News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

kennethallen

Re:Leaving Tech on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @01:09AM (#50067005)
Warrnambool is nice. Tower Hill is beautiful. I wouldn't want to leave there, either.
Don't forget that TLS 1.0 introduces itself as SSL 3.1, TLS 1.1 as SSL 3.2, TLS 1.2 as SSL 3.3. This hack you describe involves TLS 1.3 also pretending to be SSL 3.3, because ossified infrastructure freaked out at seeing "SSL 3.4".
Re:The Dataflow Model Revisited on Thursday September 10, 2026 @11:16PM (#49653142)
Separately from the content of this paper, the LLM prose is unbearable!

These are not proper headers: "The Answer Neither Community Finished Alone", "The Peace Nobody Heard", "The Larger Disappearance". These are clickbait headlines. I don't want to be constantly tantalized--I want to be shown dense, organized information I can rapidly skim for the parts I care about.

That's an obvious example of the Claudese being spoken here, but it emanates from every word. Write your own paper or just publish the prompt and I'll run it in my own LLM.

Re:Show HN: CheapFoodMap – A map of good meals under $10 on Thursday July 30, 2026 @03:31AM (#49107017)
Australia support, please! AUD15 limit?
Sorry, this kind of LLMglish is illegible.

  That rounding has teeth.

  Here is the answer, and it’s the most useful idea in this whole post.

  That last clause is the whole game.
The constantly referring back or forward to other Parts is very annoying. Please write your essay so that I can read it from beginning to end and it makes sense!

Also, this is far from "first principles". I have a general familiarity with GPUs but I had to look up a number of terms, like "LDS".

Looks like Blue Prince interiors. :D
I read this post and your post introducing zeroserve. One of the main parts of the original pitch was "no separate config file and scripts". Now you're adding a config file separate from the scripts. Is the pitch now that it's like Caddy but runs eBPF scripts in userspace?
These games all released with Denuvo on Steam and DRM-free on GOG. (Some of them have subsequently removed Denuvo on Steam.)

Mad Max Middle-earth: Shadow of War Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Re:Rethinking Syntax: Binding by Adjacency on Monday March 09, 2026 @07:16PM (#47317095)
> This isn’t parser-style backtracking

How is this different from backtracking? You're doing a depth-first search over possible interpretations. The grammar is just expressed in the type system instead of usual spec formats.

Critiques in other comments are accurate. This is a tooling nightmare, but also probably a nightmare to read. Consider an expression like

  2026 March 10 to 13
What's the binding precedence? Does this mean March 10 through March 13, or midnight to 1 PM on March 10th? I think this breaks down outside of trivial examples that are better achieved in other ways.
Re:Show HN: Explain Curl Commands on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @09:08PM (#47242095)
What does this offer over feeding `-v` output into an LLM?
Extremely. Repo is littered with one-off Python scripts, among many other indicators.
And in every training corpus many times over.
Re:Communities Are Not Fungible on Thursday February 12, 2026 @03:00PM (#46994266)
Yeah, instantly switched to reader mode.
Re:The lost art of XML on Thursday January 22, 2026 @11:59PM (#46728616)
The fundamental reason JSON won over XML is that JSON maps exactly to universal data structures (lists and string-keyed maps) and XML does not.
There are many different supersampling patterns you can use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersampling#Supersampling_pa...

A grid can have unwanted aliasing effects. It all depends on the kinds of images you're working with.

Re:Zpdf: PDF text extraction in Zig – 5x faster than MuPDF on Thursday January 01, 2026 @07:54PM (#46460105)
mmap is better when:

  * You want your program to crash on any I/O error because you wouldn't handle them anyway
  * You value the programming convenience of being able to treat a file on disk as if the entire thing exists in memory
  * The performance is good enough for your use. As the article showed, sequential scan performance is as good as direct I/O until the page cache fills up *from a single SSD*, and random access performance is as good as direct I/O until the page cache fills up *if you use MADV_RANDOM*. If your data doesn't fit in memory, or is across multiple storage devices, or you don't correctly advise the OS about your access patterns, mmap will probably be much slower
To be clear, normal I/O still benefits from the OS's shared page cache, where files that other processes have loaded will probably still be in memory, avoiding waiting on the storage device. But each normal I/O process incurs the space and time cost of a copy into its private memory, unlike mmap.
Re:Zpdf: PDF text extraction in Zig – 5x faster than MuPDF on Thursday January 01, 2026 @07:34PM (#46459934)
If you fail to load an mmapped page because of an I/O error, Unix-like OSes interrupt your program with SIGBUS/SIGSEGV. It might be technically possible to write a program that would handle those signals and recover, but it seems like a lot more work and complexity than just checking errno after a read system call.
Re:Zpdf: PDF text extraction in Zig – 5x faster than MuPDF on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @11:25PM (#46441246)
Two big advantages:

You avoid an unnecessary copy. Normal read system call gets the data from disk hardware into the kernel page cache and then copies it into the buffer you provide in your process memory. With mmap, the page cache is mapped directly into your process memory, no copy.

All running processes share the mapped copy of the file.

There are a lot of downsides to mmap: you lose explicit error handling and fine-grained control of when exactly I/O happens. Consult the classic article on why sophisticated systems like DBMSs do not use mmap: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/mmap-cidr2022/

It's 2025 and you're telling people to `pip install` into system packages instead of running via `uvx`.
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels on Sunday November 16, 2025 @06:42PM (#45949536)
I don't understand the use case here. Is this supposed to be for enterprise to control access to internal applications via network access policies?
Re:Asus Ascent GX10 on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @06:40PM (#45908496)
The use case for these boxes is a local NVIDIA development platform before you do your actual training run on your A100 cluster.
Re:Asus Ascent GX10 on Monday November 10, 2025 @07:40PM (#45882771)
Running LLMs will be slow and training them is basically out of the question. You can get a Framework Desktop with similar bandwidth for less than a third of the price of this thing (though that isn't NVIDIA).
Re:You Should Write An Agent on Thursday November 06, 2025 @05:51PM (#45841473)
Author on Twitter a few years ago: https://x.com/tqbf/status/851466178535055362
I have a few questions after reading the README.

First, if it uses PRNG with a fixed-size state, it isn't accurate to say it never repeats, correct? It will be periodic eventually, even if that takes 2^256 operations or more.

Second, can you go more into the potential practical or theoretical advantages? Your scheme is certainly more complicated, but I don't see how it offers better tamper protection or secrecy than a block cipher operating in an authenticated mode (AES+GCM, for instance). Those have a number of practical advantages, like parallel encryption/decryption and ubiquitous hardware support.

Re:Keeping Open WebUI Free, Fair, and Sustainable on Tuesday May 06, 2025 @12:23AM (#43901786)
They cannot just relicense the work of all of their public contributors without them agreeing in writing. This is completely illegitimate. (They don't seem to require signing any contributor agreement.)
Re:Nix Derivations, Without Guessing on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @09:15PM (#43639692)
I walk away from every article on or attempt to use Nix more mystified
Do I get a superuser? Can I install any extensions I want?
Re:Aligning Automattic's Sponsored Contributions to WordPress on Thursday January 09, 2025 @08:13PM (#42651506)
I'm going to take all of my toys and go home until everyone promises to stop being mean to me.
Re:It All Started with a Perceptron on Sunday October 27, 2024 @06:18PM (#41966142)
Was this LLM-written?

Older »