Hacker News: mkj

New comment by mkj in "Physically Immutable Optical Archive Libraries"

mkj — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 11:06:50 +0000

These don't seem really physically immutable, just protected by the firmware of the drives/robot against being written twice. With enough effort couldn't the same laser write _something_ over them again? Maybe optical discs need a hole that gets punched out or something, like the old floppy disk write protect. (And then make that control a physical laser power switch)

New comment by mkj in "Google Pics is generally available starting today"

mkj — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 11:01:41 +0000

So Google Pics is for work, and Google Photos is for personal photos? Got it.

New comment by mkj in "France is banning unsolicited telemarketing calls starting next week"

mkj — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:09:48 +0000

Australia banned telemarketing a while ago, it worked pretty well. The only spam phone calls left are 100% illegal scammers.

https://www.acma.gov.au/telemarketing-and-e-marketing they give out million+ dollar fines which sort things out. Just being a customer doesn't allow them to send marketing, you have to opt in.

New comment by mkj in "ESP32-C6 Power Consumption: Arduino vs. Zephyr vs. ESP-IDF Comparison"

mkj — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:30:04 +0000

This looks like it's doing that? https://github.com/esp-rs/esp-hal/tree/main/examples/async/e...

New comment by mkj in "Some combinatorial applications of spacefilling curves"

mkj — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:51:11 +0000

Aha, thanks. The adsb.exposed maps are excellent, thank you! Really intrigued by the building maps.

New comment by mkj in "Some combinatorial applications of spacefilling curves"

mkj — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:22:16 +0000

A few times I've had an irregular 2D dataset to process and thought "aha, maybe I can be lazy and iterate ordered by a space filling curve coordinates and it'll be more cache effective". But it's never given any improvement. Anyone tried something similar?

New comment by mkj in "How to Block Some of the Bots"

mkj — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:18:46 +0000

There are a lot of urls for the bots to follow. Yesterday's logs had 2.2M unique URLs out of 2.7M requests (more unique than I was expecting!)

Typical traffic:

  https://hg.ucc.asn.au/dropbear-fuzzcorpus/annotate/default/fuzzer-preauth/23f6b74342011f35e657f06e9398ad339360d7e9 
  https://hg.ucc.asn.au/dropbear-fuzzcorpus/comparison/e67e5df225e5/fuzzer-verify/b5f57a2bb85ab7ef957e4979fd202b091de27bd8?revcount=8 
  https://hg.ucc.asn.au/dropbear-fuzzcorpus/log/72337e3dcccf/fuzzer-preauth_nomaths/6b1f390d26b08759983937727e10ab90aa7b03f2?revcount=15 
  https://hg.ucc.asn.au/dropbear-fuzzcorpus/log/4cdb539e4b20/fuzzer-preauth_nomaths/713e5cd4f73276f00a5d6685cc16d4565ad3815a?revcount=96 
  https://hg.ucc.asn.au/dropbear-fuzzcorpus/diff/tip/fuzzer-client_nomaths/540778ea81a915af6e898fd9658c5d9d6594c40a?revcount=128 
  https://hg.ucc.asn.au/dropbear-fuzzcorpus/diff/0ef1e51e583f/fuzzer-client/65ac44bdf4868866def70f40542dd1b5ca447310?revcount=30

(I've moved and kept the fuzz corpus now, but other viewvc repos were suffering similarly)

New comment by mkj in "How to Block Some of the Bots"

mkj — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:25:40 +0000

It's mainly that dealing with them is a hassle, time that could be better spent doing other more useful things.

Over the weekend I got round to turning off some old viewvc (CVS and subversion) and hgweb (Mercurial) web interfaces. They'd been running fine for a decade or two with basic security updates etc, mostly only occasionally visited for real purposes, but that's fine!

But getting 2.7 million requests/day from residential proxy IPs was a bit taxing for the old uwsgi/cgi programs (that's average 30/s), making other sites on the server suffer. It was also getting close to 1TB/month which is the VPS quota.

So I ended up turning them off, one more cut towards the centralised internet. Sure I could put a cache in front, but there are probably millions of combinations of dynamic urls in the VCS tree so caching mightn't help much anyway, not worth the effort. I'm sure the web server could be tuned better too, but again it's a waste of time.

New comment by mkj in "AMD Strix Halo RDMA Cluster Setup Guide"

mkj — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 04:58:51 +0000

openai etc are going to have a higher utilisation of the hardware so can afford it more than small companies/people. Efficient resource use matters more when they're expensive.

New comment by mkj in "Gossamer: a Rust-flavoured language with real goroutines and pause-free memory"

mkj — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:48:04 +0000

Interesting idea, but wouldn't an embedded language normally be interpreted/runtime editable? I guess you could do it shipping a rust compiler, but it'd be big. A bit like Numba?

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

mkj — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:29:07 +0000

getaddrinfo was added after ipv6. Software had to be rewritten to use getaddrinfo.

Prior to that programs used gethostbyname() etc, which only works with ipv4.

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

mkj — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:32:40 +0000

Old Nanostations as a client need to do proxy arp or something, which doesn't handle ipv6. That said it's probably 15 year old hardware. I ended up using a wireguard tunnel across it instead.

New comment by mkj in "The 100k whys of AI"

mkj — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 06:39:39 +0000

Maybe the LLMs need some kind of "coverage" metric so they prioritise new paths? The author would know a thing or two about that.

New comment by mkj in "Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite"

mkj — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:11:46 +0000

I think that's incorrect. Brains/eyes are good at looking for patterns.

New comment by mkj in "Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite"

mkj — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:34:47 +0000

If you have less than hundreds of thousands of points, you can probably get away with drawing individual dots on the map. Computer screens are high res.

New comment by mkj in "Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite"

mkj — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:33:06 +0000

There are excellent examples of the problem in Edward Tufte's "Envisioning Information". Have a look at http://blah.ksteinfe.com/181106/tufte_envisioning_informatio... for a few snippets of it, then buy the book.

New comment by mkj in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

mkj — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:52:43 +0000

I'm wondering who's going to buy pi!

(Edit sorry forgetting names, I mean who's going to buy Earendil). Good luck to Armin, he's done some good stuff.

New comment by mkj in "A Matter Wi-Fi Light Bulb in Rust on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W"

mkj — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:36:47 +0000

It looks like github is just buggy in this case.

New comment by mkj in "Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe"

mkj — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:49:18 +0000

From what distance? I would have thought $1M wouldn't go far

Budget 2026–27: Free Access to Australian Standards Confirmed

mkj — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:03:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.design.org.au/dianews/budget-202627-free-access-to-australian-standards-confirmed

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383458

Points: 3

# Comments: 0