Hacker News: creshal

New comment by creshal in "Spaghettifying DRAM"

creshal — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:56:12 +0000

Reaching into ring -2 or the TPM allows privilege escalations past traditional "root permissions" and lets attackers defeat the sort of tamper protection that's designed to make escalations to local root manageable. Wipe-resistant malware, falsified cryptographic attestations, all sorts of fun.

New comment by creshal in "To save C, we must save ABI (2022)"

creshal — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:05:51 +0000

Preferably one that doesn't deliberately shoot itself in the face to spite its users just to protect some committee members' egos.

New comment by creshal in "To save C, we must save ABI (2022)"

creshal — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:18:10 +0000

Is C even worth saving at this point? Even standards committee members can't consistently write C code that doesn't overflow and segfault.

New comment by creshal in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

creshal — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:56:37 +0000

I'm always flabbergasted when I see what people pay and how much effort they need to invest to keep their cloud websites from eating them alive.

My allegedly more complicated VPS stack needs an afternoon of attention every two years when a new Debian major release is necessary, and costs have been predictable for 15 years, no matter what happened traffic wise.

New comment by creshal in "Taste Is All That's Left"

creshal — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:46:05 +0000

I'm sceptical, where are all these essays he was supposed to have learned this very distinct style from? I certainly don't remember seeing them.

New comment by creshal in "The Religion of Speed"

creshal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:49:23 +0000

Don't confuse urgency for FOMO.

> There is definitely a point where you are going too fast, but the customer will almost certainly let you know when this happens.

Usually by stopping doing business with you forever.

New comment by creshal in "What does GitHub's security team even do?"

creshal — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:47:50 +0000

The post-release XP service packs, to be precise. XP's release was a perfect storm of events: Suddenly, millions of home users receiced an OS that had dozens of networked RPC services running in the background, and received DSL modems around the same time that exposed their computer directly to the internet. A slightly suboptimal combination at a time when software firewalls were a separate product you had to buy for a hundred dollars a year, if you even knew they were a thing.

New comment by creshal in "Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber"

creshal — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:02:21 +0000

Model quality is only one aspect, the bigger problem is making it work in a fully integrated enterprise platform, and Google has always been lacking when it came to the latter.

At this rate, if Google has a flagship model, you're better off plugging it into a competitor's tooling than hope Google figures out how to use it.

New comment by creshal in "Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL"

creshal — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:54:47 +0000

The primary advantage of dedicated hardware accelerators for the past ~15 years been power efficiency, rather than performance. Not much of a problem on a desktop, but very noticeable on mobile devices.

New comment by creshal in "Ditching Vagrant: VMs with KVM and Virsh on Debian"

creshal — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:35:28 +0000

kubevirt is a cute joke, but hardly a replacement for ovirt or vmware. It's a real shame redhat keeps sabotaging itself to chase hypes with half-assed non-solutions.

New comment by creshal in "Ditching Vagrant: VMs with KVM and Virsh on Debian"

creshal — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:57:28 +0000

"around" is the best way to describe it; the libvirt/virt-manager ecosystem isn't dead, but redhat killing off ovirt/rhev support drained a lot of resources out of it.

And for some bizarre reason people decided that the much less mature (both organizationally and technologically) proxmox VE is the best thing since sliced bread, so everyone who does care about linux virtualization is now trying to hammer some homelabbers' collection of perl scripts into a replacement.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

New comment by creshal in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

creshal — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:19:07 +0000

> as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?

New comment by creshal in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

creshal — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:07:32 +0000

I'm baffled by just how much Google continues to screw up their AI overview. Even duckduckgo manages to provide significantly better results.

New comment by creshal in "Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring"

creshal — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:11:15 +0000

Step one: Decision makers who can change these processes need to be aware of this problem. Many companies fail this simple task.

Step two: These decision makers must be held accountable for the success of the process. Many companies fail this simple task.

Step three: These decision makers must be willing to admit that they made a mistake, and risk loss of prestige and political capital. Guess how likely that is.

And the bigger the company, the worse it gets. It's a good thing we didn't go through 20 years of consolidations and mergers. Oh wait.

New comment by creshal in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"

creshal — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:31:38 +0000

Yeah, Elon's whole shtick is make things scale up that everyone else thinks can't scale up. Sometimes it works (batteries), sometimes it works spectacularly well (Falcon 9), sometimes it fizzles out because it turns out everyone else was right (tunnel boring, solar tiles).

New comment by creshal in "The vi family"

creshal — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:21:39 +0000

Jokes aside, I don't really see the appeal of a demake of helix; it only really makes sense to me as "vim but far more concepts integrated as first-class features rather than addons"; take that away and you have vi with less muscle memory. So, kakuone with the serial numbers filed off.

New comment by creshal in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

creshal — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:54:46 +0000

~90% of the failure modes grub can fix don't exist without grub. I can't remember any time when its needless complexity was actually a net benefit compared to literally any of its alternatives (and between gummiboot/syslinux/efilinux/isolinux/systemd-boot/efistub I've used a lot of them).

New comment by creshal in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

creshal — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:52:11 +0000

Grub is really impressive in how it consistently spent the last 30 years focused on improving everything except the UX of the one workflow 99.99% of its involuntary users need it for (boot linux as reliably as possible, and make it easy to debug when it does not).

New comment by creshal in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

creshal — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:23:38 +0000

Or use UKI and throw the current kernel to /efi/boot/bootx64.efi; there's plenty of solutions to sane bootloader/kernel management if you're willing to invest 15 minutes into the topic and not act like it's scary and complicated (it really is the opposite).

New comment by creshal in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

creshal — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:39:08 +0000

If your definition of refinement is "looks like a Macbook", sure. Personally, if I wanted a laptop that looks like a Macbook, I'd buy a Macbook.