Hacker News: denzil

New comment by denzil in "Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them"

denzil — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:14:51 +0000

> So yes, it mostly gets done for (components of) planes, spacecraft, medical devices, etc.

I have to disagree here. All of these you mentioned have regularly bugs. Multiple spacecraft got lost because of these. For planes there's not so distant Boeing 737 MAX fiasco (admittedly this was bad software behavior caused by sensor failure). And medical devices, the news about their bugs semi-regularly pop up. So while the software for these might do a bit better than the rest, they certainly are not anywhere close to being bug free.

And same goes for specifications the software is based on. Those aren't bug-free either. And writing software based on flawed specification will inevitably result in flawed software.

That's not to say we should give up on trying to write bug free software. But we currently don't know how to do so.

New comment by denzil in "“Car Wash” test with 53 models"

denzil — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:24:44 +0000

Unlike the car question, where you can assume the car is at home and so the most probable answer is to drive, with the machines it gets complicated. Since the question doesn't specify if each machine makes one part or if they depend on each other (which is pretty common for parts production). If they are in series and the time to first part is different than time to produce 5 parts, the answer for 100 machines would be the time to produce the first part. Where if each machine is independent and takes 5 minutes to produce single part, the time would be 5 minutes.

New comment by denzil in "Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?"

denzil — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:36:59 +0000

Kinda related question, but is code really just a math? Is it possible to express things like user input, timings, inteerupts, error handling, etc. as math?

New comment by denzil in "Where's Firefox going next?"

denzil — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 06:01:38 +0000

I wonder, if these problems aren't Ubuntu fault, since it forces snap version of Firefox on you. I had Firefox crashing repeatedly on me with the snap version. Maybe switching to Firefox apt repo would help? (I tried the repo, but before I had chance to test it properly, I found I could use Debian instead of Ubuntu and reinstalled immediately.)

New comment by denzil in "I made a chair"

denzil — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:11:00 +0000

When it comes to woodworking, I quite enjoyed watching some of the videos of Granpa Amu on youtube. When I seen him make table from one piece of wood, it felt like magic.

Link for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/@GrandpaAmu

New comment by denzil in "Using uv and PEP 723 for Self-Contained Python Scripts"

denzil — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 09:11:34 +0000

For this case, it might be easier to package the script using pyinstaller. That way, she can just run it. Packaging it that way is more work on your side though.

New comment by denzil in "If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown"

denzil — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 07:36:25 +0000

I wish. If you live in any country that uses more than ASCII, then certainly not since forever. I mean, just for my language there were 7 different encodings (according to Wikipedia, possibly more) before Unicode era. When you want to read these it's solvable problem, but still it is extra work to deal with it. Now that we have UTF-8 as de-facto standard, it is much better, but there are still problems. Like when you use Japanese and it gets displayed as Chinese (same characters are different glyphs depending on language).

New comment by denzil in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)"

denzil — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 07:43:48 +0000

I have been working in my spare time on Japanese vocabulary learning app and just yesterday finally convinced myself to publish the sources: https://github.com/d3nzil/gaku

Be warned it's in early stages, difficult to use and code is big ball of mud. But the basic functionality works, so maybe it will be already useful for someone. And I have been using it and working on it consistently, so hopefully it'll only get better.

New comment by denzil in "QwQ: Alibaba's O1-like reasoning LLM"

denzil — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 10:21:37 +0000

While Sally is usually girl's name, the question never states that. So Sally could be actually a boy and in that case Sally would have two sisters.

New comment by denzil in "How and why to make a /now page on your site"

denzil — Wed, 22 May 2024 12:02:24 +0000

Usually having index.html in /now would behave as if the /now was the page. Other index.extension files (like index.php) might also work depending on the server configuration.

New comment by denzil in "The Eclipse via Satellite"

denzil — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 13:31:09 +0000

Another eclipse video, this time from Starlink satellite: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1bz9ltv/solar_eclip...

New comment by denzil in "IrfanView"

denzil — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 06:29:12 +0000

Windows now have OpenSSH client (and server) available as optional features. Together with the new terminal the ssh client seems to be working fine. Personally I usually opt in to use the ssh in WSL as I keep it installed on all my Windows machines.

New comment by denzil in "Red Hat to author new Linux driver for Nvidia GPUs in Rust"

denzil — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 07:37:21 +0000

I'm not sure if it's different for Nvidia, but the Gamer Nexus video about Intel drivers suggest a lot of the work getting good performance is done on the driver side for all GPU vendors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3BGu3vixk

New comment by denzil in "Coastline paradox"

denzil — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 08:24:21 +0000

Of course, if you are using tape to measure your weight, you are using the wrong tool for the job.

New comment by denzil in "Satellite guided to assisted crash in Atlantic in world first"

denzil — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 11:04:51 +0000

The satellite orbited at 320 km. At that altitude the atmosphere drag is non-negligible, so it had to burn fuel to stay there. So the life was limited by how much fuel it had and that is limited by launch vehicle capabilities. If the launch cost get lower, I imagine refueling might become option, but we are not there yet (except for ISS, but that is different case).

New comment by denzil in "Stanford’s Alpaca shows that OpenAI may have a problem"

denzil — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 07:59:52 +0000

Even that is not needed. There is enough people that want open source ChatGPT clone to create the dataset from scratch by themselves. The Open Assistant community actually already created enough training data for the initial model training and the data will be released under open source license. And from what I played with the initial model, it looked promising (though not anywhere close to GPT 3.5 yet).

New comment by denzil in "New cognitive skills in the age of AI tailored information"

denzil — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 10:04:09 +0000

The folks making Open Assistant [1] (opensource ChatGPT clone) gathered enough data to start initial training, so hopefully there will be something to play with soon.

[1] https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant

New comment by denzil in "We cut our CI pipeline execution time in half"

denzil — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 17:34:20 +0000

My usual strategy is to ensure that the lengthy parts are executed only once. So for example one of the lengthy parts is environment setup for me too. So what I did is to put as much as possible on the docker image I build and then I start tests from image mostly ready to run. Of course something similar can be done during runtime. If starting the software you test takes long time, you could set it up only once and run multiple tests without tearing down the setup. Of course this has disadvantage of having possibly tainted environment and there is risk of making the tests depend on previous state. On the other hand this could also help discover problems that are hidden by always running tests on clean slate, so it's a tradeoff. And I have to note that I mostly do integration testing, so the long parts are probably in different places than for unit testing.

New comment by denzil in "Blink virtual machine now supports running GUI programs"

denzil — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 10:56:06 +0000

Not sure if it helps in your case, but you also can access wsl disk from windows side. This could give better performance for some uses.

New comment by denzil in "G-3PO: A protocol droid for Ghidra, or GPT-3 for reverse-engineering"

denzil — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 06:59:11 +0000

Very nice. And it makes me wonder what would be the result if the GPT was asked to point out security problems in the code.