Hacker News: leeter

New comment by leeter in "Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated"

leeter — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:10:32 +0000

Did you enjoy your last meal and funeral? Either way glad you got better!

New comment by leeter in "Chevrolet Performance eCrate package (400v/200hp)"

leeter — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:37:18 +0000

Maybe? It's a 400V architecture, and honestly that's my criticism... 400V seems low at this point. Particularly for something requiring an "Authorized Installer" I'd have expected 800V architecture, if not pushing higher. Minimum 600V though... so IMO huge miss on GMs part. I do think GM does have an opportunity if they really wanted to do what you're suggesting and just make drop on chassis for square bodies etc.

New comment by leeter in "Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service"

leeter — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:41:25 +0000

This is why I've said for years: If you want to drive best practices and policy with companies you can only do it with liability. Particularly non-insurable and non-tax deductible liability. If a company can't offload civil or criminal penalties to their insurance company and take the tax write down, they suddenly start caring about it.

That said, this should be used sparingly; as it embeds a behavior deep. If that behavior later no longer makes sense it can be extremely costly to change it later.

New comment by leeter in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

leeter — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:59:05 +0000

When MS removed Solitaire and made it an app, that should have been the sign to move.

When they introduced a mobile first UI onto a desktop OS...

When they forced mandatory Microsoft accounts...

When they started saving files that had no place being in one drive to the cloud by default and charging people for it...

When they announced the worst AI privacy disaster in computing OS history...

When their updates refused to install cleanly and bricked people's computer to the point of hardware damage...

Seriously thinking I might have Stockholm syndrome at this point. To me the best windows would be Windows 11's kernel and libraries with Windows 7's UI and apps. Because it's been all down hill (generally) since there.

New comment by leeter in "Show HN: Mines.fyi – all the mines in the US in a leaflet visualization"

leeter — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:53:48 +0000

Based on the info if you click into them, likely no. I would have expected them to be incidental materials from tunneling, but reading the description that's not the case.

New comment by leeter in "AVX2 is slower than SSE2-4.x under Windows ARM emulation"

leeter — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:46:22 +0000

[removed]

New comment by leeter in "The Holy Grail of Linux Binary Compatibility: Musl and Dlopen"

leeter — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:57:11 +0000

I believe you're thinking of the x86 Hotpatching hook[1], which doesn't exist on x86-64[2] (in the same form, it uses a x86-64 safe one).

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110921-00/?p=95...

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20221109-00/?p=10...

New comment by leeter in "I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great"

leeter — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:06:14 +0000

Almost assuredly, given that 10.0 was released on 32bit PPC... and was built around Carbon, not Cocoa... yeah it's changed just a wee bit.

New comment by leeter in "The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered"

leeter — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:06:50 +0000

I think I said something about the stack efficiency. I was a kid that barely understood out of order execution. Register renaming and the rest was well beyond me. It was also a long time ago, so recollections are fuzzy. But, I do recall is they didn't prompt anything. I suspect the only reason I got the interview is I had done some SSE programming (AVX didn't exist yet, and to give timing context AltiVec was discussed), and they figured if I was curious enough to do that I might not be garbage.

Edit: Jogging my memory I believe they were explicit at the end of the interview they were looking for a Masters candidate. They did say I was on a good path IIRC. It wasn't a bad interview, but I was very clearly not what they were looking for.

New comment by leeter in "The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered"

leeter — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 21:46:28 +0000

I remember failing an interview with the optimization team of a large fruit trademarked computer maker because I couldn't explain why the x87 stack was a bad design. TBF they were looking for someone with a masters, not someone just graduating with a BS. But, now I know... honestly, I'm still not 100% sure what they were looking for in an answer. I assume something about register renaming. memory, and cycle efficiency.

New comment by leeter in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

leeter — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:43:00 +0000

I believe the Academy Awards and a few other things too also influence this. The rules to be eligible still very much favor legacy studios IIRC. But, with this that may change? Hard to say. I know that quite a few Netflix movies have had theatrical runs at random mom and pop theaters in Cali so they could meet eligibility requirements for the various awards.

New comment by leeter in "FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT"

leeter — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:07:20 +0000

Honestly? I expected this to be talking about the MiSTer project FPGA core[1]. That has been tuned so it's capable of running the AREA5150 demo[2] which is an insane challenge (AFAIK the timings of the v20 break that demo). Not saying this isn't cool, but it's definitely not what I was expecting.

