Hacker News: sllabres

New comment by sllabres in "The Visible Zorker: Zork 1"

sllabres — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:50:13 +0000

Or in this case; just click on "map"

New comment by sllabres in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

sllabres — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:20:10 +0000

Saying that (hand)writing is irrelevant is a bit of a strawman implying I said writing hexadecimal numbers big-endian on paper matters for coding.

The second sentence, weather your customers know if they have been in the same room with a big-endian system (CPU alone doesn't matter) is irrelevant when the point is to write correct code. Many of then aren't interested in this or other details and that is ok as they are not responsible for the implementation.

Changing the endianness either direction did have show bugs to me several times, that could be fixed, and it was worth it for that alone.

New comment by sllabres in "Big-Endian Testing with QEMU"

sllabres — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:38:08 +0000

Not only the System/390. Its also IBM i, AIX, and for many protocols the network byte order. AFAIK the binary data in JPG (1) and Java Class [2] files a re big endian. And if you write down a hexadecimal number as 0x12345678 you are writing big-endian.

(1) for JPG for embedded TIFF metadata which can have both.

[2] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/html/jvms-4.ht...

New comment by sllabres in "My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary"

sllabres — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:58:40 +0000

Congratulations :-)

Very nice shots. It must be a great feeling to see one's own footage in a feature film!

How long do you do astrophotography?

New comment by sllabres in "CT Scans of Health Wearables"

sllabres — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:39:24 +0000

It's always interesting to see how are things build in the Lumafields "Scan of the month". The the most interesting scan from Lumafield I saw was not a Scan of the month, but in "Adam Savage’s Tested: Surprising Flaws in 18650 Lithium-Ion Batteries" [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y23nfAOiXQ

PS: Nice company logo btw. ;)

New comment by sllabres in "Felix "fx" Lindner has died"

sllabres — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:13:24 +0000

Thanks for the clarification

New comment by sllabres in "Felix "fx" Lindner has died"

sllabres — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:52:34 +0000

I'm really sad, even if I never met him personally and only knew him from his talks, his software and of course his blog.

I had hoped that after his illness he would be granted some time for personal life and recovery — which makes this news all the more shocking.

New comment by sllabres in "Delphi is 31 years old – innovation timeline"

sllabres — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:08:32 +0000

Sometimes I miss the times where you had a compact development environment, wit one installer. Your source produced a mostly self contained binary in a reasonable size, you had nice debugging support and quick turnaround times for a compiled language even on a small development machines. And all that for attractive price for a perpetual license (Borland times).

Today it seems I have to give the producer my email address for the 'free' "Delphi History PDF". Well, times have changed. :)

New comment by sllabres in "Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth"

sllabres — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:21:01 +0000

Thanks, didn't knew that and 11% further is quite a increase and not too far from the maximum possible.

New comment by sllabres in "Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth"

sllabres — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:56:24 +0000

I think this is the furthest true photography [1] with 443 km distance, into the sunrise (corrected from sunset)

[1] https://beyondrange.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/pic-de-finestre...

New comment by sllabres in "Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years"

sllabres — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:30:24 +0000

So no #includedir, no LDAP integration, no log_input/output, no PAM integration ...?

New comment by sllabres in "Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II"

sllabres — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 08:37:34 +0000

I have seen the topic a bit late, but nevertheless:

I have learned 6502 assembler (and assembler) in general with "6502 assembly language programming by Lance A. Leventhal" (1979) [1] and "Apple Machine Language by Don Inman & Kurt Inman" (1981) [2]

For the 'internals' of the machine, I had "What's Where in the Apple: A Complete Guide to the Apple Computer by William F. Luebbert" (1985) amazon:[3]

[1] https://archive.org/details/6502-assembly-language-programmi...

[2] https://archive.org/details/a2-ml

[3] https://www.amazon.de/Whats-Where-Apple-Complete-Computer/dp...

