Hacker News: tkinom

New comment by tkinom in "Building a Memory Allocator from Scratch in C"

tkinom — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:22:47 +0000

Implemented my own specialized memory allocator 26+ yrs ago. (Y2K timeframe) Probably older than the most of the CMU students :-(

Use pre-allocated pools with array of indexes, free/allocation idx for alloc and free.

Con: Fixed pool size and fixed amount of memory can be allocated per pool.

Pro: constant cost operations per alloc/free via Atomic inc/dec of idx - no linklist tranversing ; Can be alloc in kernel space and free in user space (linux/QNX) and in multiple user processes when memory pools are in shmem; Run very will in SMP environment without any locks - all memory contentions were handled with atomic +/- alloc/free idx.

Same source code run in QNX, vxworks and linux (kernel and user space) at that time.

New comment by tkinom in "Shai-Hulud compromised a dev machine and raided GitHub org access: a post-mortem"

tkinom — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 05:23:05 +0000

Can we design something like virustotal setup? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirusTotal)

NPM setup similar dl_files_security_sigs.db .database for all downloaded files from npm in all offline install? List all versions, latest mod date, multiple latest crypto signatures (shar256, etc) and have been reviewed by multiple security org/researchers, auto flag if any contents are not pure clear/clean txt...

If it detects anything (file date, size, crypto sigs) < N days and have not been thru M="enough" security reviews, the npm system will automatically raise a security flag and stop the install and auto trigger security review on those files.

With proper (default secure) setup, any new version of npm downloads (code, config, scripts) will auto trigger stop download and flagged for global security review by multiple folks/orgs.

When/if this setup available as NPM default, would it stop similar compromise from happen to NPM again? Can anyone think of anyway to hack around this?

New comment by tkinom in "Google’s quest to digitize troops’ tissue samples"

tkinom — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 23:53:13 +0000

As Dr. Ian Malcolm said it: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

New comment by tkinom in "AMD Announces 7950X3D, 7900X3D Upto 128MB L3 Cache"

tkinom — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 21:05:57 +0000

About right, did it two years ago with 2 Sockets, 128Cores (64 core per socket), 256 Threads 2 Epyc Motherboard with 1TB DDR4. Build Kernel < 90 seconds. Should be faster nowadays....

New comment by tkinom in "Moonwalkers: Shoes that make you walk faster (pre-order)"

tkinom — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 20:58:59 +0000

Another idea for them: Walkatron for NFTs token for "....." causes....

New comment by tkinom in "“Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry"

tkinom — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:17:53 +0000

RPi+ Yolo can do real time object recognition of cluster Tank, Trucks, BMP from orbit.

A service with real time streams of those objects + GPS data info directly from starlink for a select sets locations should worth a lot for DOD, NATO, Ukraine. DOD and NATO would likely flip the bill for everything need to build such system.

New comment by tkinom in "Compromised PyTorch-nightly dependency chain between December 25th – December 30"

tkinom — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 04:02:12 +0000

Love to see a container environment that can monitor Monitor and log all outgoing network connection requests.... Monitor and log all critical file/directory access such as /etc/*

With such container, we can catch the compromised supply-chain attach easily, right?

Does anyone know such container exist?

New comment by tkinom in "James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first full-color image"

tkinom — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 03:45:50 +0000

There should be some post post-processing algorithms that can remove/clean hex elements, right?

New comment by tkinom in "AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer breaks the exascale barrier"

tkinom — Tue, 31 May 2022 14:55:38 +0000

NV21?

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-R...

New comment by tkinom in "Millions of electric cars are coming. What happens to all the dead batteries?"

tkinom — Sun, 22 May 2022 17:33:26 +0000

Got Honda Clarity PHEV since 2018. Loving it so far. It is 48 miles E range. I need ~36 for round trip daily commute. Charging at work is free. I remember only fuel up only 3 times in 2019 with the 7 gallon gas tank. Normal fuel up is 5-6 gallon only as it has a very small tank. But the Hybrid range is supposed to be 350 miles.

I also just installed solar at home. I expect the next family car would also be PHEV suv to replace the 16 years old minivan. Other than long trip, I don't expect to use gas much, maybe just once a week to oil up the engine for a few minutes.

New comment by tkinom in "China markets in turmoil as Russia ties add to list of risks"

tkinom — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 16:36:03 +0000

Fog of war.

New comment by tkinom in "Timescale raises $110M Series C"

tkinom — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 21:03:13 +0000

I have written time series logging db with sqlite believe that approach has following advantages:

   System performance scales well with latest SSD HW.
      As compare to cloud base approach that is limited by network/cloud speed.

   One can store logs per day / week / year in separate db files as needed.  

   Backup of small db files for last few days/weeks are trivial with rsync.

Love to hear other pro/con arguments from folks who use Timescale type approach.

New comment by tkinom in "3D reproduction of TSA Master keys (2016)"

tkinom — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 19:19:29 +0000

One can easily cut the zip-tie, search and re-zip it again, right?

New comment by tkinom in "Writing an open source GPU driver without the hardware"

tkinom — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 03:44:02 +0000

Start by tracing exist open source Intel/AMD driver in linux:

   Can be for old laptop (T420, etc with Intel GPU/Driver.) 
   Use FTRACE in kernel. 
   Setup ebpf trace for GPU acitivies.
   Write some doc/blog/medium pages on the process and show off your works.
   Understand, document and improve some opensource GPU API related utilities
   Understand and document interaction between GPU/GUI App and OpenSource driver.

In term of jobs: AMD has 289 opening for intern positions: https://jobs.amd.com/go/Internships-&-Co-op-Opportunities/25... A lot of them are graphic related.

New comment by tkinom in "Arm-Based 128-Core Ampere CPUs Cost a Fraction of x86 Price"

tkinom — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 17:02:08 +0000

Love to see compiler benchmark (compile firefox, chrome) on this vs system with EPYC 64C/128T or 128C/256T.

New comment by tkinom in "Guide to Doing Radio Astronomy with RPi and SDR [pdf]"

tkinom — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 16:57:50 +0000

Name the project "SETI@PI"?

New comment by tkinom in "India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman"

tkinom — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 01:51:21 +0000

Religion can help? - I have a Mormon co-worker. They have 8 kids. Move whole family to Japan. Told me that every time they came home to US they took a row in the wide body Jet.

New comment by tkinom in "Scientists find a way to ‘catapult’ rockets into space like ‘slingshots’"

tkinom — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 20:50:12 +0000

I love the fact they can convince VC to spend $80mil to try this.

20 year ago, most of space experts probably laugh at SpaceX for even trying to reuse the rocket by landing it back on earth vertically.

New comment by tkinom in "The reports of Perl’s death have been greatly exaggerated"

tkinom — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 20:49:24 +0000

Old Programming Languages never die, they just fade away.

New comment by tkinom in "IoT hacking and rickrolling my high school district"

tkinom — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 21:18:11 +0000

For anyone who like to hack legally and ethically, check out https://www.hackerone.com/. If you're very good at hacking devices, software, networks, etc, companies will pay bounties for the vulnerabilities you find thru HackerOne.

Looks like they paid out millions in bounty in 2020:

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/hackerones-2020-top-10-public-bug-bounty-programs/