Hacker News: ls65536

New comment by ls65536 in "AMD's Zen 6 Family: Feeding the Beast"

ls65536 — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 19:21:02 +0000

This is amusing since Intel seems to be sort of going in the other direction lately: their efficiency cores are becoming more like their performance cores with each new generation (at least in so far as they are getting wider and more capable of higher clock speeds), and there even seem to be some rumors that the two design trains may get "merged" in the future.

New comment by ls65536 in "Eight Bits of Trust: eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds"

ls65536 — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:07:17 +0000

Another place to search for private key candidates would be the outputs of various common PRNGs when they have been seeded with a timestamp (for all timestamps in, say, the past 20 years).

These would look like nice random values (unlike the ones that were recently compromised), but they would be trivial to generate by anyone who knows the initial inputs (PRNG algorithm, seed, maybe starting byte position, etc.).

New comment by ls65536 in "BIPM decides to stop adding leap seconds to UTC"

ls65536 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:43:45 +0000

It shifts the problem elsewhere, though as you suggest it's sometimes still the same people having to deal with it! For example, anyone relying on celestial navigation who had until now been satisfied with up to 1 second of time error is going to need to start keeping track of UT1-UTC before it starts exceeding those old bounds. This will be possibly within a few years, whenever the next leap second would have been inserted/removed.

New comment by ls65536 in "Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit"

ls65536 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:06:04 +0000

I've set up all NFS mounts within my home LAN over WireGuard partly for this exact reason. The impacts to bandwidth and latency are negligible, and even the increase in CPU usage remains relatively low (at least on non-ancient hardware). This reduces some of my worries about silent data corruption (at least from this potential source).

New comment by ls65536 in "`123456' password used in Danish CPR data breach"

ls65536 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:56:39 +0000

That format looks like it would allow for up to 10k per day. Unless one of those X's is a check digit?

New comment by ls65536 in "Permanent Daylight Saving Time Could Harm Sleep and Mental Health, Analysis Says"

ls65536 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:09:35 +0000

> just have a single timezone

We already have UTC, which is almost always used as the legal basis for all local timezone definitions. In many industries (such as in many aviation and maritime operations), UTC is used almost exclusively to synchronize things worldwide and to avoid any local timezone confusion that might cause problems.

So using UTC works great in situations where participants span multiple timezones. But I think the intuition of maintaining a local clock for local things, with solar noon kept somewhere approximately around clock noon, is still useful, since many day-to-day scheduling concerns remain entirely within one's local timezone. The key is that participants must be aware of their local timezone's offset from UTC. Not having to change their clocks twice a year would hopefully also make this easier.

New comment by ls65536 in "Permanent Daylight Saving Time Could Harm Sleep and Mental Health, Analysis Says"

ls65536 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:35:14 +0000

In this case, the analysis focuses on Canada, which does have a few population centres around the same latitude as London.

New comment by ls65536 in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

ls65536 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:55:45 +0000

Looks like they're making progress toward getting things restarted: "Update #2: The GOES-19 Safehold has been resolved and engineers are working to prepare for restart of the onboard instruments. More information on the recovery timeline will be provided when known." [0]

[0] https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/messages/2026/07/MSG_20260716...

New comment by ls65536 in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

ls65536 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:40:27 +0000

Very unfortunate timing given the ongoing wildfires and associated smoke spreading across eastern North America in recent days.

New comment by ls65536 in "Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?"

ls65536 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 12:08:20 +0000

There's an agreement to do something about leap seconds before 2035, either by allowing DUT1 to exceed its currently specified bounds (this is most likely) or by agreeing to simply not insert/delete leap seconds going forward (this is less likely). For certain bounds on DUT1 and at some timescale, these would be practically the same in terms of their effects on civilization, computing, etc. In any case, a decision will almost certainly be made much sooner than 2035, perhaps even before the next leap second insertion/deletion would need to take place under the present rules.

New comment by ls65536 in "Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?"

ls65536 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:58:31 +0000

Fortunately, in the past couple months, the likelihood of actually needing a negative leap second in the next few years has been trending down. This is based on measurements and predictions done by the IERS, the data for which they publish weekly in their Bulletin A [0]. I've been tracking this data for a while, and their DUT1 predictions have been trending more negative over the past few months, suggesting that the anticipated negative leap second is likely to be delayed, or it may very well not happen at all.

