Hacker News: ahomescu1

Stop Whining about Rust Hype – A Pro-Rust Rant

ahomescu1 — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 23:44:40 +0000

Article URL: https://thenewwazoo.github.io/whining.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29631993

Points: 91

# Comments: 70

Sayonara, C++, and Hello to Rust

ahomescu1 — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 08:25:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thecodedmessage.com/posts/hello-rust/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29023684

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

Prioritizing Memory Safety Migrations

ahomescu1 — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 09:53:18 +0000

Article URL: https://noncombatant.org/2021/04/09/prioritizing-memory-safety-migrations/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26769017

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Translating Quake 3 into Rust"

ahomescu1 — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 22:12:43 +0000

We added the transpiled code in a new branch at https://github.com/immunant/ioq3/tree/transpiled/quake3-rs and also a more cleaned up refactored code base at https://github.com/immunant/ioq3/tree/refactored/quake3-rs

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Translating Quake 3 into Rust"

ahomescu1 — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 22:12:10 +0000

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Translating Quake 3 into Rust"

ahomescu1 — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 22:10:30 +0000

Author here: I wanted to let everyone know we made some small edits to the text, and added two new branches to our repository: transpiled containing the raw transpiler output [1], and refactored containing the same code [2] after a few refactoring commands.

1. https://github.com/immunant/ioq3/tree/transpiled/quake3-rs

2. https://github.com/immunant/ioq3/tree/refactored/quake3-rs

Fearless Concurrency in Firefox Quantum

ahomescu1 — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 03:27:20 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-In-Firefox-Quantum.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15701238

Points: 611

# Comments: 174

New comment by ahomescu1 in "WannaCry in-memory key recovery for Windows XP"

ahomescu1 — Fri, 19 May 2017 22:21:59 +0000

Right, I see that now. Adding an additional layer of RSA and per-file keys is an interesting twist. Generating a public/private key pair instead of a symmetric key seems to let them encrypt as many files as they want without keeping the private key in memory (which they relied on Windows to erase).

New comment by ahomescu1 in "WannaCry in-memory key recovery for Windows XP"

ahomescu1 — Fri, 19 May 2017 22:17:02 +0000

> Just ship your ransomware with the attacker's public key, generate a symmetric key K locally, encrypt the data with K, encrypt K with the public key, offer to decrypt K for a ransom.

It seems that what they're doing is generating a local Kpub/Kpriv pair, encrypting Kpriv itself and then offering to decrypt it. The files are encrypted with Kpub (approximately, see comments below for details). This has the advantage that they can encrypt all they want without knowing Kpriv, which only needs to live in memory long enough to get encrypted.

New comment by ahomescu1 in "WannaCry in-memory key recovery for Windows XP"

ahomescu1 — Fri, 19 May 2017 19:51:10 +0000

I don't know the exact details of how WannaCry encrypts the files, but ransomware generally works like this: when hitting a new machine, it generates a random key K1 and then encrypts all the user's files with AES (or some other symmetric key encryption) using K1 as the key. It then encrypts K1 itself using some public key Kpub embedded in the ransomware, then stores the encrypted K1 on disk. When the user pays the ransom, they receive the corresponding private key Kpriv that allows them to decrypt K1, which then lets them decrypt all their files.

I think what this tool does is read the unencrypted K1 directly from memory, which means Kpriv is no longer needed.

EDIT: One correction: the user doesn't receive Kpriv, instead they send the encrypted K1 to the ransomware owner who decrypts it and sends back K1.

New comment by ahomescu1 in "O(1) Data Lookups with Minimal Perfect Hashing"

ahomescu1 — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 19:06:10 +0000

There doesn't seem to be anything dynamic about the algorithm in the article. They still need to precompute the perfect hash function(s) from the entire input data, whereas the hashing approach you linked to can handle adding data incrementally (hence the "dynamic" part).

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Iron law of oligarchy"

ahomescu1 — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 05:21:12 +0000

> And who runs foreign policy? How do state secrets work? Is there still a president and a bureaucracy and cabinet ministers?

All of those seem tied to the Executive branch, whereas direct democracy would replace the Legislative (Congress in the US, Parliament in other countries). The current Executive follows the laws that Congress passes, direct democracy wouldn't change that.

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Mexico supreme court rules ban on marijuana use unconstitutional"

ahomescu1 — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 05:36:55 +0000

I was following and agreeing with you (and was going to upvote you), until the last 2 sentences. You could have made your point without bashing "CS types" and CS/engineering education.

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Scholarship, Security and ‘Spillage’ on Campus"

ahomescu1 — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 20:34:49 +0000

1. and 2. are OK points, but your point 3. is atrocious. In my opinion, destructive behavior isn't really a legitimate form of protest, and as rubidium wrote, you'd be hurting people who are innocent in all this.

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Efficiency up, turnover down: Sweden experiments with six-hour working day"

ahomescu1 — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 01:15:47 +0000

> Historically, states and credit-based money came first. THEN came the unit of account and medium of exchange money that you are talking about.

Actually, the Wikipedia page on "fiat money" (if that's what you're referring to) says: "Fiat money originated in 11th century China" [1]. There were many commodity currencies before that.

> Going back to the original point, can you go to a deserted island and make "money"? No. You need society. You need government. You need an economic system. The money is only partially "yours".

That's if there is only one person on that island. If more people live on the island, they might start trading services and use some some improvised currency, e.g., coconuts or seashells. In this case, you have a society and money, but not necessarily a government.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money#History

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Efficiency up, turnover down: Sweden experiments with six-hour working day"

ahomescu1 — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 00:48:06 +0000

Anything that is valuable, fungible and divisible could be used as money (you could even use barrels of oil). For examples, see [1]. Again, a great contemporary example is Bitcoin (not sure why you're ignoring that, it's a great example of money that exists in spite of government, not because of it).

Perhaps what you're referring to is legal tender, which indeed requires a government to exist. However, not all money is legal tender (for example, euros are not legal tender in the US, afaik).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Efficiency up, turnover down: Sweden experiments with six-hour working day"

ahomescu1 — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 22:06:49 +0000

Money is both a "unit of account" and "medium of exchange". You can certainly have both of those without government. In some societies, people used seashells, salt, gold coins, or many other things as money. Bitcoin certainly counts as a "non-government money".

Since money is used as a medium of exchange, it's essentially a placeholder for your labor (when you receive it from your employer/customers as payment) or value provided to others. It is arguable whether society has as much right over an individual's labor as he/she does, I think they don't (while society may have a contribution, it might be significantly below 50%).

One last and minor thing we'll have to disagree on: I don't think government equals society. An individual can be a part of society without being part of government, and I also believe government sometimes represents its own interests at the expense of society.

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Ignition: V8 Interpreter"

ahomescu1 — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 00:40:44 +0000

AFAIK, V8 already has 3 tiers: full-codegen (the basic non-optimizing JIT), crankshaft and turbofan. With ignition, they're replacing full-codegen with an interpreter.

It's strange that there's only one mention of crankshaft in the entire document, but turbofan is all over the place. Are they also planning to get rid of the former?

New comment by ahomescu1 in "Should I Use Signed or Unsigned Ints?"

ahomescu1 — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 06:03:01 +0000

size_t is also unsigned (no idea why). The signed equivalent is ssize_t.

Edit: Sorry, missed the "i-- > 0" at first. The code works, but not because of changing "unsigned" to "size_t".

New comment by ahomescu1 in "The Magic of RPython"

ahomescu1 — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 00:31:29 +0000

If you mean run RPython code as regular Python code, that doesn't always catch typing problems. For example, returning a None where an int is expected works fine in Python, not so in RPython.