Hacker News: anitil

New comment by anitil in "De-Obfuscating Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic (MBA)"

anitil — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:17:06 +0000

This is an interesting de-obfuscation tool that Trail of Bits has built. I'd never come across this technique of hiding logical/arithmetic operations so it was interesting to learn about it and how they've attempted to de-obfuscate it.

De-Obfuscating Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic (MBA)

anitil — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:17:06 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/04/03/simplifying-mba-obfuscation-with-cobra/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668663

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by anitil in "A new C++ back end for ocamlc"

anitil — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:26:17 +0000

> Using these more sophisticated data structures, g++ is able to compute the prime numbers below 10000 in only 8 seconds, using a modest 3.1 GiB of memory.

Finally, I can get some primes on my laptop!

New comment by anitil in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

anitil — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 03:14:27 +0000

This is a concerning read, I'm not quite sure what the driving motivation is for Artemis, but the following answered at least part of my question -

> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget

New comment by anitil in "Cloudflare's Gen 13 servers: trading cache for cores for 2x performance"

anitil — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:48:35 +0000

They said they're replacing 15 years of Nginx+Lua, that's a testament to how good it can be.

New comment by anitil in "DOOM Over DNS"

anitil — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:59:31 +0000

It reminds me of the mercury delay lines - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

New comment by anitil in "Spotting issues in DeFi with dimensional analysis"

anitil — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 05:30:42 +0000

This is an interesting approach to problem solving that I'm surprised an LLM would help with. There is also a followup [0] releasing this tool as a Claude plugin (I haven't tried it myself). I'm much less interested in the application (DeFi) than in the possibility that we could use tools like this to eliminate common classes of bugs like dimensionality errors.

[0] - https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/03/25/try-our-new-dimensio...

Spotting issues in DeFi with dimensional analysis

anitil — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 05:30:42 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/03/24/spotting-issues-in-defi-with-dimensional-analysis/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526921

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by anitil in "A Eulogy for Vim"

anitil — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:41:45 +0000

I couldn't quite follow the logic in this article, though some comments on here have clarified what it seems Drew means here. To be honest, this spiralling logic reminds me of my thought processes when I was at my most depressed

New comment by anitil in "Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)"

anitil — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:01:04 +0000

I had added a file to (I think) .git/info/exclude for .... reasons, which worked well until I couldn't find that file with rg. It's still my default grep though.

New comment by anitil in "Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying"

anitil — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:25:39 +0000

I remember listening to a podcast (possibly complex systems?) that said the best way to find what kinds of frauds are out there is by looking at what known fraudsters are up to.

[0] It might have been this one, but I can't find it in the transcript https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/fraud-as-infr...

New comment by anitil in "Layoffs at Block"

anitil — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 03:06:31 +0000

To be honest I prefer this type of communication over the I-can't-believe-it's-not-layoffs that my previous employer was doing. At least it's honest that it is a decision they've made.

New comment by anitil in "Show HN: Deff – Side-by-side Git diff review in your terminal"

anitil — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:52:18 +0000

I ran in to a couple problems when trying that script (details below), but I'm really happy that you shared it, because I had not seen ':windo diffthis' before, and that method of scripting diffs. I'll definitely be customising it!

(I found that my mac machine doesn't support the '-printf' option, and also I was attempting to run 'git bvd main' on a branch but it seems it does a recursive directory diff, so I'll use 'git diff --name-only' as the input to the awk command).

Edit: worked nicely! I haven't used tabs much in vim so is a slightly new workflow but otherwise very handy

New comment by anitil in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

anitil — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:21:16 +0000

I've also found llms seem to love it when calling out to tools, I suppose for them having stderr interspersed messaged in their input doesn't make much difference

New comment by anitil in "Snakes.run: rendering 100M pixels a second over SSH"

anitil — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:50:40 +0000

The level of engineering and problem solving needed for such a charming game just brightens my day. I remember the post about ssh keystroke obfuscation as well, and I really enjoy how limiting yourself to smaller systems forces you to solve problems that people don't usually see.

New comment by anitil in "Move tests to closed source repo"

anitil — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:00:28 +0000

This is concerning, it feels a bit tragedy-of-the-commons I suppose where having public tests are a valuable public good, thought I can't quite get the analogy straight in my head.

New comment by anitil in "Devirtualization and Static Polymorphism"

anitil — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 22:10:14 +0000

I've been thinking through what features I'd want in a language if I were designing one myself, and one of my desires is to have exhaustive matches on enums (which could be made of any primitive type) and sum types. The ability to generate perfect hashes at compile time was one of the things that falls out nicely from that

New comment by anitil in "C Enum Sizes; Or, How MSVC Ignores the Standard Once Again"

anitil — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:46:11 +0000

There's so many times where I realise what I thought was simple in C turns out to be a minefield. I'd assumed an enum was 'word' sized, so 64 bits on a 64 bit architecture, but instead it turns out to be unspecified, and left up to the compiler.

Thinking through the standards quote again, I'm not sure that MSVC's behaviour is even wrong (when not using C23 type specification)? Because it doesn't look like it's required that the underlying type has to be sufficient to represent the largest enum. So maybe it's not wrong, it's just ... broken.

New comment by anitil in "Git's Magic Files"

anitil — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 05:33:21 +0000

Wow TIL thankyou! I've got a bunch of small things like this in my current project that always complicate my PRs, this will solve that handily.

New comment by anitil in "Notes on Clarifying Man Pages"

anitil — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:36:21 +0000

This was really interesting. Man pages are at the same time really useful, while being arcane and frustrating to use. I still never remember is it 'man 1 read' or 'man 2 read' for libc vs the bash 'read' command (checking now 1 is the builtin, 2 is libc). Yes I know about 'man man', but it won't stick in my brain which is which.

They also lack discoverability, I just checked man 1 through 5 of 'open' and 'man 3 open' is a random perl pragma, which is not what I'd expect