Hacker News: kam

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

kam — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:32:48 +0000

> Being in the public domain is not a license; rather, it means the material is not copyrighted and no license is needed. Practically speaking, though, if a work is in the public domain, it might as well have an all-permissive non-copyleft free software license. Public domain material is compatible with the GNU GPL.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain

New comment by kam in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

kam — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:20:22 +0000

And for Rust, https://github.com/kevinmehall/nusb

New comment by kam in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

kam — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:16:24 +0000

USB devices cannot directly address host memory like PCIe or FireWire, but the XHCI controller does DMA to/from host memory, and most USB device controllers have some kind of DMA between USB and the device's RAM.

New comment by kam in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

kam — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:11:20 +0000

No need to pretend to be HID. Windows has WinUSB for userspace USB drivers that don't need special signing.

New comment by kam in "We rewrote our Rust WASM parser in TypeScript and it got faster"

kam — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:10:25 +0000

No, serde-wasm-bindgen implements the serde Serializer interface by calling into JS to directly construct the JS objects on the JS heap without an intermediate serialization/deserialization. You pay the cost of one or more FFI calls for every object though.

https://docs.rs/serde-wasm-bindgen/

New comment by kam in "CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root"

kam — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:57:54 +0000

Send a message to a socket-activated daemon running as a UID with write access to the password database.

New comment by kam in "Solo ASIC tapeout on a budget: detailed write up"

kam — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 02:25:06 +0000

See also Luke Wren's Mastodon thread on taping out a RISC-V chip in two weeks: https://types.pl/@wren6991/115572086565318699

New comment by kam in "Android's sideloading limits are its most anti-consumer move"

kam — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:41:31 +0000

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/09/lets-talk-...

> Android Studio is unaffected because deployments performed with adb, which Android Studio uses behind the scenes to push builds to devices, is unaffected.

New comment by kam in "Show HN: Traceroute Visualizer"

kam — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:45:22 +0000

The calls to the ipinfo.io API are blocked by Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection. No results for Location or ISP without turning that off.

New comment by kam in "Docker Hub Is Down"

kam — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 23:54:12 +0000

> Is there a mirror registry with all the same basic images?

https://gallery.ecr.aws/

New comment by kam in "OrioleDB Patent: now freely available to the Postgres community"

kam — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 20:18:32 +0000

You could put it under a "PostgreSQL OR Apache-2.0 at your option" dual-license, so all contributors give you their code under both licenses, instead of needing to re-license later. The Rust project does this (MIT OR Apache-2.0) to get the patents clause from Apache while retaining compatibility with MIT and GPL.

New comment by kam in "Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android"

kam — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 03:52:02 +0000

That's a bad analogy. No one is complaining about Google providing Android security updates.

This is like a car manufacturer preventing the installation of all unapproved aftermarket accessories by claiming they're protecting you from a stalker installing a tracker on your car.

New comment by kam in "Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords"

kam — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:18:32 +0000

The browser that initiated the request is under the control of BAD in step 3.

New comment by kam in "OSS Rebuild: open-source, rebuilt to last"

kam — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:58:04 +0000

Nixpkgs pulls source code from places like pypi and crates.io, so verifying the integrity of those packages does help the Nix ecosystem along with everyone else.

New comment by kam in "Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141"

kam — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 15:20:12 +0000

What improvements does WebGPU bring vs WebGL for things like Potree?

New comment by kam in "Show HN: Icepi Zero – The FPGA Raspberry Pi Zero Equivalent"

kam — Sat, 31 May 2025 03:12:40 +0000

The examples in the repo are using the open-source yosys + nextpnr tooling.

New comment by kam in "I use zip bombs to protect my server"

kam — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 23:23:27 +0000

No, compression formats are not Turing-complete. You control the code interpreting the compressed stream and allocating the memory, writing the output, etc. based on what it sees there and can simply choose to return an error after writing N bytes.

New comment by kam in "TLS certificate lifetimes will officially reduce to 47 days"

kam — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 19:34:10 +0000

At least that sounds like it would be a more interesting story than the one where the person who quit a year ago didn't document all the places they manually installed the 2-year certificate.

New comment by kam in "New USPTO Memo Makes Fighting Patent Trolls Even Harder"

kam — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 20:07:38 +0000

I think the idea is that if an LLM trained prior to the patent date can reproduce the invention, then either the idea is obvious or there was prior art in the training set; either way the patent is invalid.

New comment by kam in "Google Pixel 4a's old firmware is gone, trapping users on buggy battery update"

kam — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 19:13:47 +0000

I also looked around AOSP and found the commit for the battery alert icon [1], but no kernel source.

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...