New comment by sllabres in "We X-Rayed a Suspicious FTDI USB Cable"

sllabres — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 12:59:08 +0000

From the article: "The consequences for a consumer buying a shady USB cable likely aren’t too bad".

I can't second that, but more to the software/driver side.

Without my knowledge, I once had a counterfeit cable that costed several days of my life. At that time, the FTDI drivers recognized (and as I read did some other things [1]) that a counterfeit cable was connected, but instead of simply disabling the function, they impeded it. In my case: After pressing the first few keys on terminal connection, the transmission from the device to the PC worked, but not the reverse direction. A long search for the error came to an end after I replaced the USB/RS232 with a new one. This was with windows, with Linux even the counterfeit worked.

[1] https://www.elektroda.com/qa,ftdi-ft232-scandal-driver-brick...

New comment by sllabres in "Sun Position Calculator"

sllabres — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 05:18:31 +0000

I would say this is the prettiest interface I've seen for explaining seasons, analemma, solstice, ... to someone or experimenting myself.

Thanks for the find!

New comment by sllabres in "Handling secrets (somewhat) securely in shells"

sllabres — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 06:22:13 +0000

From the man page: Linux 5.14.

Before Linux 6.5, memfd_secret() was disabled by default and only available if the system administrator turned it on using "secretmem.enable=y" kernel parameter. [...]

"To prevent potential data leaks of memory regions backed by memfd_secret() from a hybernation image, hybernation is prevented when there are active memfd_secret() users."

New comment by sllabres in "A 40-line fix eliminated a 400x performance gap"

sllabres — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 06:01:22 +0000

Yes, they are made with: http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html and

https://github.com/brendangregg/FlameGraph

Useful site if you are on to perf/eBPF/performance things with many examples and descriptions even for other uses as e.g. memory usage, disk usage (prefer heatmaps here but they are nice if you want to send someone a interactive view of their directory tree ...).

New comment by sllabres in "39th Chaos Communication Congress Videos"

sllabres — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:58:11 +0000

Every of the lightning talks itself had about 20 short different topics, And as I wrote these were examples, you didn't expect someone to re-enumerate them here all to refute your statement. You can easily find them yourself. Have look at this page, where others listed their favorites, there are many more. But I don't think from your reply you didn't look at the list of sessions yourself.

New comment by sllabres in "39th Chaos Communication Congress Videos"

sllabres — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:04:58 +0000

None of these interesting as "technical topic"? (only examples)

51 Ways to Spell the Image Giraffe

Who cares about the Baltic Jammer?

Asahi Linux - Porting Linux to Apple Silicon

The art of text (rendering)

Excuse me, what precise time is It?

DNGerousLINK

CPU Entwicklung in Factorio

How to render cloud FPGAs useless

Breaking architecture barriers: Running x86 games and apps on ARM

Cracking open what makes Apple's Low-Latency WiFi so fast

Reverse engineering the Pixel TitanM2 firmware

Not To Be Trusted - A Fiasco in Android TEEs

Celestial navigation with very little math

Textiles 101: Fast Fiber Transform

Escaping Containment: A Security Analysis of FreeBSD Jails

Don’t look up: There are sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites

Opening pAMDora's box and unleashing a thousand paths on the journey to play Beatsaber custom songs

Lessons from Building an Open-Architecture Secure Element

And of course some of the Lightning Talks...

New comment by sllabres in "Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups"

sllabres — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 12:23:51 +0000

My method when such a pop-up occurs: I'll vote with my feet and immediately close the sites windows to reward them (at lest 95% of the time)

New comment by sllabres in "Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options"

sllabres — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 15:44:00 +0000

I am not a HIFI/TV aficionado, but the ACR [1] thing was new to me.

I hope it is not yet important for me as I never allowed a TV access to my LAN/WLAN. But with smart devices using accessible open WLANs to transmit who knows.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203 / https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06203