Hacker News: matja

New comment by matja in "Is x86 ready to ACE it?"

matja — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:35:12 +0000

That's not very efficient

New comment by matja in "Is x86 ready to ACE it?"

matja — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:42:58 +0000

Encode every 0 as 10 - then decode every 10 back to 0. Or more efficiently, the first 0 as 10, then decode the the first 10 as 0.

New comment by matja in "OAuth for all"

matja — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:28:23 +0000

OAuth is designed so that an end-user never needs to see an API key (OAuth refresh/access token) or even know what one is. When it is implemented to the spec, that happens well.

I think that most of the "just give me an API key" comments are from a <1% of end-users (developers) that know what an API key is, and are facing a broken OAuth implementation.

New comment by matja in "We’re making Bunny DNS free"

matja — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:45:00 +0000

Amazon Route 53 is $0.40 per million DNS queries - which would terrify me if I used it, considering a typical 10Gbit server connection hosted at a unscrupulous ASN with no egress IP filtering is capable of sending a million DNS requests per second from random spoofed IP addresses.

New comment by matja in "Google Hits 50% IPv6"

matja — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 17:10:02 +0000

> I feel like IPv6 is overengineered

In what metrics? IPv6 is more simple to implement than IPv4. In Linux 7.1.1 IPv4 is 84kLOC, IPv6 is 59kLOC.

New comment by matja in "AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs"

matja — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:26:28 +0000

I can think of a few reasons:

There wasn't any such features for x86 when the patch was created, other than AES-NI.

Many hardware platforms that have TPM, have it connected via a low-bandwidth LPC bus which would have nowhere near enough bandwidth for demand decryption/encryption of memory pages.

Hardware vendors can apparently turn these security features off as they wish, even if the hardware supports and was shipped with it :)

New comment by matja in "AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs"

matja — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:50:34 +0000

There was a patch called Tresor that did this, but I don't think it was updated for a long time.

You have to store the encryption key in CPU registers and ensure it's not saved to RAM during task switching or power suspend operations. Tresor used x86-specific debug registers for it, but you could potentially use unused SIMD registers if you masked-off the CPUID bits for them and disabled them for access by user-space.

But securing against attacks from a hostile hypervisor or a server provider needs more than just memory encryption, because they can intercept any part of the boot process and control the hardware/firmware that can lie to your kernel.

To counter that you'd need something like AMD SEV(ES/SNP) with measured boot and remote attestation to switch the only thing you trust to the CPU manufacturer (best you can do IMO).

New comment by matja in "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]"

matja — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:59:59 +0000

Apt comic: https://www.workchronicles.com/p/comic-prevention-vs-cure

New comment by matja in "Show HN: Gravity – interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein"

matja — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:06:18 +0000

> well that is fortunate

I think that was one of the arguments of the Anthropic principle [1], that there doesn't appear to be any reason why there are 3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension, or why the fundamental constants are what they are - but if they weren't then there wouldn't be anyone to exist to say "well that is fortunate".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle#Dimensions...

New comment by matja in "Corrupting a ZFS File on Purpose"

matja — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:24:20 +0000

You're right that the ECC validation is very robust, but that only validates one small part - that the drive is reading what it has previously written, not that the data was correct when it came in to the drive, correctly handled by the firmware, or even written in the correct place (LBA) on the drive.

There's been times when some features of entire models of drives have been disabled in the Linux kernel because of buggy firmware that silently writes bad data (with correct ECC), so reading it back is successful from both the drive's and the OS's block driver views.

I was hit by this myself with the queued TRIM command firmware bug that affected all Samsung EVO 840 SSDs (Linux kernel commit 9a9324d3969678d44b330e1230ad2c8ae67acf81 if you want to look into the history) - the drive didn't report any errors, but ZFS kept reporting corruption, and kept on fixing it in the background.

New comment by matja in "There's still no point in gigabit broadband"

matja — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 22:40:23 +0000

Because I would have expected for game development that it would be rare for majority of the large assets (art, textures, 3d meshes, video, sound, music) to change multiple times per day, so - to me - sounds like would perfectly suit a differential/incremental sync protocol, rather than treating everything as a large packed blob. At least that was the case for the game development I did.

New comment by matja in "There's still no point in gigabit broadband"

matja — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:30:05 +0000

I play games but I suppose I don't download a 100GB game frequently enough for it to matter to myself.

New comment by matja in "There's still no point in gigabit broadband"

matja — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:27:55 +0000

True, but that is transport (TLS). I was asking about the underlying data.

New comment by matja in "There's still no point in gigabit broadband"

matja — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:17:30 +0000

Please can you enlighten the ignorant that are also gamers? :)

New comment by matja in "There's still no point in gigabit broadband"

matja — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:16:26 +0000

Is that 80-100GB of unique data multiple times per day? Is it encrypted with a different key every time? Sounds very interesting.

New comment by matja in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

matja — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:58:45 +0000

One side-effect, is that the separate .mmproj file (Multi-Modal Projection encoder) is no longer needed, when using the model with llama.cpp etc.

New comment by matja in "OpenRouter raises $113M Series B"

matja — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:08:58 +0000

+1 this. Example: Using Mistral TTS voice cloning appears to be not possible via the "providers" pass-through object in the OpenRouter API because some parameters are always forwarded which conflict with the provider's parameters.

New comment by matja in "I put a datacenter GPU in my gaming PC"

matja — Sun, 31 May 2026 14:38:27 +0000

The latest Raspberry Pi 5 has one 32-bit channel (2x 16-bit subchannels) of LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM giving 17.1GB/s of bandwidth, 52x less than this GPU. Never mind lacking the CUDA and Tensor cores, so the FP16 performance is 102x less (307 GFLOPS vs 31.4 TFLOPS). So for £200, there's absolutely no comparison for this specific use-case.

New comment by matja in "I put a datacenter GPU in my gaming PC"

matja — Sun, 31 May 2026 14:26:53 +0000

The AMD MI250X GPUs are also interesting - 128GB of HBM2E at 3TB/s, sometimes you see them second-hand for under $1k, the catch obviously is that it needs an OAM socket. Never seen an easy way to hook them up to a regular mainboard.

New comment by matja in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

matja — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:18:28 +0000

> canonicality matters — for signatures, content-addressing, or any kind of “two implementations must agree on the bytes” property

If you don't do this properly, you end up with things like: - SAML XSW attack due to XML signature wrapping - ASN.1 BER/DER signature forgery - Bitcoin transaction malleability attacks