Hacker News: mgdm

New comment by mgdm in "/dev/null: social network for developers"

mgdm — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 21:46:45 +0000

New comment by mgdm in "Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient"

mgdm — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 20:29:28 +0000

I have been meaning to do it for ages! I got as far as finding a paper on the topic and reading it and then forgetting all about it. Nice work.

New comment by mgdm in "The HP Printer USB Sticker Trick Also Works for Thermaltake PSUs"

mgdm — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 10:47:34 +0000

I think it's something along the lines of there being a model of HP printer which was advertised as being wifi-only, and apparently had no USB port, but if you removed a strategically-placed sticker you'd find this was a lie.

New comment by mgdm in "The SHA256 for this sentence begins with: one, eight, two, a, seven, c and nine."

mgdm — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 19:28:24 +0000

Something that I'm not seeing mentioned in these comments (I may just have missed it) is that you can precompute the hash of the static part of the string and then extend it with the numbers in a loop, saving some cycles. This is because the full hex representation of a SHA hash gives you the entire internal state of the algorithm. This can lead to security vulnerabilities:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_extension_attack

New comment by mgdm in "413. The Isle of Luing"

mgdm — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 22:04:37 +0000

"Knock Nah Heard", I think?

New comment by mgdm in "Review of James Coglan’s Building Git"

mgdm — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 21:55:50 +0000

Perhaps Crafting Interpreters?

https://craftinginterpreters.com/

New comment by mgdm in "Review of James Coglan’s Building Git"

mgdm — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 21:26:43 +0000

FWIW, the author's name is Coglan, not Cogland.

New comment by mgdm in "Linux preparing to disable drivers for Microsoft’s RNDIS protocol"

mgdm — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 21:40:49 +0000

I was concerned that this might remove USB Ethernet support entirely, but I believe that the protocol prefered for this on Linux is called CDC-ECM:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65321405/linux-cdc-ecm-d...

This may not help if the objective is to connect to a Windows host, though.

New comment by mgdm in "Ask HN: Intercepting HTTPS – How can we trust anything?"

mgdm — Sat, 25 Dec 2021 10:57:20 +0000

I don’t believe any modern browser supports HPKP any more, due to how hard it was to set up and operate.

New comment by mgdm in "Htmlq: like jq, but for html"

mgdm — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 16:12:58 +0000

Exactly this! I’ll fix it after work.

New comment by mgdm in "Htmlq: like jq, but for html"

mgdm — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 15:06:25 +0000

Hah. Yeah. I had another account for a little while but then HN started to let me reset the password for this one quite recently, so here I am.

New comment by mgdm in "Htmlq: like jq, but for html"

mgdm — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 13:53:32 +0000

I just wanted to be slightly more descriptive and less likely to collide with other tools.

Systemd Socket Activation

mgdm — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 16:25:59 +0000

Article URL: https://mgdm.net/weblog/systemd-socket-activation/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27884413

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by mgdm in "Avoiding Complexity with Systemd"

mgdm — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 20:18:48 +0000

It's not really a binding. It doesn't link to anything in systemd, it's just aware of the convention used by systemd to pass the file descriptors into the process. The actual code being executed from that repository is around 60 lines, I guess:

https://github.com/coreos/go-systemd/blob/main/activation/li...

I just used that rather than writing it myself because it felt like it didn't add much to the story. Also the code was actually written on macOS, it still runs fine without systemd.

Edit: I'd be quite interested to see if passing file descriptors in this way would be a goal in, for example, the proposed Alpine service manager. A quick scan of the proposal didn't show me anything obvious, but I'll go and read it in more detail.

Building a GSM network with Open Source

mgdm — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 18:20:21 +0000

Article URL: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Building-a-GSM-network-with-open-source-1476745.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3757940

Points: 4

# Comments: 0