News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Charon77

Re:A story about Magic (Jargon File) on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @07:39AM (#49977028)
Funny read but there's so many wrong assumptions are made in the article.

'ground' is just an idealized concept.

The switch could be connecting ground trace to the casing or make a long antenna

Physical switch has capacitance, etc...

> Now we have smartwatches with 4GB of RAM (rolls eyes). WTF do they even do with all that memory?

Probably running a web browser or more

Re:Reverse Engineering Unknown File Formats with ImHex on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @10:14PM (#49545173)
I use both ImHex and Kaitai struct, give it a try maybe you'll like it
Re:Reverse Engineering Unknown File Formats with ImHex on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @10:13PM (#49545170)
A lot of unity games does it, especially the 'legacy' serializer
Re:Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:55PM (#49542413)
> would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?

Only quote the relevant part and reply to it, just like this very comment.

And Linux has a large mailing archive of various lists and threads that are searchable and available to everyone and get this: free access

I don't fly and I wouldn't call my self someone that plays a lot of flight simulator. But I do enjoy navigation methods and I did learn the basics and practices of VOR navigation. I got an Android app that simulates flying courses, holding patterns etc, but only the navigation part. I would say I learned some intuition to it.
Re:Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards on Thursday August 27, 2026 @12:30AM (#49459714)
If I stab at your teddy bear will you feel that it is hurt?

Yes it will gain consciousness. You can't prove it but other people can't prove that it's not conscious either

> And yet they have the most coal plants, and the most coal plants under construction. This comparison includes India.

Well yeah, but not in Beijing

Re:Building an Arch Linux Aarch64 Port for Holo Core on Monday July 20, 2026 @09:24PM (#48987028)
You can start by changing only the extra package url to the aarch64 arch linux. Do keep in mind that while the aarch64 pkgbuilds are official arch, the package building and distribution is community. they're currently compiling for armv8.2, while some are maintaining armv8, and these mismatch can cause program to crash with illegal instructions and what not.
Re:Building an Arch Linux Aarch64 Port for Holo Core on Monday July 20, 2026 @02:56AM (#48975157)
As much as I am an avid arch linux fanboy, I don't think it's a good choice for "an appliance", the frequent update might cause unnecessary wear and tear for the storage chips if they use flash memory/sd card.

Lazy me would often update pacman database and upgrade just a few packages. Living dangerously but often times it doesn't really matter

If reproducible build is important maybe consider NixOS?

Re:Building an Arch Linux Aarch64 Port for Holo Core on Monday July 20, 2026 @02:52AM (#48975133)
I posted about this here https://charon.konekopi.com/posts/archlinux_on_arm/

But to answer your question:

A lot of ALARM core repositories are out of date, their extra repositories are even worse. chromium has been broken for like 1.5 year or so (I think it's fixed recently). Can't really blame them, they need to support older armv7 hardwares. Their packages are also for armv7 instead of the aarch64 architectures used by a lot of tablets/PC nowadays, so there's a huge performance/compatibility tradeoff they're making.

Arch linux aarch64 port is as the name says, aarch64 only, the people don't really care for older RPi. And because their work lives on the official arch linux repo, the pkgbuilds by definition won't be out of date. However package building are still community maintained, and will be out of date in that regards.

Re:Building an Arch Linux Aarch64 Port for Holo Core on Sunday July 19, 2026 @08:05PM (#48972906)
Archlinuxarm is a fork. The name is confusing because it's a fork with the same name and logo, but they have got permission to do so

Arch linux aarch64 port is not a fork, it uses the same upstream PKGBUILD which contains minimal aarch64 specific conditional compilation and config

https://ports.archlinux.page/

I think even this project was not being mentioned so maybe they are not aware of each other

> Postal codes resolve to town (町域) level — that's how Japan's postal system works. Users still type the block/building portion themselves.

