Hacker News: surajrmal

New comment by surajrmal in "To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system"

surajrmal — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 14:20:01 +0000

Hardware is getting more specialized these days. It's becoming more difficult than ever to write bare metal code. I don't think most (any?) software wants to manage the details a BSP solves for them.

New comment by surajrmal in "Porting Zircon (Fuchsia OS's kernel) C++ code to Rust"

surajrmal — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:33:19 +0000

Zephyr has a totally different use case. The pigweed project is closer to competing with zephyr, although it technically can work on top of it.

New comment by surajrmal in "Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users"

surajrmal — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:35:23 +0000

If you pay for the privilege of using the app, that makes sense. I can't imagine such a law would ever be made for free apps as controlling the client experience is key for enabling them to offer it for free. The reason free apps often don't have a paid tier is because the folks who would pay for it are often the key demographic they need to not pay for the entire thing to be profitable for subsidizing the less desirable demographics.

I'm not trying to suggest that these sorts of things should be this way, but if there is a server involved in the economics of maintaining that endpoint come into play and can't be ignored. Ideally things were federated and you could point your car or whatever device at and endpoint you maintain, but that comes at a cost as well as maintaining software where both client and server are controlled by the same party is an order of magnitude easier than cases where they aren't the same.

New comment by surajrmal in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

surajrmal — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:59:08 +0000

Considering the large increases in revenues bug tech extracts year over year, the maintenance and small improvements are not necessarily completely disregarding the business side of things. You cannot keep sustained performance without proper practices. Too much short term thinking like you see in startups leads to loss of confidence that new changes won't break existing customers, or hellish on call that no one wants to be part of. There is a lifecycle to product development and different phases require different tradeoffs. You sound like you align with the builder phase and that's great.

I will also note that most civil engineering is about maintaining existing structures and roadways, not building new ones.

New comment by surajrmal in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

surajrmal — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:15:30 +0000

Good engineering isn't always about building new things, but making existing ones continue to work well. Funding new ideas is generally a hard problem for large organizations and that's not entirely an engineering culture problem.

There are a lot of terrible practices out there in the world that you should stay wary of. Too many false positive alerts, flakey tests, not enough tests, not listening to users, taking a solution because it's easy and popular but not necessarily a good fit for your specific requirements, etc. Many of these practices are popular unfortunately. That's not to say others don't have great ideas, just don't copy them blindly.

New comment by surajrmal in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

surajrmal — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:38:26 +0000

Right, because the android security model considers app developers independent entities with security privileges equal to those of the device owner (in that both parties need to authorize access for things to work, the device owner doesn't have more privileges than the application developer when it comes to the application). Those mechanisms are necessary for that security model to work. If you want to operate with a different security model that's fine, but you just need to use something other than Android. The bootloader situation being optional is Google not getting overly involved in the device maker's business outside of the scope they should have influence on. And they set the precedent via Pixel for how they think others should do it.

New comment by surajrmal in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

surajrmal — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:12:23 +0000

There is nothing about Android as a platform that forbids installation of your own OS. That's a phone oem choice and the fact Pixel phones can be unlocked proves as much. In fact this is the reason this project is even possible.

New comment by surajrmal in "Waymo Premier"

surajrmal — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 03:50:06 +0000

I use public transit but it comes with a lot of inconvenience. You need to stand on a moving vehicle more often than not, it takes more time, there are panhandlers, you might not feel safe, transfers don't generally seem to time well, going up and down multiple flights of stairs is a fair bit of exercise, some people don't shower as often as you'd hope, etc. People generally pay for convenience. I certainly would if I could budget for it. I couldn't care less about status or class.

New comment by surajrmal in "A Matter Wi-Fi Light Bulb in Rust on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W"

surajrmal — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:20:27 +0000

None of those are using WiFi. Most use a different radio technology and require a hub to bridge the network.

New comment by surajrmal in "A Matter Wi-Fi Light Bulb in Rust on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W"

surajrmal — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:45:59 +0000

Nothing with WiFi will ever be coin cell battery powered. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be battery powered for a year or longer with bigger batteries. Otherwise you'll need a different radio technology.

New comment by surajrmal in "India's surprise baby bust"

surajrmal — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:59:59 +0000

What always irks me about posts talking about how the upper middle class cannot afford to raise children is how the conversation ignores the idea that raising children will cause you to alter your lifestyle. You may need to live somewhere else, eat out less, or what have you, but I assure you that you can afford it. Many are simply not willing to compromise on their lifestyle comforts.

New comment by surajrmal in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

surajrmal — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:53:39 +0000

Most posts are fairly US centric so I don't think it's odd to assume it's mostly Americans who visit.

New comment by surajrmal in "Moving beyond fork() + exec()"

surajrmal — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:17:04 +0000

Android and chrome both benefit greatly from fork exec as part of their zygote model iirc. It substantially reduces the memory cost and latency of spawning new apps and tabs.

New comment by surajrmal in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

surajrmal — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:30:16 +0000

To some degree this is how it already feels like to program basically anything with dma today. You map hardware into an iommu and stop touching it when the hardware is supposed to use it, and then you reclaim it afterwards. So the model from the os feels the same, the difference is that it's not copying the memory into some local memory to operate on it.

New comment by surajrmal in "C++: The Documentary"

surajrmal — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:47:37 +0000

Your org needs better distributed build caching if you can't get that number lower. All builds should be "incremental" with appropriate caching.

New comment by surajrmal in "Roku LT Operating System open source distribution"

surajrmal — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:16:22 +0000

This is not "enshittification". That implies it's gotten worse over time. Smart TVs have been doing this from the beginning.

New comment by surajrmal in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

surajrmal — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:26:16 +0000

Search's AI mode is by far the most popular "AI app". Most of the time I don't end up using Gemini, it's because search's AI mode is good enough for my needs and I use it out of habit. I imagine a lot of other would-be Gemini users are in similar shoes.

New comment by surajrmal in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

surajrmal — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:23:47 +0000

Google search related ad revenue is still going up. Volume isn't everything. Personally, as llms have gotten better I do more and more product research on Google.

New comment by surajrmal in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

surajrmal — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:09:08 +0000

Ads are meaningless without a surface to show them on. Search is absolutely a core product.

New comment by surajrmal in "Zig ELF Linker Improvements Devlog"

surajrmal — Sun, 31 May 2026 14:06:52 +0000

Those rewrites happen because someone was interested in making them happen (often the maintainer). The meme is that evangelists will constantly advocate to you that your project should be rewritten.