Hacker News: corbet

New comment by corbet in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

corbet — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:21:58 +0000

I doubt it. The scraper botnets aren't going to bother with niceties like APIs, they just come in over HTTPS and grab anything they can.

New comment by corbet in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

corbet — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:09:46 +0000

I am hard put to defend reddit and a lot of the things they do ... but I can attest, from personal experience, that scrapers are a huge problem for anybody trying to keep a complex site working. Withholding the display of the comments will significantly reduce the database traffic needed to satisfy a request; I can see why they would want to do that for anonymous readers.

New comment by corbet in "An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation"

corbet — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:19:01 +0000

Very little of it. When you see a million IPs systematically working their way through your URL space, it's pretty clear that there's a central control node behind it all.

New comment by corbet in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

corbet — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:54:00 +0000

It's an experiment. Compared to the text-obscuring popovers that are prevalent elsewhere on the net, it seems pretty low-key; as far as I know, this is the first complaint I've seen. I don't know if we will continue experimenting with those or not...better ideas for getting people to subscribe to the site would be more than welcome.

New comment by corbet in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

corbet — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:16:00 +0000

The kernel does not copy every page, but it does have to copy all of the VMAs. Setting memory to COW (which can involve changing a lot of page-table-entries) is not free either. I guess I could have mentioned copy-on-write explicitly, but I do not believe that what I wrote was incorrect.

New comment by corbet in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"

corbet — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:45:45 +0000

Meeting minutes: https://lwn.net/Articles/1049830/

New comment by corbet in "I imported the full Linux kernel git history into pgit"

corbet — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:19:34 +0000

I hate to blow our own horn, but I'm gonna...if you are interested in seeing this kind of kernel-development data mining, fully human-written, LWN posts it every development cycle. The 6.17 version (https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/) included the buggiest commit and much surrounding material. See our kernel index (https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Releases) for information on every kernel release since 2.6.20.

Or see LWN on Monday for the 7.0 version :)

New comment by corbet in "Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it"

corbet — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:41:49 +0000

Being used to validate stolen card numbers has long been a problem; we've had to put in a number of defenses to fight our way off whatever list of "easy sites" these folks maintain. I hadn't thought about the "change card" path though...another bit of time spent away from what our business is really supposed to be doing...

New comment by corbet in "Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD"

corbet — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:48:51 +0000

I'm not sure what you're reading; there is a distinct lack of GPL advocates in that conversation.

Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

corbet — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:51:06 +0000

Article URL: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1064541/1a399d572a046fb9/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546732

Points: 77

# Comments: 81

New comment by corbet in "Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?"

corbet — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:21:37 +0000

I feel obligated to mention LWN - https://lwn.net/ - since that is exactly what we aspire to.

New comment by corbet in "Guideline has been acquired by Gusto"

corbet — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 23:29:25 +0000

Something broke down somewhere ... I got emails a while back about the acquisition and giving options about whether to go along with the move or not.

Since Gusto is our payroll provider, I didn't see a reason not to do that... hopefully there will be less finger pointing the next time something goes screwy with the 401k transfers.

New comment by corbet in "Aggressive bots ruined my weekend"

corbet — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:54:09 +0000

The "compliance officer" at Bright Data, instead, offered me a special deal to protect my site from their bots ... they run a protection racket along with all the rest of their nastiness.

New comment by corbet in "Harnessing America's heat pump moment"

corbet — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 22:57:41 +0000

My heat pump, in Colorado, kept the house warm at -18°F last winter. Without firing up the backup resistance heating strip. I think it works.

(It is more expensive to operate than the natural-gas furnace was, though).

New comment by corbet in "Next steps for BPF support in the GNU toolchain"

corbet — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:54:58 +0000

We do try to spell things out and/or link them in LWN articles to make the context available, but some things we just have to assume.

Additionally, spelling out "Berkeley Packet Filter" is not going to help any readers here; BPF is far removed from the days when its sole job was filtering packets, and that name will not tell readers anything about why BPF is important in the Linux kernel.

New comment by corbet in "Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development"

corbet — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:06:45 +0000

See, for example, the binder driver merged for 6.18. It's out there, and will land when it's ready.

New comment by corbet in "Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian"

corbet — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 14:05:01 +0000

The occasional sharing of subscriber links in this way only does us good. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe and help ensure that there will be more of it!

New comment by corbet in "QUIC for the kernel"

corbet — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 17:22:39 +0000

Ossification does not come about from the decisions of "Linux maintainers". You need to look at the people who design, sell, and deploy middleboxes for that.

New comment by corbet in "Reports of widespread power cuts in Spain and Portugal"

corbet — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 12:17:42 +0000

Many years ago I worked in a Safeway grocery store. We would have occasional power failures that would leave the entire store dark; we would all be given flashlights to help customers find their way out.

The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.

New comment by corbet in "Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent"

corbet — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 13:57:40 +0000

For a more detailed look at this change: https://lwn.net/Articles/1008399/