Hacker News: edrobap

New comment by edrobap in "Welcome to the Strip Mining Era of OSS Security"

edrobap — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:12:11 +0000

I had done a fair bit of reverse-engineering-jar-files in the pre-LLM era for various reasons. The biggest problem with decompiled java files was naming. The original variable names, class names etc were not retained and the decompiler would use some alphanumeric series. That'd make reading code very hard. Curious how the current LLMs are able to address this. Maybe it's able to figure out how the class, variable etc is used and name it accordingly. (All this is assuming the original code itself was readable because there are enough bad programmers)

New comment by edrobap in "What’s the origin of the phrase “big data doesn’t fit in excel”?"

edrobap — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 15:03:07 +0000

It amuses me how the low limit nature of Excel has affected the ecosystem around it. Apache POI, which is a popular library to operate on Excel files, has a weird 4GB limit [1] on uncompressed file size.

throw new IllegalArgumentException("Max entry size is bounded [0-4GB], but had " + maxEntrySize);

[1] https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/poi/tags/REL_5_0_0/src/ooxml/j...

New comment by edrobap in "Yandex said it caught an employee selling access to users' inboxes"

edrobap — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 11:38:37 +0000

All 3 ways make sense. The dump and session token ways look cleaner from Yandex employees’ perspective. Although, none of the three should require a password change for the compromised user account. At no point, users password or hash of the password gets shared.

New comment by edrobap in "Yandex said it caught an employee selling access to users' inboxes"

edrobap — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 17:53:34 +0000

> Yandex officials also said they re-secured the compromised accounts and blocked what appeared to be unauthorized logins. They are now asking impacted account owners to change their passwords.

I’m curious how access was provided to these sold accounts. The password change implies the passwords were shared and that means plan text password were available to admins!?

New comment by edrobap in "The Mutated Virus Is a Ticking Time Bomb"

edrobap — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 11:36:22 +0000

> This increased transmission could be due to chance or founder effects—meaning one variant just happened to get somewhere before the other variants and then got “lucky”; it was early, rather than more transmissible. It could be due to changed behavior among people—quarantine fatigue, less masking—leading to more rapid spread. However, given the current evidence, along with the specifics of the mutation, it’s getting harder to assume that those other explanations are more likely than the simple proposition that this is truly a more transmissible variant.

There is a chance that the hyper growth of the mutated virus is not scalable.

New comment by edrobap in "Ask HN: Why does print (0.1 and 0.1 and 0.1 == 0.3) evaluate to False in Python?"

edrobap — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 11:21:07 +0000

Explanation for this behaviour is explained here - https://docs.python.org/3/library/decimal.html

New comment by edrobap in "TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem"

edrobap — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 07:52:47 +0000

I have seen this behaviour repeatedly. Having to many “task windows” makes it difficult to focus. Similar to having to many tasks in Asana or emails in my Inbox. Prioritisation is the only option to come out of this. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to tag priority with the “task windows”. And that’s the reason I daily browse through all windows and close the ones that are not urgent.

New comment by edrobap in "They want us to be compliant, not secure"

edrobap — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 15:53:26 +0000

> SOC3 facility, located 25 feet below street level in 8 foot thick concrete walls

One of objectives for encryption at rest is shredding. The drives may not remain in the secure facility after the end of life.

> your files are distributed in pieces across millions of drives throughout the data center

Distributing data could actually secure it if individual pieces are meaningless.

New comment by edrobap in "Some Git internals"

edrobap — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 05:34:33 +0000

Branching is more of an art. With the kind of flexibility git provides, one can get lost in the convention to follow. I have found this useful For a small team working on app development -

https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

New comment by edrobap in "Ask HN: What helps you deal with burnout?"

edrobap — Sat, 19 Dec 2020 05:42:42 +0000

Working on your intrinsic motivation needs - relatedness, autonomy, and competence - has always helped me when it comes to burnout, failures, and, in general, feeling of things not going your way. AFAIU, you probably have a good autonomy in terms of "how" you do the tech stuff as long as it works. Embrace your autonomy and have a plan for the other two.