Hacker News: arjvik

New comment by arjvik in "11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker"

arjvik — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:50:04 +0000

You take hardware properties as axioms (for instance, ARMv6 cache coherency is specified in detail as part of the lengthy spec, even though you have no guarantees that the hardware actually is faithful to the spec)

New comment by arjvik in "PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)"

arjvik — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:21:14 +0000

was linked in the article!

New comment by arjvik in "OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes release included a Lean 4 formal proof"

arjvik — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:55:24 +0000

Sadly, as ideal as this seems, Lean has a history of kernel bugs that allow one to prove False.

It's unlikely to be the case here as instead of hillclimbing a Lean proof for validity it appears the proof was first constructed in English before being translated to Lean, which intuitively (hopefully) reduces the chance it exploits a bug.

New comment by arjvik in "What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks"

arjvik — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:25:44 +0000

2 business days is a lot more strict than credit cards, which at the very least would not blink an eye at 2 weeks.

New comment by arjvik in "New type of dice guarantees no tie when deciding who goes first"

arjvik — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 01:29:46 +0000

This is not exactly perfectly fair - appears that the first player wins 11/27 times and the other two win 8/27 each.

New comment by arjvik in "How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?"

arjvik — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:41:19 +0000

This makes sense, and I guess as someone who’s never written Windows software I didn’t realize it was a leaky abstraction!

New comment by arjvik in "Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries"

arjvik — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:51:52 +0000

Mapping parts of files into executable memory, and then executing them, had better be bulletproof! Exploiting this seems like a direct path to RCE, and it's likely that this sort of library is used by privileged code.

Purely academically, this is a very cool piece of code! Just hoping that it gets a thorough vetting before used by privileged/security-critical software :)

New comment by arjvik in "How does IKEA come up with names for its products?"

arjvik — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:05:13 +0000

> Sofas → Swedish place names

Looks like some of these place names have been overpowered in search results by their named-for sofa counterparts! When searching Finnala, Sweden, I essentially only get search results for the sofa, and even the Google AI overview, while admitting it's a locality in Sweden, shows me a picture of the sofa!

New comment by arjvik in "How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?"

arjvik — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:00:49 +0000

Arguably the lower level abstractions are more interesting too! how exactly Windows does ring-0 is less interesting than writing your own ring-0! And unless you care about writing driver-level software for Windows or contributing to the kernel, learning this is also less useful.

I'm essentially arguing that unless you work at MSFT, there's next to no reason to learn that specific abstraction layer.

New comment by arjvik in "Bluesky Protocol Services"

arjvik — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 01:56:21 +0000

I think you just invented blockchain DNS (e.g. https://handshake.org/) without the byzantine tolerance.

New comment by arjvik in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"

arjvik — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:37:00 +0000

Shortest-Path (Djikstra's) is in P :)

New comment by arjvik in "Video2NAND – Abusing video codecs for great computational power"

arjvik — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:38:40 +0000

Sadly doesn't look turing complete (yet) :(

New comment by arjvik in "Clockwise/Spiral Rule (1994)"

arjvik — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:02:54 +0000

The way I've learned to read it is

    int v;

means that `v` is an `int`.

    int *w;

means that `*w` is an `int`, meaning `w` is a pointer to an `int`.

    int *y[5]

(note that `◌[]` has higher precedence than `*◌`, so this is `*(y[5])`) means that `*y[5]` is an `int`, so `y[5]` is a pointer to an `int`, meaning `y` is an array of `int` pointers.

    int (*(*kitchensink[5])(int, int))[6];

means that `(*(*kitchensink[5])(int, int))[6]` is an int, so

- `*(*kitchensink[5])(int, int)` is an array of `int`.

- `(*kitchensink[5])(int, int)` is a pointer to array of `int`.

- `kitchensink[5]` is a function pointer to a function that takes `(int, int)` and returns a pointer to an array of `int`.

- `kitchensink` is an array of function pointers to functions that take `(int, int)` and return a pointer to an array of `int`.

New comment by arjvik in "Ferrari Creates a Fake Manual Transmission"

arjvik — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:40:20 +0000

On your side here!

The clutch (and the potential to money shift your transmission) is _fun_, but not the reason that I want a stick shift - when pushing a car beyond normal limits just having control of when it shifts is enough. That being said, the up/down gate is just no fun! Plus, it lacks any feedback on what gear you're in.

New comment by arjvik in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

arjvik — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:53:15 +0000

understand?

It's really easy to understand that everything is typed as Any/Object/whatever upper bound type your statically-typed language of choice uses.

Desiring something better does not mean a lack of understanding of the status quo.

New comment by arjvik in "GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits"

arjvik — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:43:11 +0000

ooc, would you claim its the responsibility of the security researcher to remove the webshell, or the company's as soon as they were notified? was it publically discoverable and exploitable or was there some form of protection?

New comment by arjvik in "Can we have the day off?"

arjvik — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:16:26 +0000

in tech, we (frequently are expected to) work 5x12!

New comment by arjvik in "Can we have the day off?"

arjvik — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:15:16 +0000

something something you're paid the amount the market values your work, which in today's job market is an order of magnitude less than the profit you bring the company

New comment by arjvik in "Anthropic acquires Stainless"

arjvik — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:10:44 +0000

I don't have an account but my colleauges do as my company uses the platform.

By self-service, do you mean that the SDK generators are now source-available so they can be run by end users locally?

New comment by arjvik in "I’ve banned query strings"

arjvik — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:38:27 +0000

Every object in git (commit, tree, revision of a single file) has a hash that is guaranteed unique within a repository (otherwise many more things than a web UI would break) and likely also globally. I can understand wanting to isolate repositories to prevent hash collisions from causing problems, but within a repo everything has a universally unique ID.

edit: for instance, that specific VERBS.md is represented by the blob 3b9a46854589abb305ea33360f6f6d8634649108.