[1] https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PCXT_MiSTer

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOmcgp99fEk

New comment by leeter in "Fallout from the AWS outage: Smart mattresses go rogue"

leeter — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:18:58 +0000

I've said for years that any smart thermostat should have a bimetallic backup that controls maximum ranges and acts in the dumbest way possible. Just max temp and min temp for AC and heat. Nothing that should ever be hit... but there nonetheless.

New comment by leeter in "How to stop Linux threads cleanly"

leeter — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 13:12:07 +0000

So there is a reason that in the C++ spec if a std::thread is still joinable when the destructor is called it calls std::terminate[1]. That reason being exactly this case. If the house is being torn down it's not safe to try to save the curtains[2]. Just let the house get torn down as quickly as possible. If you wanted to save the curtains (e.g. do things on the threads before they exit) you need to do it before the end of main and thus global destructors start getting called.

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/thread/~thread.html

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120105-00/?p=86...

New comment by leeter in "How to stop Linux threads cleanly"

leeter — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 15:53:31 +0000

I'm reminded of Raymond Chen's many many blogs[1][2][3](there are a lot more) on why TerminateThread is a bad idea. Not surprised at all the same is true elsewhere. I will say in my own code this is why I tend to prefer cancellable system calls that are alertable. That way the thread can wake up, check if it needs to die and then GTFO.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150814-00/?p=91...

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20191101-00/?p=10...

[3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140808-00/?p=29...

there are a lot more, I'm not linking them all here.

New comment by leeter in "Pwning the Nix ecosystem"

leeter — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:39:50 +0000

Why github didn't is beyond me. Even if something isn't merge clean doesn't mean linters shouldn't be run. I get not running deployments etc. but not even having the option is pain.

New comment by leeter in "Pwning the Nix ecosystem"

leeter — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:28:48 +0000

I don't disagree... but, there is a use case for orgs that don't allow forks. Some tools do their merging outside of github and thus allow for PRs that cannot be clean from a merge perspective. This won't trigger workflows that are pull_request. Because pull_request requires a clean merge. In those cases pull_request_target is literally the only option.

The best move would be for github to have a setting for allowing the automation to run on PRs that don't have clean merges, off by default and intended for use with linters only really. Until that happens though pull_request_target is the only game in town to get around that limitation. Much to my and other SecDevOps engineers sadness.

NOTE: with these external tools you absolutely cannot do the merge manually in github unless you want to break the entire thing. It's a whole heap of not fun.

New comment by leeter in "DXGI debugging: Microsoft put me on a list"

leeter — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 23:40:15 +0000

You are correct, I need to edit my post because they both boot up in unreal mode. The 32bit Segment limit is an unreal mode thing.

New comment by leeter in "DXGI debugging: Microsoft put me on a list"

leeter — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 23:17:19 +0000

> it was only very recently that your 64 core CPU stopped pretending to be an 8086 during initial boot

Still Does[1]:

>> After a RESET or INIT, the processor is operating in 16-bit real mode. Normally within real mode, the code-segment base-address is formed by shifting the CS-selector value left four bits. The base address is then added to the value in EIP to form the physical address into memory. As a result, the processor can only address the first 1 Mbyte of memory when in real mode.

The UEFI hands off the boot CPU to the OS loader (GRUB/NTLoader etc) in long mode. But when the OS brings up any CPU that is not the initial bootstrap CPU via the interprocessor interrupt... that CPU comes up in 16bit* real mode.

[1]: https://docs.amd.com/v/u/en-US/40332-PUB_4.08 (the intel one says the same thing last I checked, Intel has discussed changing this... but AFAIK has not yet)

* This is a lie... note how the quote references EIP and not IP? That's because it's actually booting up in Unreal mode. Hence the initial instruction run is actually at 0xFFFF_FFF0 IIRC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_mode

New comment by leeter in "A computer upgrade shut down BART"

leeter — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 16:39:02 +0000

They would not, the term you're looking for is "Loading Gauge"[1]. The US freight loading gauge is one of the larger ones.

That said there are other reasons a subway could end up being subject to Federal Railroad Administration[2] rules. I will note that I'm not an expert on those rules. But, generally passenger rail systems in the US are subject to Positive Train Control[3] or equivalent. It appears BART is actually one of the earliest adopters of Automatic Train Control[4], which appears to be a PTC equivalent. If not more automated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loading_gauge

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Railroad_Administratio...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit#Automat...