'town' might be misunderstood. The postal code resolve to area probably less than 1km^2. Not specific enough to be a block, but I wouldn't call that a town either

I only got to know calculix because that's one of the FEM solver FreeCAD use
Re:What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014) on Sunday July 12, 2026 @10:36PM (#48887184)
"after the query has returned from the database"

I have a lot of fighting against Spring / Hibernate for this. It doesn't let me do cartesian product because the query builder thinks it needs a cartesian product, I can't select only some of the columns without making a whole new data structure while fighting the ORM that thinks one table = one class, can't query from a joined table.

I don't have any issue with mapping using these query builders like jooq which lets you use generated class from the live db for simple use case and give you other mechanism for querying weird joins or aggregates.

What sort of perks of ORM after the query has returned do you find to be helpful?

Condition 2 are pretty much hard to get. Happens everytime in the equator, happens only twice a year in most countries, hopefully never happens in the n/s pole
Re:A Road to Lisp: Why Lisp on Friday July 10, 2026 @06:12AM (#48857977)
I really love the idea of lisp but feels like the learning curve is steep. Sure you can learn basic lisp in an hour or so but then? You need to learn emacs, all of the plugins, module systems.

Maybe I just don't know where to start.

Re:Dependencies should be fetched directly from VCS on Sunday July 05, 2026 @10:30PM (#48800057)
Archlinux has this separation of official packages and the user submitted AUR, which has never been something that is officially supported by design.

Having big names maintain their own VCS is a good thing. There can be a centralized system to index / search packages just for findability. And this centralized system doesn't have to be anything special just like how anyone could use any search engine

Re:What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @07:21PM (#48789963)
Agreed. Simple CRUD is something that only shows up in the beginning of the project, everyone was told to use ORM for that purpose, business grow, and you had awkward requirements that require complex ORM features which might exist but requires deep dive into ORM library's corner case, or just straight not possible and makes you bang your head wishing you'd write SQL instead where it would have been obvious what to write.

The only good thing about ORM is the type safety, but I find rust's sqlx or java's jooq to be hitting the sweet spot.

You can't prove something is/isn't created with AI.

Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well

Re:Do LLMs pass the mirror test? on Sunday June 28, 2026 @09:05PM (#48713568)
The issue with Markov Chain is you can't get good next token prediction on long enough context because once you see the last 1000 words instead of just 2, it's quite unlikely that your 'frequency' is populated for that exact combination, and markov chain don't work on token embedding that allows some encoding of meaning.
This is being pushed to us in forms of AI SDLC.

I am quite heartbroken. Your /s comment is a reality for others.

I think pretty much parallel to how social engineering, manipulation, scams work. LLMs are being trained to have human values, prioritizing human lifes, yet people are shocked it will spurt out how to make a nuclear bomb because grandma is being tied to a train track as a hostage.
> If #2 was false, surely some other LLM lab would have done it by now.

This is a logical flaw. LLM that is immune to jailbreak _could_ exist, but not yet, or maybe nobody talks about it. Yes there's a market, but all of these AI boom is too recent to make any claims.

Ironically I used AI for this question, and what came out is 'Echo prompt' apparently it's a thing: repeating LLM instructions twice increases accuracy.

Another idea was Chain of Thought leakage. It's like as if a chef saying "Now I am adding salt because the customer requested so"

Wrapper is really helpful for every time you do pacman update for official repo, you should recompile all of the AUR repo as well, otherwise you'll be in the land of 'partial upgrades'. Some packages don't complaint too much, while others do
It does, but there's a y/n question of whether you want to see the patch
Re:Ask HN: How do you find deep technical content? on Friday June 05, 2026 @02:39AM (#48408829)
Much obliged!
Re:Ask HN: How do you find deep technical content? on Friday June 05, 2026 @01:06AM (#48408212)
Would appreciate invite too (email in my about column)
Re:Mystery Microsoft bug leaker keeps the zero-days coming on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @11:43PM (#48130863)
Only affects win11

Older »