Hacker News: ZephyrP

New comment by ZephyrP in "Elixir-lang.org has a new design"

ZephyrP — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 09:23:27 +0000

Although I'm late to the pile-on and all the good takes have grown old and gotten replies, I cannot let this grave insult against my people go unanswered.

Elixir, if anything, really excels at communicating the intentions of the (occasionally esoteric) architectural demands that the Erlang originally fortified decades ago, often encountered when using OTP. This, alongside that tower of respected Elixir tooling, adhering to Erlang's norms which, once past "mere" interoperability within BEAM, is still supremely important when e.x. minimizing laborious/unusual syntax requirements when using Elixir modules from 'naive' Erlang code. This is part of a more wide-reaching feeling, one of common concerns being important to address in Elixir (and Erlang) for the health of the franchise, not just as grist for the mill of an ancient FP hyperwar, each warring cybergang being willing to die for their preferred juridical interpretation of a bug report.

New comment by ZephyrP in "How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]"

ZephyrP — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:48:28 +0000

A long-forgotten machine on a DoD network sounds like the kind of host that could serve for idle scanning or any other technique using a forged source address and a predictable dummy host; I imagine that arpwatch takes a view of network security focused on classifying frames and less on connection behavior.

New comment by ZephyrP in "Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance"

ZephyrP — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:50:46 +0000

It's certainly not an "elitist initiation ordeal" to ask a potential crewmate to sketch a library function they've selected, what abstraction or ideas it implicitly contains, and what bearing those have on their overall approach. GP's use of `bisect_left` is instructive here:

  In [2]: Solution().findMin([1, 0, 1, 1])
  Out[2]: 4

However, requesting a bug-free implementation of `bsearch()` (to say nothing of the actual problem being solved) during a timed, in-person interview is less a structured rehearsal of an individual's unique capacities, and more of a jumping-in ritual proving only a willingness to die for their cybergang.

New comment by ZephyrP in "F-Stack – A network development kit with high performance based on DPDK"

ZephyrP — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 19:23:04 +0000

Change keeps coming, even when the wire format of a protocol has ossified. I've spent years in security and router performance at Cisco, wrote a respectable fraction of the flagship's L3 and L2-L3 (tun) firewall. I merged a patch on this tried-and-true firewall just this year; it's now deployed.

As vendors are eager to remind us, custom silicon to accelerate everything between L1 to L7 exists. That said, it is still the case in 2025 that the "fast path" data-plane will end up passing either nothing or everything in a flow to the "slow path" control-plane, where the most significant silicon is less 'ASIC' and more 'aarch64'.

This is all to say that the GP's comments are broadly correct.

New comment by ZephyrP in "We're Still Not Done with Jesus"

ZephyrP — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 14:26:07 +0000

In the mid-2000s, I attended evangelical 'kids night'. Held each Friday at the dead-center of an unincorporated community in rural Colorado.

The "cool" youth pastor who was responsible for these events told us "the Gospel's authors are anonymous, their names are totally traditional". I never had the sense that this view was in any way heretical or contentious, even in a strain of Christianity that strongly emphasized the historicity of the Bible.

New comment by ZephyrP in "A reawakening of systems programming meetups"

ZephyrP — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:46:18 +0000

The pandemic killed a fantastic meetup called "Papers We Love" here in San Diego. I miss the many great people (and papers) I met through PWL, and would be thrilled to see something like it again.

If not, we're just going to have to jump-start it ourselves.

New comment by ZephyrP in "Selfish reasons to want more humans"

ZephyrP — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 16:59:48 +0000

I traveled through a town in California known for it's apple orchards. There, I ate a 'Hawkeye' apple, which was said to be an ancestor of the 'Red Delicious'.

The 'Hawkeye' isn't my new favorite, but was good enough to appreciate how much it's shameful descendent had dishonored the name of this otherwise respectable apple family.

New comment by ZephyrP in "Sqids – Generate short unique IDs from numbers"

ZephyrP — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 02:04:01 +0000

of course, but an LFSR is going to be faster (provided you have a reasonable number of rounds in your Feistel cipher), have some situationally desirable statistical properties and is easier to adapt than a format-preserving encryption technique like a Feistel network.

New comment by ZephyrP in "Sqids – Generate short unique IDs from numbers"

ZephyrP — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 02:01:27 +0000

Feistel ciphers are a good technique for doing just this but it's also worth noting that if all you are looking for is "produce a pseudorandom permutation of 1..N without actually shuffling a list of numbers" you can also use an LFSR as well.

