HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

babas

109 karma · joined March 23, 2013

submissionscomments
babas··on Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering
How does this compare to ReVa? https://github.com/cyberkaida/reverse-engineering-assistant

I think your installation instructions are incomplete. I followed the instructions and installed via file -> install in the project view. Restarted. But GhidraMCP is not visible in Tools after opening a binary.

babas··on No I don't want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive
Windows enshittification has come a long way unfortunately. You still have some options to remove crap. I have had very good luck with o&o ShutUp10++

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

babas··on Why are there suddenly so many car washes?
I've been thinking about this same phenomenon. I reside in Norway, where, interestingly, five different car washes opened in 2023 within a 2 km radius of my local neighborhood. Remarkably, four of these are clustered within a 300m stretch inside a commercial park. Our local area has a population of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 people.

Each car wash is operated by a different entity, offering unique apps and subscription plans.

It's hard to imagine this being profitable given the circumstances. But what do I know, I wash my own car.

babas··on I wrote my own smart home software
It can use both. ZHA is included in base HA. Z2M is an optional addon. Z2M has better support for obscure devices in my experience. I Also strongly prefer the management interface in z2m.
babas··on Notes on training BERT from scratch on an 8GB consumer GPU
You usually save checkpoints at some interval. You can use them to continue the training.
babas··on How Brompton Bicycle uses Raspberry Pi technology to improve production [video]
WAGO pfc controllers series can do everything you mention. They are "just" Linux boxes with a fully featured integrated I/O bus (with any input/output type you can imagine). They can be programmed in pretty much any language and you can deploy with docker.

That said. Really large factories use DCS. (Distributed Control System) they are horribly expensive but integrates everything in one system. Controller programming, Human machine interfaces, MES and even ERP. Best known to me is ABB 800xA and Siemens PCS7.

babas··on GNU poke: The extensible editor for structured binary data
It may not be ideal to praise commercial software in a GNU software thread, but I really enjoy using 010 Editor. It's one of the few programs I pay for. Its C-like template syntax (looks similar to GNU Poke syntax) makes reverse engineering binary formats easy and fun!
babas··on UML: My Part in Its Downfall
I was in university 2004 to 2009. We had a total of 3 UML classes. A whole semester of wasted time. The professor that pushed this got "promoted" to a non teaching role after us. Everyone with some programming experience saw UML as a complete waste of time. The people pushing it at the time had no actual use-case just pie in the sky dreams of autogenerated software. It was doomed to fail.
babas··on The Low Energy Trap
This made me think of 2 videos by Isaac Author

https://youtu.be/XAJeYe-abUA

Tldv; if we pave over the earth the carrying capacity is humongous. Only limited by heat and energy.

babas··on VNC client running on a coffee machine
We have one of those exact machines at the office. It's okey. The coffee is alright. The number codes are a nice feature. It's annoying that the cup sensor doesn't recognise transparent glasses so you have to hold your finger over the sensor if you want a glass of water. I can't figure out why they wouldn't use a ultrasonic sensor. Oh well. First World problems.
babas··on The S in IoT is for Security
You can join Phillips hue units to your own zigbee network without Internet or even the Phillips hue app.

Zigbee2mqtt and a cheap zigbee dongle is all you need really. You could add home assistant for a better interface but there is no need to involve Phillips or the Internet. One of the huge advantages of zigbee imo.

babas··on What’s interesting about the Florida water system hack is that we heard about it
The 3G thing is extremely common. Even with HUGE suppliers. Including Siemens Energy. Their steam turbine systems come with a 3g connection as standard. I even think they won't do 24h/7d support without it.
babas··on ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies
Probably. After reading the paper I'm pretty sure they messed up their testing.

The problem is that they blow it up HUGE both in the paper and the article without cursory checking. That is as bad as lie. Maybe even worse.

From The paper 7.1.2: "Censored Planet data reveals extremely aggressive DNS blocking of many domains in Norway, with many blocks being consistent in all of our vantage points. During the four month period of increased censorship, 25 ASes observed blocking of more than 10 domains in at least six categories. We observed the most rigorous activity in AS 2116 (CATCHCOM) where more than 50 domains were blocked."

Blocking more than 10 domains in 25 ASes I have no reason to doubt. As I said there is extensive DNS blocking. So they write in a way that makes it sound like all the ASes are blocking hrw.org and match. But it's probably only on CATCHCOM. This is a ISP for mostly huge corporate environments where blocking may be by customer demand. So they take one single source of "anomaly" and blow it up. Pretty much a lie.

babas··on ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies
I'm pretty sure it never happened. This would have been big news here. The technology press went ape when thepriatebay.org was added to a DNS blocklist. I have searched around and can not find any references to hrw or match being blocked by accident or not.

