Hacker News: PhilipRoman

New comment by PhilipRoman in "AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere"

PhilipRoman — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:26:54 +0000

Ironically news outlets like to use the phrasing you rightfully point out as absurd. Not sure if they just do it randomly or only when they get orders to push a certain narrative.

>Car plows into Christmas market in Germany, killing at least 5 and injuring 200

New comment by PhilipRoman in "MCP is dead?"

PhilipRoman — Sat, 30 May 2026 08:07:45 +0000

Don't most companies have a Git repo for skills that you can pull?

New comment by PhilipRoman in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

PhilipRoman — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:12:39 +0000

Because it costs money? Believe it or not, most places don't pay you 6 digit salaries for shuffling around YAML.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd"

PhilipRoman — Tue, 26 May 2026 10:42:42 +0000

It is a fantastic init system/service supervisor. My problem with it is basically everything else. I think its developers see systemd as central to the entire system, basically the userspace counterpart to the kernel. I prefer the approach of 'dinit', but I understand why they designed it that way.

Due to this design they often have underspecified interaction between the different components, since the assumption is that everyone will use largely the same baseline systemd environment and as long as it works, who cares what it does underneath. If the different parts were more independent, they would be forced to develop a cleaner API contract between them.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Childhood Computing"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 24 May 2026 14:57:48 +0000

SDL is a relatively high level API and framebuffer style graphics work fine on it. I think there are some edge cases for X11 with non-compositing window manager where you will get interesting glitches if the window moves.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "My two-part desk setup (2025)"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:01:37 +0000

Yes, only... 25m? You must have a bigger room than I do :)

New comment by PhilipRoman in "The Third Hard Problem"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:28:09 +0000

I'd agree if POSIX provided something like an open() flag which made the changes visible atomically, but as it stands, the rename() idiom is the mainstream way of durable file writing, so it is commonly used. Practical example using busybox sed: (GNU sed detects this case and refuses to overwrite)

  / # stat /dev/null
    File: /dev/null
    Size: 0          Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   character special file
    ...
  / # sed -i 's/foo/bar/' /dev/null
  / # stat /dev/null
    File: /dev/null
    Size: 0          Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   regular empty file
    ...

New comment by PhilipRoman in "The Third Hard Problem"

PhilipRoman — Sun, 17 May 2026 09:26:49 +0000

Hard links suffer from the general issue of there being two styles of writing to a file - open(2)/write(2) vs rename(2). Depending on the internals of each program you use to update the file, you will get very different results.

This is one of the ugliest parts of POSIX design, making idioms like -o /dev/null and file attributes unpredictable (I've had a server run out of disk space because a root-owned process used rename-style writing on /dev/null)

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Mullvad exit IPs are surprisingly identifying"

PhilipRoman — Fri, 15 May 2026 06:41:50 +0000

If you use the VPN for the Web, browser fingerprinting is a major threat outside of specialized scenarios

New comment by PhilipRoman in "CERT is releasing six CVEs for serious security vulnerabilities in dnsmasq"

PhilipRoman — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:13:59 +0000

If you blindly TOFU ssh sessions, those can be pwned easily in many common use cases. Legacy software configurations like NFS with IP authentication will be bypassed. Realistically the most likely scenario is using your home as a VPN, or a DDOS node.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker"

PhilipRoman — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:57:56 +0000

It also sets a HN=1 cookie, so you may need to clear that or use incognito

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Dirtyfrag: Universal Linux LPE"

PhilipRoman — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:46:54 +0000

AFAIK Lambda and everything else will use micro-VMs. No serious company would use a shared kernel design for workloads in different security contexts. (Personally I wouldn't even use the same hardware host, but sometimes sacrifices have to be made)

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved"

PhilipRoman — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:11:18 +0000

And how many of those actions do uncached downloads instead of building self-contained offline images... Speaking of which, I wonder if GitHub has implemented any HTTP interception for common mirror sites, like used by apt, etc.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "GTFOBins"

PhilipRoman — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:00:30 +0000

If you have /proc available, you don't even need to disable ASLR (all mappings are available to you)

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Managing the Unmanaged Switch"

PhilipRoman — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:45:29 +0000

>You can't restrict management to specific vlans

This bit me as well, FYI Zyxel switches seem to be among the few that do this properly, even on cheapest models. On the other hand their web interface cannot be used over SSH or other tunnels... The software side of network equipment is in a sad state, no wonder the hyperscalers moved to whitebox switches

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Claude Opus 4.7"

PhilipRoman — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:10:46 +0000

I strongly suspected that there was some pre/postprocessing going on when trying to get it to output rot13("uryyb, jbyeq"), but it's probably just due to massively biased token probabilities. Still, it creates some hilarious output, even when you clearly point out the error:

  Hmm, but wait — the original you gave was jbyeq not jbeyq:
  j→w, b→o, y→l, e→r, q→d = world
  So the final answer is still hello, world. You're right that I was misreading the input. The result stands.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Germany suspends military approval for long stays abroad for men under 45"

PhilipRoman — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:36:18 +0000

Hah, based on the title I assumed it was exactly the opposite - that it was the automatic approval that had been suspended

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8)"

PhilipRoman — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 05:36:39 +0000

I see this point a lot but it never really made sense to me. What exactly does IPv6 bring to the table that makes it unnecessary to remember IP addresses? Especially for anything more advanced than just looking up a hostname.

New comment by PhilipRoman in "The Orange Pi 6 Plus"

PhilipRoman — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:38:01 +0000

N100 works just fine with fully passive cooling

New comment by PhilipRoman in "Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI"

PhilipRoman — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:39 +0000

I'm not sure there are many causes that have "50% of people incandescently furious about it", except maybe heavily diluted positions like "corruption = bad". Even just based on voter turnouts. If you see this kind of activity, it's most likely representative of the terminally online class and not actual people.