Hacker News: kvakil

New comment by kvakil in "The Bun Shell"

kvakil — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 05:15:55 +0000

I worked on that Node.js issue. If you can share a repro, I'd love to take a look: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/new?assignees=&labels=...

New comment by kvakil in "SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes"

kvakil — Thu, 25 May 2023 03:26:50 +0000

wow, this is impressive.

I wrote a similar x86-16 assembler in < 512 B of x86-16 assembly, and this seems much more difficult <https://github.com/kvakil/0asm/>. I did find a lot of similar tricks were helpful: using gadgets and hashes. Once trick I don't see in sectorc which shaved quite a bit off of 0asm was self-modifying code, which 0asm uses to "change" to the second-pass of the assembler. (I wrote some other techniques here: <https://kvakil.me/posts/asmkoan.html>.)

bootOS (<https://github.com/nanochess/bootOS>) and other tools by the author are also amazing works of assembly golf.

New comment by kvakil in "Images Created from Prime Numbers"

kvakil — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 04:20:28 +0000

In addition, even if a normal number was used, it's far simpler to describe the data by just using a single number alone. For example, a binary encoding of the data (perhaps using a prefix-free code). Using a normal number and two "positions" is just more complicated.

New comment by kvakil in "Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?"

kvakil — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 04:01:18 +0000

Anecdote: for me the actor model has been the most understandable and useful concurrency primitive I've used. Pi-calculus, which was inspired by the actor model, is similarly elegant.

New comment by kvakil in "Images Created from Prime Numbers"

kvakil — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 03:52:25 +0000

This assumes that pi is a normal number [0], a fact that is widely believed but has not been proven.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

New comment by kvakil in "Browser Games Aren't an Easy Target"

kvakil — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 02:30:39 +0000

jsfuck is hardly obfuscation: remove the first 828 bytes (for "eval(") and the last 3 bytes (for ")()"), and then execute the remaining string, and that gives you the original source code.

Show HN: 0asm: x86 assembler in 512 bytes of x86 machine code

kvakil — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 17:17:31 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/kvakil/0asm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21585920

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by kvakil in "Multiple ways to compute e in Raku"

kvakil — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 21:04:12 +0000

> Maksymilian Piskorowski found that if you happen to have a spare eight 9s, you can compute 𝑒 = (9/9 + 9^(-9^9))^(9^(9^9)), which is accurate to a little over 369 million decimal places.

Sure, because 9/9 = 1 and if you take x = 9^9^9, you get back (1 + x^(-1))^x, i.e. the first formula. It's cute, but I don't know if you could call it a "discovery".

New comment by kvakil in "Tethered Jailbreaks Are Back"

kvakil — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 02:57:01 +0000

Seems likely that the hard reset works on a lower level as it works even if the phone is hung.

New comment by kvakil in "Understanding GCC Builtins to Develop Better Tools [pdf]"

kvakil — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 02:44:45 +0000

Maybe take a look at gg [0]? It seems to solve the problem of slow compilation quite nicely.

[0] https://github.com/StanfordSNR/gg

New comment by kvakil in "Learning to prove theorems via interacting with proof assistants"

kvakil — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 17:34:56 +0000

From the article: "As an extra bonus, the generated proofs tend to be shorter than the ground truth proofs collected in CoqGym."

This feels a little misleading, the paper itself says that the phenomena "... suggests that theorems with longer proofs are much more challenging for the model." It'd be more interesting to see how the automated theorem proving length compares to the manual length for the same proofs (although I'd expect this to be biased downwards, for the same reason).

New comment by kvakil in "The Day I Fell in Love with Fuzzing"

kvakil — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 21:19:04 +0000

how does this compare to oss-fuzz [0]? is the main value proposition that its easier to set up?

[0]: https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/

New comment by kvakil in "Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years"

kvakil — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 19:36:35 +0000

Modern secure messaging systems are typically OTR and have deniability: after the session ends, anybody can forge messages to make it look like they came from you. Sure the messages can become public, but they're no more "proof" than someone saying "X said Y".

New comment by kvakil in "IBM releases Elm-powered app"

kvakil — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 08:35:18 +0000

In French, there is a space before exclamation and question marks. Based on the author's name, I'd also guess that they are French.

New comment by kvakil in "How tech baffled an elderly Congress"

kvakil — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 20:21:01 +0000

I think that an age-based criterion would reflect that younger people (on average) have greater tech literacy. But I don't think Congresspeople reflect the general population, so I agree that using age is probably not the best idea.

New comment by kvakil in "Ruby 2.6"

kvakil — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 20:56:10 +0000

It depends on how you define the modulo operator [0]--there are definitions where (-1)%5 == 4 and definitions where (-1)%5 == -1. Presumably the GP is referring to the former case.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulo_operation#Remainder_cal...

New comment by kvakil in "Raw String Literals Removed From Java 12 as Feature Set Frozen"

kvakil — Sat, 22 Dec 2018 20:08:51 +0000

I believe they're almost certainly referring to Clojure macros

New comment by kvakil in "50 CVEs in 50 Days: Fuzzing Adobe Reader"

kvakil — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 05:38:55 +0000

and just like that, you've convinced me to install it. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. :)

New comment by kvakil in "Tiddlywiki – A non-linear personal web notebook"

kvakil — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 19:36:06 +0000

You might find this interesting: https://unhosted.org/

New comment by kvakil in "Why numbering should start at zero (1982)"

kvakil — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 17:17:42 +0000

Of course the answer is N1 - 3 N2 + 3 N3, since that naturally completes the cubic interpolating polynomial.