Hacker News: djfergus

New comment by djfergus in "Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse"

djfergus — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:39:02 +0000

In the Dwarkesh podcast about relativity they talked about one of the ways to prove einsteins theory was to observe a total eclipse - stars that should not be visible were predicted to bend their light rays and be able to be seen. Explorers launched grand expeditions in the early 1900s to be the first to witness and prove the phenomenon.

Made me yearn for a more heroic time.

They kept being thwarted by weather, clouds etc and eventually scientists worked out the theory could be easily proven by the red shift of stars by direct observation.

New comment by djfergus in "Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?"

djfergus — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 01:40:54 +0000

>> what does this cost for dell to include?

1) a few cents of components

2) the opportunity cost of selling you a high margin dongle

3) minus the risk of a lost sale if you buy a competitor

New comment by djfergus in "I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux"

djfergus — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:30:20 +0000

Thank you (and the GP post) for the insight.

I wonder if further developing microg or similar would be a better use of resources than Postmarket, Ubuntu touch etc? Would that be a faster path to wider adoption and therefore better chance of challenging the Android/iOS duopoly?

New comment by djfergus in "Investors are having doubts about Elon Musk's grandiose ambitions"

djfergus — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 02:27:22 +0000

https://archive.is/XeR68

New comment by djfergus in "The session you cannot take with you"

djfergus — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:44:02 +0000

“A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples”

Open SDK for AGM AG32 Combo RISC-V/FPGA Chip

djfergus — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:29:11 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/bbenchoff/AGaMEMnon/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48988792

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by djfergus in "GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years"

djfergus — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 05:28:39 +0000

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48826404

GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years

djfergus — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:43:02 +0000

Article URL: https://nebusec.ai/research/ionstack-part-2/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864969

Points: 104

# Comments: 6

New comment by djfergus in "Harman and Dr. Sean Olive are reshaping headphone sound (2025)"

djfergus — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:11:56 +0000

The subject of the article (Dr Sean Olive) has been doing research into actual perceivable differences in audio reproduction - he wrote the book on ideal curves for headphones based on blind tests by trained and untrained listeners. I read his blog religiously decades ago - he really cut through the audiophile snake oil.

Open Source E-Reader

djfergus — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:58:28 +0000

Article URL: https://liliputing.com/crowdfunding-begins-for-open-book-touch-an-open-source-ereader/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48857070

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by djfergus in "We won $92,337 bug bounty using a single kernel 0-day"

djfergus — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 07:49:33 +0000

Wow. A universal, unprivileged local kernel stack use-after-free enabling ~97%-reliable privilege escalation and container escape via a constrained write primitive, control-flow hijack, and ROP

* Introduced in Linux 2.6.39 in 2011

* patched in 7.1 (April 2026)

New comment by djfergus in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

djfergus — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 03:05:19 +0000

"By the end of 2026, we expect CXMT to reach roughly 350 kwspm, which is only modestly below Micron’s estimated ~385 kwspm. This would position CXMT close to becoming the industry’s third-largest memory supplier"

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-...

At current margins their capacity is going to commodity DRAM since their HBM process is not competitive. Will be interesting to see how it pans out

New comment by djfergus in "China's CXMT Is Set to Challenge DRAM Incumbents"

djfergus — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 03:00:36 +0000

Its rational for CXMT to not chase HBM right now, because commodity DRAM currently carries higher margins than its immature HBM process. Curious to see how this influences the consumer RAM shortage medium term (2027).

China's CXMT Is Set to Challenge DRAM Incumbents

djfergus — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:53:09 +0000

Article URL: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-challenge-dram

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681822

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by djfergus in "Usbliter8: an A12/A13 SecureROM Exploit"

djfergus — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:24:17 +0000

Sounds like it’s a low level hardware/firmware hole that can’t be patched.

New comment by djfergus in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

djfergus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:14:30 +0000

The lack of open, replaceable software is the main blocker. The article talks about only keeping the motherboard anyway.

End users don’t need to replace screens, ports and batteries if there is reasonable cost parts and skilled labour available.

I’m happy with a trade off where a device has extreme miniaturisation and water resistance but needs someone with some surface mount soldering skill and the right tools to work on it.

Regardless, many (most?) phones hardware will last longer than the software running on it.

New comment by djfergus in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

djfergus — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:07:11 +0000

Exactly this. Few phones allow bootloader unlock let alone open drivers that can be brought forward to a mainline kernel.

The article seems to refer to a 2023 Pixel Fold as one of their candidates - I guess a good opportunity if those fragile screens get damaged but not a cheap used device otherwise.

Even normal slab pixel devices have limited support for true android replacements like PostmarketOS let alone cheaper 3rd party devices usually running Mediatek/Exnos SOC that have zero open docs or support.

New comment by djfergus in "Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin bypasses, Edge, Opera to follow"

djfergus — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:15:38 +0000

On lower end cpus (N100) chromium/brave benchmarks 10-20% faster than Firefox.

New comment by djfergus in "If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know"

djfergus — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:16:22 +0000

We need a benchmark that tests a models ability to do LLM research.

New comment by djfergus in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

djfergus — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:07:24 +0000

I feel like your analysis is correct and it’s overvalued but employees and insiders have already been selling shares (eg on platforms like Forge) for around the $130-135 IPO price. So there are buyers, question is if there is enough to consume the liquidity of a $75B IPO.