[0] https://datacenter.iers.org/data/latestVersion/bulletinA.txt

New comment by ls65536 in "Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD"

ls65536 — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:03:34 +0000

I have a machine that's on a Debian installation that I've been steadily upgrading, one Debian stable release at a time, since I originally installed it about a decade ago now. At one point I even copied the entire installation to another disk (just a "dd" from its original SATA SSD to a new NVMe one, plus some partition and filesystem resizing), and I've upgraded the CPU/motherboard/RAM at another time, and it just keeps going reliably. It's fun knowing that the origin of that Debian installation predates every hardware component it's presently running on (with the exception of only the case and power supply).

New comment by ls65536 in "How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?"

ls65536 — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:55:28 +0000

They bought P.A. Semi, but it was for their design capability; they never had fabs anyway, and Apple still depends on TSMC and others for manufacturing chips. Apple building fabs to ensure a guaranteed supply of memory (or logic) chips would be an unprecedented level of vertical integration, even for them.

New comment by ls65536 in "Ibuilt a tiny Unix‑like 'OS' with shell and filesystem for Arduino UNO (2KB RAM)"

ls65536 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:52:54 +0000

I made something similar a long time ago partly as a challenge to see what could be done with just 2 KB RAM [0]. It was possible to implement some very basic context switching between two "processes", pipes (okay, I only had a single pipe, and it only worked between certain commands), and some other things like a few built-in games (pong, snake, and a breakout-style game, naturally). I didn't go as far as adding any filesystem functionality though, and ultimately yours does feel more Unix-like overall, but it was a fun little project where you learned to always consider every single byte as precious.

[0] https://github.com/ls4096/avrsysh

New comment by ls65536 in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

ls65536 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:12:09 +0000

~450 square feet, with how many feet in the third dimension? You probably had an order of magnitude more volume than 330 cubic feet there.

So You Want to Work in Hardware

ls65536 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:05:37 +0000

Article URL: https://ourancientfuture.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-work-in-hardware

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231702

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ls65536 in "Show HN: Geo Racers – Race from London to Tokyo on a single bus pass"

ls65536 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:33:59 +0000

This is really fun!

A possible bug though: I managed to finish Inverness to Gibraltar, and the top three spots on the leaderboard somehow had negative time durations!

New comment by ls65536 in "Keeping 20k GPUs healthy"

ls65536 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:28:31 +0000

My intuition would be that constant usage (not exceeding maximum rated capacity/thermals/etc.) should generally result in less wear compared to the more frequent thermal cycling that you might expect from intermittent use, but maybe there's something else going on here too. I suppose this would depend on what exactly the cause of the failure is.

Either way, these are obviously being intentionally sold to be used for non-gaming-type workloads, so it wouldn't be a good argument to state that they're just being (ab)used beyond what they were inteded for...unless somehow they really are being pushed beyond design limits, but given the cost of these things I can't imagine anyone doing this willingly with a whole fleet of them.

New comment by ls65536 in "The percentage of Show HN posts is increasing, but their scores are decreasing"

ls65536 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:14:45 +0000

But if everyone follows this advice, then everything just gets overwhelmed by "hustlers" (and their "shameless spam"), and collectively we're now all worse off because of it. It just turns into yet another tragedy of the commons situation.

I say this as someone who received a lot of great feedback and had some interesting interactions after posting about a project of mine using "Show HN" a few years ago. I didn't need to spam anything to get the attention, but I admit maybe I just got very lucky, or maybe there were just fewer posts to "compete" with at the time (this was before the recent write-everything-with-AI-and-launch-it-out-there craze).

Finally, I'm not making any moral judgments here, and if someone feels they need to do this to get the attention they want, then who am I to tell you otherwise. But we should be aware of what we're giving up when we overall tend to behave in such a way, even if it's the inevitable outcome.

New comment by ls65536 in "RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung"

ls65536 — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 16:32:42 +0000

The total size isn't what matters in this case but rather the total number of files/directories that need to be traversed (and their file sizes summed).