Hacker News: snazz

New comment by snazz in "SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)"

snazz — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:03:09 +0000

I’ve read this article every time it’s gotten posted here and it’s always gone a little over my head. I was able to follow how he used 8 x86_64 registers for the VM’s stack slots and how the VM instructions were implemented. How the padding and alignments of each version of the instructions was calculated is impressive and I can imagine how much of a chore it would be to figure out with a normal assembler.

Using SBCL as a macro-assembler is extremely cool, and then allowing CL code to call into the VM is where it really blows my mind.

Obviously it’s been over a decade since this article was written. For someone less familiar with SBCL internals (or CL in general), would something like AsmJit or Iced be a good way to achieve similar things?

New comment by snazz in "OpenBSD 7.9"

snazz — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:06:11 +0000

The “kernel” in Qubes is arguably Xen rather than Linux, and that’s where the security boundaries are supposed to be defined rather than within VMs that may be running any OS. VM compartmentalization as a security mechanism is hard to compare to a more conventional Unix like OpenBSD.

New comment by snazz in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

snazz — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:07:27 +0000

You can run Android on an iPhone 7 as a demo, but not for any practical benefit: https://projectsandcastle.org/

New comment by snazz in "SDL Now Supports DOS"

snazz — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:40:03 +0000

You can do substantially more in UEFI than NES-level games. (See https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.9_A/12_Protocols_Console_Suppo...)

New comment by snazz in "Phyphox – Physical Experiments Using a Smartphone"

snazz — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:26:13 +0000

I just tested this in the U.S. with a toaster plugged into my outlet and there was a 40 Hz peak in the graph. I had a hard time telling where the wires were in the wall, though, maybe because the toaster itself was too close.

New comment by snazz in "I Ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

snazz — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:56:41 +0000

“entii-for-workcubes” is a pretty good pun!

New comment by snazz in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

snazz — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:02:11 +0000

As I understood it, Memory Integrity Enforcement adds an additional check on heap dereferences (and it doesn’t apply to every process for performance reasons). Why does it crush hacking rather than just adding another incremental roadblock like many other mitigations before?

New comment by snazz in "Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston"

snazz — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:46:54 +0000

Private Cloud Compute uses their own hardware: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

New comment by snazz in "Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed"

snazz — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:03:13 +0000

Extra pedantic: that’s the en dash, the em dash is option-shift-hyphen

New comment by snazz in "The Day the Telnet Died"

snazz — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 02:08:44 +0000

Am I the only one who feels like it isn't the responsibility of backbone ISPs to filter traffic like this? In the case of a DDoS situation I could get behind it, but in this case I feel as though it's not Cogent's problem if I want to use telnet from a device on Charter's network to a Vultr VPS, even if it may be ill-advised.

(Of course, the article only speculates that this traffic filtering is what's going on; there isn't any hard proof, but it feels plausible to me.)

New comment by snazz in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

snazz — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:07:12 +0000

I feel like the nondeterminism makes LLM-assisted programming a different sort of concept than using a compiler. Your prompt isn't your source code.

New comment by snazz in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

snazz — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:45:37 +0000

Apple also puts fn/globe in the bottom left corner and control to its right.

New comment by snazz in "Linux is good now"

snazz — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:30:13 +0000

In his talk a few days ago, one of the main Asahi developers (Sven) shared that there is someone working on M3 support. There are screenshots of an M3 machine running Linux and playing DOOM at around 31:34 here: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...

Sounds like the GPU architecture changed significantly with M3. With M4 and M5, the technique for efficiently reverse-engineering drivers using a hypervisor no longer works.

New comment by snazz in "Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief"

snazz — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 21:30:21 +0000

If you “fling” the page, lift your fingers off, and then tap with two fingers, does the page come to a stop?

New comment by snazz in "Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves"

snazz — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:16:50 +0000

Defendants trying to exclude ALPR evidence often invoke Carpenter v. U.S. (or U.S. v. Jones, but that’s questionable because the majority decision is based on the trespass interpretation of the 4th Amendment rather than the Katz test). Judges have not generally agreed with defendants that ALPR (either the license plate capture itself or the database lookup) resembles the CSLI in Carpenter or the GPS tracker in Jones. A high enough density of Flock cameras may make the Carpenter-like arguments more compelling, though.

Charging lithium-ion batteries at high currents first increases lifespan by 50%

snazz — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 22:06:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1056171

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41483654

Points: 249

# Comments: 109

New comment by snazz in "SQLite: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem"

snazz — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 13:11:11 +0000

It’s somewhat more complex than “NTFS is slow”. Here’s a good explanation: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...

I’ve benchmarked deleting files (around ~65,000 small node_modules sort of files) and it takes 40 seconds through Explorer, 20 seconds with rd, and roughly a second inside WSL2 (cloned to the VM’s ext4 virtual hard drive).

New comment by snazz in "Things I learned while writing an x86 emulator (2023)"

snazz — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 19:57:00 +0000

What sorts of projects are you working on that use Itanium?

New comment by snazz in "Please don't mention AI again"

snazz — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 22:33:08 +0000

If you're interviewing for job at a company you're not familiar with, what are some good heuristics (and/or questions to ask) to politely get a sense of whether it's run by buzzword bingo enthusiasts?

New comment by snazz in "Apple Joins the SeL4 Foundation"

snazz — Fri, 10 May 2024 13:26:41 +0000

What product from 2006 did it come with? My understanding was that the Secure Enclave came out with the iPhone 5s in 2013 (still before 2014, so your point stands, I’m just curious).