Hacker News: ls65536

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).

New comment by ls65536 in "Self-hosting a NAT Gateway"

ls65536 — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:44:59 +0000

> I've seen claims of providers putting IPv6 behind NAT, so don't think full IPv6 acceptance will solve this problem.

I get annoyed even when what's offered is a single /64 prefix (rather than something like a /56 or even /60), but putting IPv6 behind NAT is just ridiculous.

New comment by ls65536 in "Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates"

ls65536 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 22:58:35 +0000

If that's really the case, I wish they would just come out and say it and spare the rest of us the burden of trying to debate such a decision on its technical merits. (Of course, I am aware that they owe me nothing here.)

Assuming this theory is true then, what other GPLv3-licensed "core" software in the distro could be next on their list?

New comment by ls65536 in "Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates"

ls65536 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 22:50:51 +0000

Maybe the thought is that there will be more pressure now on getting all the tests to pass given the larger install base? It isn't a great way to push out software, but it's certainly a way to provide motivation. I'm personally more interested in whether the ultimate decision will be to leave these as the default coreutils implementation in the next Ubuntu LTS release version (26.04) or if they will switch back (and for what reason).

New comment by ls65536 in "Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates"

ls65536 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 22:18:29 +0000

I can certainly understand it for something like sudo or for other tools where the attack surface is larger and certain security-critical interactions are happening, but in this case it really seems like a questionable tradeoff, where the benefits in this specific case are abstract (theoretically no more possibility of any memory-safety bugs) but the costs are very concrete (incompatibility issues; and possibly other, new, non-memory-safety bugs being introduced with new code).

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm otherwise perfectly happy that these experiments are being done, and we should all be better off for it and learn something as a result. Obviously somebody has assessed that this tradeoff has at least a decent probability of being a net positive here in some timeframe, and if others are unhappy about it then I suppose they're welcome to install another implementation of coreutils, or use a different distro, or write their own, or whatever.

New comment by ls65536 in "Qwen3-Next"

ls65536 — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:43:38 +0000

I'm not going to speculate about what might be ahead in regards to Oracle's forecasting of data center demand, but regarding the idea of efficiency gains leading to lower demand, don't you think something like Jevons paradox might apply here?

New comment by ls65536 in "OpenSSH Post-Quantum Cryptography"

ls65536 — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 20:11:49 +0000

The industry definitely seems to be going in this hybrid PQC-classical direction for the most part. At least until we know there's a real quantum computer somewhere that renders the likes of RSA, ECC, and DH no longer useful, it seems this conservative approach of using two different types of locks in parallel might be the safest bet for now.

However, what's notable is that the published CNSA 2.0 algorithms in this context are exclusively of the post-quantum variety, and even though there is no explicit disallowing of the use of hybrid constructions, NSA publicly deems them as unnecessary (from their FAQ [0]):

> NSA has confidence in CNSA 2.0 algorithms and will not require NSS developers to use hybrid certified products for security purposes.

[0] https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Artic...

New comment by ls65536 in "Tuta Launches Post Quantum Cryptography for Email (2024)"

ls65536 — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:13:12 +0000

> until there is actually a quantum computer that can break it

There isn't one yet (at least that the general public knows about), but that doesn't mean we don't need to do anything about it right now. See this problem, for example, which would potentially affect today's encrypted data if it were harvested and saved to storage for the long term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later

New comment by ls65536 in "A rare alignment of 7 planets is about to take place"

ls65536 — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 02:41:52 +0000

There's also a lunar occultation of Mars (which is near opposition itself, making it relatively bright) happening in a few days, and then again in February, which should be visible from parts of the northern hemisphere: https://in-the-sky.org/news.php?id=20250114_16_100

Skymont in Desktop Form: Atom Unleashed

ls65536 — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 13:12:19 +0000

Article URL: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/skymont-in-desktop-form-atom-unleashed

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42479453

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ls65536 in "Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for"

ls65536 — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 12:42:07 +0000

> If you do consider paying for either Wubuntu or LinuxFX, it's worth keeping in mind that in the past, the developer's activation system and registration database have both been investigated and found to be horribly insecure. However, from the database, it looks like some 20,000 people did pay.

Even if one wanted to use it for anything serious without paying or otherwise providing any personal information in the process, this is a huge turnoff.

New comment by ls65536 in "Linux 6.12 Released with Real-Time Capabilities, Sched_Ext, AMD RDNA4 and More"

ls65536 — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:04:10 +0000

It looks like there's also a fix for that nested virtualization bug causing host reboots on Ryzen 7000/8000 CPUs [0]. It's nice to see that the cause appears to be known and that it's being addressed (even if the kernel here is technically not at fault).

Apparently this problem is caused by a CPU erratum (or unsupported functionality?) with some (many?) BIOSes still reporting the broken/unsupported instructions (VMLOAD/VMSAVE) as being available with these CPUs, at least according to some discussion about it on the LKML [1].

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Clear-VMLOAD-VMSAVE-Zen4

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/11/5/1006

New comment by ls65536 in "Do hard things carefully"

ls65536 — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 14:49:12 +0000

For some reason this also made me think of the boundary of the Mandelbrot set...that place where all the interesting structure reveals itself.

New comment by ls65536 in "The unnecessary decline of U.S. numerical weather prediction"

ls65536 — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 23:36:22 +0000

It depends on the type of sailing and where the race will be taking you. The participants in a race such as the Vendée Globe [0] are almost certainly using the likes of synoptic scale models like the GFS and ECMWF to plan their routes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vend%C3%A9e_Globe