Hacker News Reader

antoinealbon Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

Tangent nit, but k8s was never a google-internal system. See https://research.google/pubs/borg-omega-and-kubernetes/

antoinealbon GCC steering committee announces AI policy

From the README of that repo, rcc seems to only compile ~2x as fast as GCC. You claim 10x. Where is the proof ?

antoinealbon Mag 7 starting to underperform [pdf]

Shouldn't you look at the YoY change instead, to compare to stock returns ? Otherwise that's like comparing market cap, and then it is obvious that a big company tends to stay big.

antoinealbon Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

The agency who arrested him have been sentenced to pay him 12k$ + court fees. There is a criminal case ongoing against Della Valle, former head of Switzerland's federal police. It only started after the administrative ruling and parliamentary investigation.

antoinealbon Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

And a Swiss court decided that this was illegal and disproportionate [1]. Rule of law does not mean that nothing illegal happens in the country (that's obviously impossible to guarantee). It means illegal acts have consequences.

[1] https://www.bvger.ch/en/newsroom/media-releases/fedpol-must-...

antoinealbon What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

That's not what I believe. Other posters have explained it well, but to respond myself:

1. Some large tech companies are also large real estate funds. Google had >100B$ in real estate positions (although mixed between datacenters and office parks) [0]. So its not that they are milked for rent, but more that they would be loosing some money here, although not much. 2. People making decisions are also probably invested in the real estate market, and therefore have money to loose from a collapse of real estate value.

I also gave more thought to it, and I don't see it as impossible that WFH reduces employee's productivity (from the perspective of the employer). However, that is also true of other worker's rights like vacation time or sick leave. RTO mandates are an act of control of workers, from the managing class, and pushing it as "because of productivity" does not change that.

And again: I personally like working more from an office. I don't want to force others to follow my preferences.

[0] https://www.realtygroupfl.com/blog/posts/2022/02/02/google-r...

antoinealbon What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?

That's not necessarily true, though. For instance, real estate investors have a lot to lose from vacant office space and therefore would benefit from RTO.

I personally find that I enjoy in person collaboration but that should not mean we should universally force every team to come back to the office.

antoinealbon PCB devboard the size of a USB-C plug

If you are talking about USB-A Nanos, there is https://tomu.im/, which is very nice and interesting.

antoinealbon Cloudflare Down Again – and DownDetector Is Also Down

The linked article is precisely about how in 2024 they started rewriting their proxy layer from nginx (a C app). While "They haven't had an incident that bad since they switched from C to Rust." might be true, it has also been almost 9 years since cloudbleed, of which 8 were in C world.

antoinealbon Arrests in Louvre Heist Show Power of DNA Databases in Solving Crimes

What are you raving about? In the US you can get your DNA taken by authorities without possibility of refusing as well: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/23/us-border...

antoinealbon F-Stack – A network development kit with high performance based on DPDK

The goal of this kind of system is not to replace the application server. This is intended to work on the data plane where you do simple operations but do them many time per second. Think things like load balancers, cache server, routers, security appliances, etc. In this space Kernel Bypass is still very much the norm if you want to get an efficient system.

antoinealbon SSL certificate requirements are becoming obnoxious

There are more ACME-compatible CAs than just Let's Encrypt, should they ever become the bad guys, or if you don't want to trust them for any reason, see [0].

I understand that people get annoyed at shorter cert lifetime, for instance if you are managing appliances or use SSL certs for other reasons than the common use case. But if you just want to serve a website, there are not so many reasons not to use HTTPS today, either on Let's Encrypt or on something else.

[0] https://acmeclients.com/certificate-authorities/

antoinealbon New Linux udisks flaw lets attackers get root on major Linux distros

Android delegated some security features to a different kernel called Trusty that is separated from the main Linux kernel using virtualisation. That kernel runs high value security services.

https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/trusty

antoinealbon FFmpeg School of Assembly Language

Yes, but on projects like that, ease of maintenance is a secondary priority when compared to performance or throughput.

antoinealbon Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

Romansh is a national language, not an official one. (At the federal level) Which means that Switzerland considers it a part of it’s culture but that for instance laws and executive orders are not translated in Romansh.

antoinealbon Nothing-up-my-sleeve number

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/227459/why-is-t...

The initials spell out "OBSD", as a nod to the hash being first designed for OpenBSD, and they needed a 24 char / 192 bits value.

antoinealbon A tiny self-remaking C program

In arch at least it is reasonnably easy to download the source for a package, modify it locally, build it and install it. Not sure if that's what you are asking for?

antoinealbon How I got my laser eye injury

Google as a company manufactures hardware, it makes sense to have a machine shop for prototypes.

antoinealbon A Swiss town banned billboards. Zurich, Bern may soon follow

Do you have a link ? I was not aware of that, the only thing I can find is that McLaren ran some tests to replace in-cockpit ads with a small eink screen, but nothing on the side of the cars.

antoinealbon Synchronization Is Bad for Scale

etcd is fairly similar to Chubby indeed, or Zookeeper.

antoinealbon WireViz: Easily document cables and wiring harnesses

I heard good stuff about Dirty Cables: https://dirtypcbs.com/store/cables

antoinealbon Reflections on Distrusting xz

Arch Linux is not vulnerable to this specific attack, which requires sshd to be linked to liblzma. This link is provided by out-of-sshd patches, that Arch does not apply to their build.

antoinealbon Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?

That leads to an infinite backlog no ? If you need more than 24h to process 24h of data ?

antoinealbon The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade

At least according to the Github's language breakdown for https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux, C is still 98.3% of the repository, and Rust is in the 0.1% of "others".

antoinealbon Timeline to remove DSA support in OpenSSH

CAN Bus is more like a layer 2 bus, so it should not really bother with encryption, just like Ethernet doesn't provide it. It all comes from the layers above it, and there has been proposal to add encryption or authentication to CAN. The big issue is that in normal CAN you only have 8 bytes to work with.

antoinealbon GM says it's dropping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto because they're unsafe

Well a lot of cars have a wireless charging pad available in the phone holder, so you just drop your phone there and it starts charging / connects to Android Auto.

antoinealbon Apple and Google Monitor Notifications. We Need Push Notification Alternatives

I also had some experience in that space, and my conclusion was that what was really hard is handling keep-alive correctly. Some mobile networks will very aggressively flush their NAT entries while other will be fine with a packet every hour or so. And sometimes the NAT timeout changes depending on the server's IP range. Building a solution that is both battery-optimal and that will keep the connection alive is pretty hard.

antoinealbon The first stable release of a memory safe sudo implementation

Isn't Rust's result type basically the same as Abseil's Status, or am I missing something ? https://abseil.io/docs/cpp/guides/status

antoinealbon Exploiting the iPhone 4

I don't think so. According to [0], the passcode is used to protect filesystem encryption keys, meaning that without the code, you cannot decrypt your files. I don't know if pictures are stored encrypted, but I would assume so.

edit: apparently I might be wrong. [0] also says that for a while only Mail storage, was encrypted and the default changed in iOS 7. So if your iPhone is on iOS <= 6, you might be able to use that to gain access to the device and copy pictures. The tools at [1] might help.

[1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/iphone-dataprotection/

[0] https://darthnull.org/ios-encryption/

antoinealbon STM32 family grows to microprocessor/Linux level with STM32MP1

You can also use third party libraries. I have written projects using ChibiOS and libopencm3 and their driver model was actually OK to use, although for most peripherals you still need the datasheet to understand the exact capabilities of the device.