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shirian

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026) on Monday March 09, 2026 @09:10AM (#47308592)
Me and Claude have been working on zfetch (https://github.com/roobie/zfetch), which is a single static binary that fetches URLs over HTTPS with strict security defaults. For many applications, it should be able to replace curl in restricted environments where you need a small, auditable tool with no runtime dependencies.

It should also be usable as a Zig library for embedding HTTP(S) fetches in your own programs.

Vendors and links BoringSSL

Re:I Wrote a Scheme in 2025 on Thursday February 12, 2026 @05:44PM (#46996335)
I just really like the homoiconicity.
Re:Stack Overflow for AI Coding Agents on Monday February 09, 2026 @10:14AM (#46946096)
I've been thinking about knowledge in agentic systems lately. Your comment made me put up my draft of the `knowledge-repo` concept: https://github.com/roobie/rfc/blob/main/knowledge-repo/READM... - nothing special really, but I think the concept could be really powerful.
Re:Mutmut: A Python mutation testing system (2016) on Monday February 09, 2026 @04:57AM (#46943522)
Interesting to see the genesis story for mutmut. It has come a long way since its inception: https://pypi.org/project/mutmut/

Mutation testing is a new concept for me, and even though one has to manage the performance aspects of it, it seems like a good idea to at least apply to selected functions in one's codebase, in order to find bugs.

Re:Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea? on Friday June 12, 2020 @06:15AM (#23497750)
redshift is also an option.
All the open source developers/publishers here should get together and pitch in to get one long lasting certificate to sign all of their respective binaries (of course, really important that they vet each other's code, so has to be open source) Edit: typo.
I don't think so. Check the accompanying githup repo.
Re:Janet: a lightweight, expressive and modern Lisp on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @08:40AM (#23166258)
Wow, this is exactly what I've been looking for. Also, I'm not a C-programmer, but I think the source code is good-looking.
Re:Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @08:28AM (#16157976)
Or, at least, disabling `url()` in CSS.
For reference, I received this email before today:

By now, we're sure most everyone have heard of the Meltdown and Spectre attacks. If not, head over to https://meltdownattack.com/ and get an overview. Additional technical details are available from Google Project Zero. https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privi...

The FreeBSD Security Team was notified of the issue in late December and received a briefing under NDA with the original embargo date of January 9th. Since we received relatively late notice of the issue, our ability to provide fixes is delayed.

Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In terms of priority, the first step is to mitigate against the Meltdown attack (CVE-2017-5754, cited as variant 3 by Project Zero). Work for this is ongoing, but due to the relatively large changes needed, this is going to take a little while. We are currently targeting patches for amd64 being dev complete this week with testing probably running into next week. From there, we hope to give it a short bake time before pushing it into the 11.1-RELEASE branch. Additional work will be required to bring the mitigation to 10.3-RELEASE and 10.4-RELEASE.

The code will be selectable via a tunable which will automatically turn on for modern Intel processors and off for AMD processors (since they are reportedly not vulnerable). Since the fix for Meltdown does incur a performance hit for any transition between user space and kernel space, this could be rather impactful depending on the workload. As such, the tunable can also be overridden by the end-user if they are willing to accept the risk.

Initial work can be tracked at https://reviews.freebsd.org/D13797. Please note this is a work in progress and some stuff is likely to be broken.

Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When it comes to the Spectre vulnerabilities, it is much harder to sort these out. Variant 1 (CVE-2017-5753) is going to require some static analysis to determine vulnerable use cases that will require barriers to stop speculation from disclosing information it shouldn't. While we haven't done the analysis to determine where we are vulnerable, the number of cases here are supposed to be pretty small. Apparently there have been some Coverity rules developed to help look for these, but we are still evaluating what can be done here.

The other half of Spectre, variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715) is a bit trickier as it affects both normal processes and bhyve. There is a proposed patch for LLVM (https://reviews.llvm.org/D41723) that introduces a concept called 'retpoline' which mitigates this issue. We are likely to pull this into HEAD and 11-STABLE once it hits the LLVM tree. Unfortunately, the currently supported FreeBSD releases are using older versions of LLVM for which we are not sure the LLVM project will produce patches. We will be looking at the feasibility to backport these patches to these earlier versions.

There are CPU microcode fixes coming out when in concert with OS changes would also help, but that's a bit down the road at the moment.

If anything significantly changes I will make additional posts to clarify as the information becomes available.

Best regards, Gordon Tetlow with security-officer hat on

Re:This 15-foot tall mech weighs 8,000 lbs and can run 20 mph on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @05:40PM (#16110858)
I wonder where all the money came from.
Re:Which is the fastest web framework? on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @04:41PM (#16110390)
Is the term "framework" really the best descriptor for this type of chunks of code?
Relating to that is that artificial is "konstgjord" in Swedish, i.e. "art made".
You are quite right. I apologize for misremembering the copyright laws.
Re:A letter about Google AMP on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @02:07PM (#16108806)
Well, if one were to buy into the hypothesis that AMP is a way for Google to monopolize content, that would be the reason. At least in search results provided by Google's search.
Re:Companies behind Top 99 Cryptocurrencies on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @02:05PM (#16108783)
I'm very looking forward to seeing the crypto-currency bubble burst. I wonder what will be the tipping point.
To be fair, the life expectancy of people keeps increasing.
Art in Swedish is "konst" which is the base for the word "konstig" which means, literally, weird or odd. I'm pretty sure there's a reason for that etymology.
Re:Alibaba Cloud on Sunday July 16, 2017 @08:52PM (#14784950)
As languages change over time, so has the meaning of "literally" to actually also mean "virtually"[0]

[0]: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/literally

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