Hacker News: modderation

New comment by modderation in "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"

modderation — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:24:11 +0000

You can always order the pro parts along with a regular display from the regular Framework 13. Some assembly required, but the bits are all interchangeable, so you can have your non-touch display.

Alternatively, you can also "not touch" the touch display :)

New comment by modderation in "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"

modderation — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:10:17 +0000

Intel got a lot of attention during the keynote, but the Ryzen AI 300 series mainboards are available if you want them. It's one of the first few choices in the configuration flow.

New comment by modderation in "Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise"

modderation — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:31:17 +0000

It's either a a Career Limiting Event, or a Career Learning event.

In the case of a Learning event, you keep your job, and take the time to make the environment more resilient to this kind of issue.

In the case of a Limiting event, you lose your job, and get hired somewhere else for significantly better pay, and make the new environment more resilient to this kind of issue.

Hopefully the Wikimedia foundation is the former.

New comment by modderation in "Reliable 25 Gigabit Ethernet via Thunderbolt"

modderation — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 14:05:16 +0000

As a guess, large-scale volumetric or photogrammetric "datasets" could be difficult to stream over lesser interconnects.

New comment by modderation in "Purrtran – ᓚᘏᗢ – A Programming Language for Cat People"

modderation — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:03:18 +0000

Can this be generalized into a higher-level metalanguage? Notably, one called FURTRAN with broader support for other fuzzy creatures?

New comment by modderation in "Proxmox Datacenter Manager 1.0 available"

modderation — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 21:52:23 +0000

Probably with KubeVirt.

Some instructions for Windows 11: https://kubevirt.io/2022/KubeVirt-installing_Microsoft_Windo...

New comment by modderation in "Consistent hashing"

modderation — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 11:08:57 +0000

Ceph storage uses a hierarchical consistent hashing scheme called "CRUSH" to handle hierarchical data placement and replication across failure domains. Given an object ID, its location can be calculated, and the expected service queried.

As a side effect, it's possible to define a logical topology that reflects the physical layout, spreading data across hosts, racks, or by other arbitrary criteria. Things are exactly where you expect them to be, and there's very little searching involved. Combined with a consistent view of the cluster state, this avoids the need for centralized lookups.

The original paper is a surprisingly short read: https://ceph.com/assets/pdfs/weil-crush-sc06.pdf DOI: 10.1109/SC.2006.19

New comment by modderation in "Qwen3-Omni: Native Omni AI model for text, image and video"

modderation — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 06:32:59 +0000

Depends on the setup, but programmatic access to a Gmail account that's used for admin purposes would allow for hijacking via key/password exfiltration of anything in the mailbox, sending unattended approvals, and autonomous conversations with third parties that aren't on the lookout for impersonation. In the average case, the address book would probably get scraped and the account would be used to blast spam to the rest of the internet.

Moving further, if the OAuth Token confers access to the rest of a user's Google suite, any information in Drive can be compromised. If the token has broader access to a Google Workspace account, there's room for inspecting, modifying, and destroying important information belonging to multiple users. If it's got admin privileges, a third party can start making changes to the org's configuration at large, sending spam from the domain to tank its reputation while earning a quick buck, or engage in phishing on internal users.

The next step would be racking up bills in Google's Cloud, but that's hopefully locked behind a different token. All the same, a bit of lateral movement goes a long way ;)

New comment by modderation in "Diffsitter – A Tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs"

modderation — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 13:27:35 +0000

This looks interesting! I've been building a similar tool that uses TreeSitter to follow changes to AST contents across git commits, with the addition of tying the node state to items in another codebase. In short, if something changes upstream, the corresponding downstream functionality can be flagged for review.

The ultimate goal is to simplify the building and maintenance of a port of an actively-maintained codebase or specification by avoiding the need to know how every last upstream change corresponds to the downstream.

Just from an initial peek at the repo, I might have to take a look at how the author is processing their TreeSitter grammars -- writing the queries by hand is a bit of a slow process. I'm sure there are other good ideas in there too, and Diffsitter looks like it'd be perfect for displaying the actual semantic changes.