New comment by ZephyrP in "FastClick: A new architecture for programmable network infrastructure"

ZephyrP — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 01:40:01 +0000

I wouldn't call it "commonly used" but it's popular enough to be used in a number of Cisco products (and elsewhere, I'm sure).

New comment by ZephyrP in "Downfall Attacks"

ZephyrP — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 18:13:25 +0000

In general, not really, but the most common string comparison instruction in x86_64 leaves the last character of one of the strings being compared with the other one just being a pointer into the C-style string.

New comment by ZephyrP in "Facebook has not been doing enough to comply with a 2020 privacy order: FTC"

ZephyrP — Thu, 04 May 2023 20:11:59 +0000

This isn't to refute your overarching point, but even the oldest of stories, the 'Epic of Gilgamesh', begins with the titular character accused of not "leaving maidens to their warriors", leading the gods (and people) of Ur to try to end his reign. I think the story makes it clear - this behavior was totally unacceptable for a king, even in what the Sumerians considered "those ancient days, when bread had been tasted for the first time".

New comment by ZephyrP in "Alexander the ‘Accursed’ and Zoroastrianism"

ZephyrP — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 16:34:37 +0000

Do you see this is an expression of secular "neo-Persian" nationalism, or as part of a reaction to Iran's religious conservatives who'd read literal truth in the Quran's story of a heroic Zuul al Qarayn (whom I've heard is identified with Alexander)?

New comment by ZephyrP in "C Posix-compliant argument parsing in 42 LoC, inspired by Duff's device"

ZephyrP — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 17:50:42 +0000

Very neat. Do you implement option parsing in "magic getopt" or can you (somehow?) handle setting up the option string arguments used by the more familiar variants in getopt(3)?

New comment by ZephyrP in "Universe Splitter"

ZephyrP — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 15:44:37 +0000

Having a slew of physical theories with profound existential ramifications to choose from, why do you think the "many-worlds interpretation" is particularly connected to secularization?

New comment by ZephyrP in "I cannot begin to tell you how proficient I am in Microsoft Word"

ZephyrP — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 18:01:40 +0000

I worked as a framer with my dad for around 4 years in the mid 2000s. We framed small residential homes in southern Colorado and although we would always carry a hammer on our belt to "align" a stud, bend flashing and drive in nails that hit a knot; nail guns hooked up to a shared compressor was how nearly everything got, well, nailed together.

New comment by ZephyrP in "Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test"

ZephyrP — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 21:32:30 +0000

I got the same result as you, but in my mind the expression "twice as likely to purchase" could just as easily have meant P(C) = 2 * P(D) / 1 + P(D) (yielding 0.35824) rather than 2 * P(C) (yielding 0.32841).

New comment by ZephyrP in "Students’ solar-powered camper van turns heads on 1,800-mile road trip"

ZephyrP — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 17:58:32 +0000

I calculated a similar maximum horsepower to your own estimation (6.1 hp) when I used the average direct solar radiation (164 W m^2 @ 27 m^2 surface). This rose to 41 hp when using values for "a typical cloudless day at solar zenith" (1120 W m^2) [1]. The wattage will square when doubling each side, so if you were to double each length of the surface, you'd be up to 151 extremely hypothetical hp - just like the Honda Insight!

Back on planet earth, the most common solar panels have efficiencies between 15-20% [2]. Direct radiation is diminished by the cosine of the angle of solar tilt. It takes another ~2 hp to overcome drag at just 30mph [3]. Who knows how much this setup would weigh. You'd have to be Speed Racer's long-lost brother in Arizona to win a mid-summer dead-heat race at noon with a go-cart.

[1] https://www.newport.com/t/introduction-to-solar-radiation

[2] https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/photovoltaic-energy-factshe...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190616063447/http://phors.loco...

New comment by ZephyrP in "QNTM on memes, anti-memes, and knowledge that doesn't want to be shared"

ZephyrP — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 22:59:09 +0000

In addition to fiction, qntm is a sharp, versatile programmer. greenery [1], their unobtrusive and generally tasteful python library for manipulating regular expressions, is also accompanied by high-quality technical writing on related topics [2] [3] [4] [5].

[1] https://github.com/qntm/greenery

[2] https://qntm.org/greenery

[3] https://qntm.org/lego

[4] https://qntm.org/plants

[5] https://qntm.org/fsm

New comment by ZephyrP in "Programming Puzzles"

ZephyrP — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 18:49:04 +0000

> This is very untrue. While loop and a stack.

>> You can still simulate

> any function outside DSPACE(O(1)) can't

The space complexity of the algorithm is only incidentally related to the number of unique variables required to represent it's state.

You said it best:

> The fact that you have an implicit call stack doesn't change the space complexity