It's not nice to find out about a few percent of hosts failing to boot all at once because nothing tested it for months until the power outage.

IMHO, optimizing your update process and treating whole OS environments like we do containers is good, but there are plenty of environments like stateful services where a rolling reboot can still take months to complete if done in a naive way.

New comment by MertsA in "Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation"

MertsA — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 04:59:13 +0000

Thorium isn't fissile, it's fertile. All thorium reactors work by breeding that thorium into uranium.

New comment by MertsA in "Fuse is 95% cheaper and 10x faster than NFS"

MertsA — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 21:06:10 +0000

While DAOS looks cool, from their roadmap it looks like they still don't have a fault domain larger than a server... Their erasure coding profiles also look pretty thin. I'm ex-Meta, our infra had vastly different availability and reliability requirements but that looks like it'd be painful to support at scale.

New comment by MertsA in "Bcachefs may be headed out of the kernel"

MertsA — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 22:05:53 +0000

You can shrink XFS, but only the realtime volume. All you need is xfs_db and a steady hand. I once had to pull this off for a shortened test program for a new server platform at Meta. Works great except some of those filesystems did somehow get this weird corruption around used space tracking that xfs_repair couldn't detect... It was mostly fine.

New comment by MertsA in "An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system"

MertsA — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 18:39:21 +0000

>Tectonic some KV store,

Tectonic is built on ZippyDB which is a distributed DB built on RocksDB.

>What's important here with S3FS is that it supports (1) a fuse client - it just makes life so much easier

Tectonic also has a FUSE client built for GenAI workloads on clusters backed by 100% NVMe storage.

https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineerin...

Personally what stands out to me for 3FS isn't just that it has a FUSE client, but that they made it more of a hybrid of FUSE client and native IO path. You open the file just like normal but once you have a fd you use their native library to do the actual IO. You still need to adapt whatever AI training code to use 3FS natively if you want to avoid FUSE overhead, but now you use your FUSE client for all the metadata operations that the native client would have needed to implement.

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/3FS/blob/ee9a5cee0a85c64f4797...

New comment by MertsA in "SQLite does not do checksums"

MertsA — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 04:34:50 +0000

If you already know the checksum for some huge chunk of the message then you don't need to recompute it to append some data and get a new checksum (at least for CRC). On the read side you would want to have checksums at whatever granularity you want to be able to read but for a larger combined CRC checksum you don't need to ever reread data to append or prepend to it.

New comment by MertsA in "Defend against vampires with 10 gbps network encryption"

MertsA — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 18:49:39 +0000

Wifi would probably be the easiest. Either hide a dummy AP in the house or use a combination of multiple neighbors APs. If you don't see any beacon frames from the dummy SSID for a 30 second period then lock/shred the computer.

New comment by MertsA in "xAI's Colossus: Most Powerful AI Cluster Online in 122 Days"

MertsA — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 23:03:04 +0000

The data in that graph is just complete misinformation.

https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineerin...

New comment by MertsA in "Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn"

MertsA — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 19:28:31 +0000

For some trivial client side filtering that still makes it e2e encrypted.

New comment by MertsA in "Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn"

MertsA — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 19:27:35 +0000

iMessage is not on the same playing field as Whatsapp and Signal. Apple has full control over key distribution and virtually no one verifies Apple isn't acting as a MitM. Whatsapp and e2e encrypted messenger force you to handle securely linking multiple devices to your account and gives you the option to verify that Meta isn't providing bogus public keys to break the e2e encryption.

https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/13/security/whatsapp-key-...

For iMessage, Apple can just add a fake iDevice to your account and now iMessage will happily encrypt everything to that new key as well and there's zero practical visibility to the user. If it was a targeted attack and not blanket surveillance then there's no way the target is going to notice. You can open up the keychain app and check for yourself but unless you regularly do this and compare the keys between all your Apple products you can't be sure. I don't even know how to do that on iPhone.

New comment by MertsA in "Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn"

MertsA — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 19:09:06 +0000

Are you talking about Brian Steel? He was held in contempt because he refused to name his source that informed him of some misconduct by the judge (ex parte communication with a witness). That's hardly relevant here, the client wasn't involved at all as far as anyone knows.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/comments/1dd32ji/brian_s...

New comment by MertsA in "Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn"

MertsA — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 18:59:31 +0000

That in particular would fall under the crime-fraud exception so there's no attorney client privilege.

New comment by MertsA in "Perf Is Not Enough"

MertsA — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 16:21:19 +0000

Made it door to door in 4h20m. Clearly the original person was taking the scenic route.

New comment by MertsA in "Perf Is Not Enough"

MertsA — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 12:32:35 +0000

I'm literally going from a house in Seattle to an office in SF right now. I left 48 minutes ago, I'll update when I arrive and I'll personally add a data point here lol.