Hacker News: sgjohnson

New comment by sgjohnson in "Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows"

sgjohnson — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:30:03 +0000

This is awesome. I take it your plans for the next weekend include actually cleanrooming the driver so you can skip running it in a linux container? =P

New comment by sgjohnson in "Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot"

sgjohnson — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:44:25 +0000

"humans can read"

lol. Barely.

New comment by sgjohnson in "Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete"

sgjohnson — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 02:23:22 +0000

reminded me of the PowerPoint Turing Machine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8

New comment by sgjohnson in "How to Survive 3 Years in North Korea as a Foreigner"

sgjohnson — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:59:49 +0000

>I was fascinated to learn while visiting they consider themselves ‘at war’

fun fact, Japan and Russia are technically in a state of war too. The World War II hasn't ended. They have never signed a treaty over the Kuril Islands, and they both claim them.

New comment by sgjohnson in "Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach"

sgjohnson — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:30:04 +0000

Yes. I'm an avid Dota 2 player. I used to play the remastered CoD MWs too, and had a Counter-Strike phase as well.

Cheaters using external tools in Dota are rare. Smurfs are a much bigger problem than scripters/maphackers.

In my experience, MW and CS aren't that bad. I see a cheater only about once in 20 games.

I also play online chess. No kernel level anticheat is going to help you there.

New comment by sgjohnson in "Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach"

sgjohnson — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:02:44 +0000

I’m actually surprised how a lot of commenters here are defending kernel-level anticheat.

New comment by sgjohnson in "The Boeing 747 begins its final descent"

sgjohnson — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:31:21 +0000

> the 747 is the only commercial jet that deserves to be called beautiful

Concorde?

New comment by sgjohnson in "TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP"

sgjohnson — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:42:46 +0000

Someone did a Minecraft server in pure bash.

https://sdomi.pl/weblog/15-witchcraft-minecraft-server-in-ba...

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

sgjohnson — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:32:32 +0000

Evidently, at some point money just stops being real. Also, it's not even $60b. It's a 100% stock deal.

The markets have quite literally given Elon a carte blanche. Can it last forever? I doubt it.

New comment by sgjohnson in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

sgjohnson — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:12:13 +0000

> Then I imagined the real-but-unknowable chance it was all set up by some kid just getting into computers, just seeing what’s possible

if this is the case, then I'd say that the best-case scenario happened. They had an expensive learning exercise. They won't forget these $2k.

New comment by sgjohnson in "The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography"

sgjohnson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:21:16 +0000

>For me a number station needs sends a message to be a number station, not a key.

We don't know that it's a key that's being sent. For all we know, it could be just random data. Obviously it's most likely not random data, but ciphertext. Either way, we have no idea what the message is.

New comment by sgjohnson in "The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography"

sgjohnson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:50:47 +0000

> GPS was always a dual use system

It wasn't. It was going to be a military-only system, until KAL007 presented the obvious life-saving civilian case.

But yes, the title of this article might as well read "Satellite system developed for military use is being used for a military purpose."

New comment by sgjohnson in "Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux"

sgjohnson — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:30:37 +0000

>Sequential throughput: ~1.3 GB/s

sounds VERY low, also, wouldn't random read/write speed be MUCH more relevant here?

New comment by sgjohnson in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

sgjohnson — Sat, 30 May 2026 04:01:23 +0000

> Rosetta 2's retirement announcement was when I realized I won't buy another Mac, I'm not interested in a computer that is preoccupied with stopping me from running software.

This is the 3rd time this has happened in roughly 2 decades by the way.

ppc/ppc64 -> x86_64 x86_64 -> x64 only x64 -> arm64

I much prefer Apple just forcing the developers to update their apps. Perhaps it’s just me though.

New comment by sgjohnson in "GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits"

sgjohnson — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:45:18 +0000

Microsoft hasn’t particuarly cared about consumers pirating Windows for more than a decade. I’m pretty sure they make close to 0 money off Windows licensing to consumers.

New comment by sgjohnson in "GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits"

sgjohnson — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:38:33 +0000

> If this researcher actually had a vendetta, I'd expect them to just sell the remaining zero-days to the highest bidder.

selling to the highest bidder doesn’t generate headlines though.

New comment by sgjohnson in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

sgjohnson — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:53:28 +0000

> you need to communicate your bank account number

in Latvia we need to do this for domestic payments anyway. We use IBAN even for domestic payments..

> and likely your legal name.

not mandatory. If provided, the bank tells you whether the recipient name matches the account, but if not, you can proceed with the payment anyway.

New comment by sgjohnson in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

sgjohnson — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:52:02 +0000

> then explicitly authorize the receiver. Oh, and explicitly authorise the country

I've never had to do any of this, and I quire frequently send SEPA payments from Latvia.

New comment by sgjohnson in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

sgjohnson — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:13:21 +0000

> > A Frenchman using Wero will be able to transfer money to a Spanish friend on Bizum, with the same simplicity as a domestic payment.

SEPA Instant Payments also solves that.

New comment by sgjohnson in "For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions"

sgjohnson — Fri, 01 May 2026 01:04:53 +0000

Which just reinforces my point. The patch was available, therefore, where the exploit lies was also available.

Linux kernel is one of the most audited open-source projects ever. I guarantee you that someone did reverse the patch.

> but forgot to tell the distros

Probably an oversight, but irrelevant. The bug was in the linux kernel. It's insane to suggest that they should have notified everyone shipping the linux kernel.