Hacker News: murderfs

New comment by murderfs in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

murderfs — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:26:32 +0000

The salt is there to be hygroscopic, they don't want the salt out. The structure is there to keep the salt in.

New comment by murderfs in "Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee"

murderfs — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:24:47 +0000

I mean, so's "Bumfuck, Alaska needs a handful of teachers, therefore we're going to import infinite Indians"

New comment by murderfs in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

murderfs — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 06:43:03 +0000

By that logic, we should eliminate paternity and maternity leave, because why should people without children work to fill in the gaps left by parents?

New comment by murderfs in "I found a seashell in the middle of the desert"

murderfs — Sat, 30 May 2026 22:58:17 +0000

In the repository? https://github.com/Hawzen/I-found-a-seashell-in-the-middle-o...

New comment by murderfs in "What Is a Dickover?"

murderfs — Sat, 30 May 2026 01:03:53 +0000

It isn't anymore, but if you go back a decade or two, it really was that zealous. He really did used to blindly defend Apple (e.g. things like this: https://daringfireball.net/2006/09/open_challenge), but I think he's grown more skeptical of Apple lately.

New comment by murderfs in "A fundamental principle of aeronautical engineering has been overturned"

murderfs — Tue, 26 May 2026 01:21:47 +0000

Instability just means that they don't naturally return to stable flight. Fighter jets benefit from this because when you want to make a maneuver, you're not fighting the plane's natural inclination to stay where it's pointing. You don't need particularly powerful hardware to do this kind of control, quadcopters are an even more obviously inherently unstable example, because any thrust imbalance will immediately make it roll. Quadcopter control loops only need to run at a few hundred hertz to achieve stability.

New comment by murderfs in "Magnifica Humanitas"

murderfs — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:48:07 +0000

The total water usage of the largest concentration of datacenters in the world is only using 10% of the water consumption of the county, about half of which is non-potable reclaimed water that would otherwise be dumped into a river [1], and you think this is a bad thing?

1: https://www.loudounwater.org/commercial-customers/reclaimed-...

New comment by murderfs in "sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library"

murderfs — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:34:06 +0000

I was making a general point about portability, not this library in particular. I wouldn't consider "only x86_64 and aarch64" as being "portable".

New comment by murderfs in "sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library"

murderfs — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:41:45 +0000

> Those are contradictory. Either the code is extremely portable, or it can't support "obscure" platforms, but not both.

I think it's perfectly valid to call code 'extremely portable' without supporting every special snowflake architecture. There's a spectrum from assumptions that hold on everything that isn't some esoteric joke architecture or archaeology to something that I would probably consider required for 'extremely portable'.

I would personally consider something that failed to support anything on this list above big endian as still being extremely portable: you'll build for any serious modern architecture that isn't a DSP.

  - non twos complement integers
  - (int) nullptr != 0
  - segmented addressing
  - non-8 bit char
  - big endian
  - missing floating point

ARM's done a good job of making it so that you can't assume the traditional x86 assumptions of being able to access any pointer unaligned or having sequentially consistent semantics on memory ordering (with the help of compilers getting better at reordering resulting in you needing to have proper semantics on x86 as well).

New comment by murderfs in "SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket"

murderfs — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:18:28 +0000

> This is why, for example, despite the existence of jumbo jets (which have a better mass:payload ration than smaller planes), most passenger flights are not on jumbo jets, because there's just not enough demand on most routes.

Airlines used to use a hub and spoke model where it would make sense to have larger planes between hubs and smaller ones to get to and from the hubs, but consumers strongly preferred direct routing, so it didn't work out. For orbital payloads, most payloads probably do not mind too much if it takes a month or more to boost/deboost themselves to their intended orbits.

New comment by murderfs in "What is a Demand Coop"

murderfs — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:30:35 +0000

> Because when people say “avoid politics” they usually mean it as a derogatory term for “all the disagreements that I dont personally care about” - and conveniently exclude the issues they care about from “politics”.

People use "politics" as shorthand for "things that are divisive issues that split your purported represented class". You're not going to get anyone to join your union if all you do is advocate for things that the vast majority of employees at best don't care about, or worse, disagree with.

New comment by murderfs in "Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15"

murderfs — Thu, 14 May 2026 01:44:06 +0000

> Is Python's GC bad, or are there cyclic reference issues?

Unless you're being pedantic and including reference counting without cycle detection as GC, if your GC has cyclic reference issues, your GC is bad.

> Is it possible to detect cyclic references perfectly?

Yes? That's the entire point of tracing GC. You have some set of root objects that you start with (globals, objects on thread stacks, etc.) and then you mark every object that's reachable from them. Anything that's not reachable is garbage, even if there are cycles within them.

New comment by murderfs in "Debian must ship reproducible packages"

murderfs — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:47:49 +0000

My magic beans have prevented thousands of tiger attacks in top secret underground moon bases, never you mind that there's no way for me to actually prove this.

There's a certain irony in pushing for verifiable builds with completely unverifiable claims.

I've worked at several of the biggest targets for espionage, industrial or otherwise, and to the best of my knowledge, the only thing that's ever been discovered by their reproducible build efforts has been failing hardware on build reproducers

New comment by murderfs in "The Serial TTL connector we deserve"

murderfs — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:35:07 +0000

Better yet, you could add more pins and switch them to using differential pairs to make it extensible for more use cases. While you're at it, you could have pins on both the top and bottom of the connector, and use a pair of sense pins to detect orientation, so that super specialized use cases can use every single pin available on the connector.

  GND TX1+ TX1- VBUS CC1  D+   D-   SBU1 VBUS RX2- RX2+ GND
  GND RX1+ RX1- VBUS SBU2 D-   D+   CC2  VBUS TX2- TX2+ GND

If only you could buy receptacles for this for like five cents a pop...

(If you do this, make sure that you don't send more than 3.3ish V over a pin, and that you're tolerant of 3.3V incoming, so that you don't explode yourself or victim devices if people randomly plug you into things. https://github.com/google/usb-cereal is a reference design for a UART over USB-C SBU adapter used for Pixel phones)

New comment by murderfs in "Debian must ship reproducible packages"

murderfs — Sun, 10 May 2026 07:51:01 +0000

Has there been a single publicly known attack that would have been prevented by this?

New comment by murderfs in "Local privilege escalation via execve()"

murderfs — Sun, 10 May 2026 04:38:29 +0000

Sure, but that's mostly academic: compromise of the user account is game over for any real user. Not actually being Administrator isn't much consolation when the regular user account can extract your cookie jar, record all of your keystrokes and mouse movements, record all desktop video (except for DRM-protected content, heh) etc.

New comment by murderfs in "Local privilege escalation via execve()"

murderfs — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:53:46 +0000

Local privilege escalation is largely irrelevant on Windows because basically no one uses it in a multi-user system, and application sandboxing is effectively nonexistent.

New comment by murderfs in "Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs"

murderfs — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:48:38 +0000

And yet he is.

New comment by murderfs in "Prove you are a robot: CAPTCHAs for agents"

murderfs — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:07:17 +0000

Time is a flat circle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YM9Ereg2Zo

New comment by murderfs in "SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit [pdf] (2017)"

murderfs — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:31:54 +0000

It's pretty unlikely that Meta is actually eavesdropping on your conversations, because it'd be immediately obvious from battery usage. The ability to turn speakers into microphones doesn't help if the speakers aren't actually connected to an ADC, and both of the modern smartphone OSes limit you to on the order of hundreds of samples per second, so it's rather difficult to get anything sensible without either doing a bunch of local analysis or exfiltrating it, both of which would be visible.