Early prototype, heavily relies on manual annotations in the downstream: https://github.com/NTmatter/rawr

(yes, it's admittedly a "Rewrite it in Rust" tool at the moment, but I'd like it to be a generic "Rewrite it in $LANG" in the future)

New comment by modderation in "Code and Trust: Vibrators to Pacemakers"

modderation — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:38:40 +0000

It's even more fun when you extend it to negative integers, reals, and the complex plane!

Matt Parker (Stand-up Maths) delves into this in a very approachable manner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghxQA3vvhsk

New comment by modderation in "Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole"

modderation — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:55:30 +0000

I'm guessing it'd look something like this on a 1-dimensional number line:

    --- >   | > >> . << < |   < ---

The dot in the middle would be the singularity, the pipes the event horizon, and the contents would be increasingly warped spacetime that may or may not exist, depending on your interpretation of things.

New comment by modderation in "Wall Street’s ‘Private Rooms’"

modderation — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 09:45:11 +0000

I think it's an interesting thought experiment. What would happen if the stock market were quantized to a blind one trade per-minute granularity?

I suspect this would put everyone on more even footing, with less focus on beating causality and light lag, placing more focus on using the acquired information to make longer-term decisions. This would open things up to anyone with a computer and a disposable income, though it would disappoint anyone in the high-frequency trading field.

New comment by modderation in "Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline"

modderation — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:34:26 +0000

How about "Vidja" -- the .fr domain seems to be available, the top google hit is for an IKEA floor lamp, and it is generally a silly English mispronunciation of "video" (you kids and yer vidja games...) :)

New comment by modderation in "Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'"

modderation — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 11:23:41 +0000

WORM prevents after-the-fact modification, but it isn't very helpful in the case of persistent threats.

The concern is that the tampering has already been committed to the backups. When was the "Break Glass" password last rotated? Is it protected by one or more Yubikeys that were manufactured before they fixed that nasty exploit? What other attack vectors are baked in through malfeasance or human error?

New comment by modderation in "Bang bang! He murdered math! [video]"

modderation — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:31:41 +0000

Perhaps you are the Sheriff? My baby shot me down, but they did not shoot the Deputy.

New comment by modderation in "Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect"

modderation — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:25:56 +0000

That's a useful step, but the options are still Full Cloud Dependency or DIY with Zero Security.

Why haven't they implemented rudimentary access control with printer-side Basic Auth (or the equivalents auth for MQTT and FTP). Add optional SSL support to prevent tampering/MITM on a potentially hostile network, and the unauthenticated access concerns listed in [1] should disappear.

Any problems related to potentially damaging instructions should be best-effort mitigated by the firmware and otherwise indemnified by a "your own fault for using a third-party slicer" clause in the EULA.

Bambu Labs shouldn't need to be in the authentication/authorization path, unless we're actively using their cloud environment.

New comment by modderation in "A solar gravitational lens will be humanity's most powerful telescope (2022)"

modderation — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 13:09:01 +0000

Just as a thought experiment, would it be viable to send up an array of traditional hard drives? Arrange them all for use as reaction wheels, then spin them up to persist/de-stage data while changing/maintaining targets.

Probably worse than sending up well-shielded flash, but I don't think the Seagate/WD warranty expressly forbids this usage.

New comment by modderation in "Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined"

modderation — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 23:43:22 +0000

Who needs a house fire? A bit of quartz glass, a blow torch, and an oxygen supply, and you can convert your unused diamonds into carbon dioxide without losing the house*

Nile Red uses this approach to make Diamond Water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0wvDwSnzcw

* You might still lose the house if you opt for the bigger diamonds.

New comment by modderation in "MongoDB takes a swing at PostgreSQL after claiming wins against rival"

modderation — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 22:44:38 +0000

But is it web-scale?

New comment by modderation in "Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?"

modderation — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 09:13:48 +0000

He also covered this in a more recent talk [1] which has some better audio and a direct feed of the slides. It also comes with an entirely different set of interesting stories for anyone inclined to listen :)

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwEYamjXpA&t=2489s