Either the article writer is confusing Norway with another country or this is just "Journalistic flair" i.e. a lie.

babas··on ‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies
When I read that, I immediately dismissed the whole article. Both HRW and match.com are available on the 4/5 ISPs I have access to ATM. Home (Telenor), mobile (Telia), server host (domeneshop), my office (Telia, wired) and a customer network (Not sure about the downstream ISP). On the last one match.com is blocked by a firewall not the ISP.

They should really check thier sources. My guess is that they tested on a network that has a filtering firewall.

Now that that is said. Norway is not perfect. The biggest ISPs use a easy to bypass DNS blocklist by the judiciary. The list contains CP-sites, gambling, piracy, terrorism. This is bad enough. Why lie about match.com and hrw.org? Jeez.

babas··on Alphabet announces Q3 2020 earnings
I'm pretty sure it's modded version of the official youtube app so no guarantees (Just use a dummy account?).

I'm actually very interested in how the vanced developer has made this. This app is pretty much identical to the youtube app with premium features enabled and ad/sponsor bocking/skipping.

babas··on Alphabet announces Q3 2020 earnings
If you use Android Youtube Vanced is really awesome. Removes ads and has function for skipping in-video annoyances (sponsors, intros, etc)

https://vancedapp.com/

babas··on Browser Fingerprinting: An Introduction and the Challenges Ahead
I have been wondering for some time if some kind of randomization of the fingerprinting parameters would be better than trying to be standard/anonymous. If the fingerprint changes often wouldn't it become completely useless?
babas··on Show HN: EventQL – Open-source distributed SQL analytics database in C++11
Yeah that is one of the biggest issues besides the licensing stuff. But ram is pretty cheap and it seems 200,000 different series/tags fits easily in 32gb.
babas··on Show HN: EventQL – Open-source distributed SQL analytics database in C++11
We threw kdb+ out of consideration pretty early because it's extremely expensive and we prefer open software.
babas··on Show HN: EventQL – Open-source distributed SQL analytics database in C++11
Looks great! I've just gotten a single instance up and running. Really simple to set up. It seems almost exactly what We've been looking for! Some background: We have been evaluating different time series databases for use with sensor readings (We probably need to ingest something on the order of 100,000-200,000 samples/s per cluster). The data is from physical sensors like temperature, level, pressure etc. Where all the data is in the form of tag(string)|datetime(ms)|value(decimal).

Have you done any comparisons to other similar software like influxdb, Cassandra, etc? Especially ingestion rate and disk usage.

What kind of pricing can we expect on Managed Hosting?

We are currently leaning towards Influxdb but the cluster licensing stuff they are doing really made us think twice.

babas··on Lenovo Launches ThinkPad X1 Yoga at CES with OLED Display
Is it really that bad? All I can find is some anecdotes about temporary burn-in.
babas··on Dozens of oil tankers cluster off the coast of Texas due to oil price fall
This is a drill rig and does not have any oil/gas production facilities. The pressure in a well can be very unpredictable and is very dangerous to connect directly to generators/heaters. I's much safer to flare it off for the short period when plugging the well.
babas··on Dozens of oil tankers cluster off the coast of Texas due to oil price fall
It's definitely flaring. Just look at the other images. Due to the way the flare is placed it just looks like it's on fire. It's still an emergency flare and looks like a pretty bad situation. I've worked on similar drill rigs and i would not want to be on one that is flaring that much.

http://imgur.com/FTFgz5U

http://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:185...

babas··on What’s Wrong with Git? A Conceptual Design Analysis
What "op" exactly? git push/pull? git push/pull are bandwidth efficient and atomic. A failed pull/push wont destroy your local/remote copy.
babas··on LASIK 6 months later
What gets me the most about LASIK naysayers is that you also get the same or even much worse artifacts when using glasses or contacts. I had Femto-LASIK 2 years ago, after using glasses for 6 years and contacts for 6 more. I have very slight haloing around bright lights at night (Not as bad as described in the post though). The freedom of not having glasses or using contacts is FANTASTIC!
babas··on OpenZFS launch
Just to make it clear. raid-5/6 mdadm arrays does the right thing when repairing/checking/scrubbing data. It writes the correct data if one of the drives has a corrupted block.

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_Administration

  How often does this happen? According to what I have been reading, without ECC RAM and without ZFS, your machines get roughly one corrupt bit per day. In other words, that could be a few corrupt files per week.
This is complete nonsense without more data to back it up.
babas··on Hyperloop
Orbital welding on this scale and much larger is already done in the offshore oil industry.
babas··on How we use BitTorrent to improve our design sharing workflow
You can set the port in the configuration:

http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync/get-started.html...

The closed source nature of Bitorrent Sync is biggest drawback IMHO. But I guess FOSS clones are on their way. The bit torrent protocol in itself is very well known after all.

babas··on BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public
Dropbox does not upload your whole Truecrypt volume every time you change it. It just uploads the blocks that are changed. It's pretty efficient.

The real problem with using a Truecrypt volume on Dropbox is concurrent changes to the same volume. It happens if you mount the Truecrypt volume on 2 machines at the same time. It will mess up badly.

Page 1 of 2Next →