Hacker News Reader

crustycoderon UK police seize Cybertruck because it's illegal there

Is the cybertruck a commercial or a passenger vehicle? If tesla want to reclassify it as a commercial vehicle then they can do the conformity testing under those regulations, and then it will be subject to all the other rules such as class of license needed to drive it, having a tacho, having a speed limiter etc. If they want to sell it as a passenger vehicle then it needs to comply with those regulations - which, by the way, are still the same as the EU ones, so this isn't a UK-only issue.

crustycoderon UK police seize Cybertruck because it's illegal there

To be legal in the UK, vehicles have to have a certificate of conformity, getting one is the responsibility of the manufacturer. Tesla have done that for their other models, but not for cybertruck. I assume that's because the have decided the costs of getting cybertruck compliant with UK regulations would be too high, or not practical.

That's a business decision made by Tesla, not victimisation of poor old Elon, whatever the Musk fanbois think.

crustycoderon 'Switches' are turning handguns into machine guns on Ontario streets

Oh well, if we are going full Ad hominem, not only are you mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence, you are lazy as well. If you'd bothered to look, you'd have found that under UK law, all modern handguns are totally illegal. Specifically, any firearm which either has a barrel less than 30 centimetres in length or is less than 60 centimetres in length overall, other than an air weapon, a muzzle-loading gun or a firearm designed as signalling apparatus, is forbidden. Any form of semi-automatic solid projectile weapon is also banned, so the weapon that's issue in Canada (Glock handgun) is illegal on multiple counts.

Good luck fitting a switch to a handgun dating before 1919, which in theory can be held - although you'd struggle to get a license because you can only hold antique handguns if ammunition isn't readily available for them in the UK, you are a bona-fide collector and central government don't object - they have to individually approve all such licenses.

As you seem to be struggling, I'll simplify it as much as I can for you. The situation that's causing concern in Canada can't happen in the UK because it's illegal to own that sort of weapon in the first place.

That means our laws are stricter than those in Canada.

That means Canada's laws are weaker than those of at least one European country.

That means you are wrong.

crustycoderon 'Switches' are turning handguns into machine guns on Ontario streets

> most, if not all, allowed you to own pistols

Still wrong. In the UK, for example, it's virtually impossible to own a handgun of any sort. The info is easily available online.

crustycoderon 'Switches' are turning handguns into machine guns on Ontario streets

> It may surprise you to know that Canada currently has more restrictive gun laws than any European country.

It certainly would, as it's not true.

crustycoderon Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)

Was just going to say the same. The integration of JavaScript into the Oracle RDBMS is done using a mix of C, Java/Truffle and JavaScript - https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...

And you can step up a level above in the same ecosystem as well, my current project is written in Scala and directly shares its data structures with the Graal Python interprer that I've embedded inside it, so other people can write the stuff they want in Python.

crustycoderon Is Python That Slow?

Another option is GraalPy (https://www.graalvm.org/python/) which is a Python JIT compiler. I've used it to embed an entire Python runtime in an application that's written in Scala which I then compiled to a native executable (https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image...) ending up with a zero-dependency single-file application that can execute and interact with arbitrary Python scripts.

As pointless benchmarks seem to be the thing, here's the numbers for different flavours of the one from the article with "10 20 30 40 50" as the args to make it a teeny bit more realistic:

C 27sec

Java 39sec 1.4x C

GraalPy 139sec 5.1x C

PyPy 252sec 9.3x C

CPython 1780sec 66.3x C

Not that this will tell you much about real-world use cases, of course, but hell, it's Friday afternoon...

crustycoderon Is Python That Slow?

Except of course that's completely missing the point of the benchmark - not that it is a good point, admittedly.

crustycoderon Is Python That Slow?

The TL;DR is "Yes, Python is slow but this is why is doesn't matter, in these scenarios where it being fast doesn't matter".

And:

"Python is by far the fastest to write, cleanest, more maintainable programming language I know ... I rarely feel Python slows me down, and on the other side I constantly marvel at how fast I code with it compared to other languages."

In other words, "I don't know much about anything else other than Python."

What a pointless article.

crustycoderon The Retreat to Muskworld

You do realise that matrix LEDs and auto wipers are bog standard auto tech that other manufacturers have been providing for years?

Audi first offered matrix LED headlights in 2013, so it's only taken Tesla a decade to catch up.

crustycoderon gRPC: The Ugly Parts

What Google does with its internal infrastructure is of limited applicability to the majority of people, where interface stability is the prime directive.

crustycoderon gRPC: The Ugly Parts

Customers who expect interface stability for 12+ months is the real world.

crustycoderon gRPC: The Ugly Parts

Must be nice not to have to live in the real world.

crustycoderon gRPC: The Ugly Parts

Yep, well said.

crustycoderon gRPC: The Ugly Parts

If you think that answer makes even the remotest sense then you really don't know what you are talking about.

crustycoderon gRPC: The Ugly Parts

Experienced people use complex solutions because they know it's the only way they can get stuff to work at the scale they need.

Inexperienced people use complex solutions because they think if the experienced people use it, it must be the right thing to do, no matter what the scale is.

Always use the simplest thing that will work.

crustycoderon gRPC: The Ugly Parts

It's a stupid statement internally as well. Unless you can freeze time itself, deploying new versions of stuff isn't instantaneous. And what happens if you need to do a rollback of a component?

crustycoderon What's your favorite RSS feed reader?

Drop feeds on Firefox

crustycoderon CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

Horrible for sure, not least because hackers now know that the channel file parser is fragile and perhaps exploitable. I haven't seen any significant discussion about follow-on attacks, it's all been about rolling back the config file rather than addressing the root cause, which is the shonky device driver.

crustycoderon CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops

Although it's a .sys file, it's not a device driver.

"Although Channel Files end with the SYS extension, they are not kernel drivers."

https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/technical-details-on-todays...

crustycoderon Meaningful Nonsense: How I generate sentences

I had a bot running at http://twitter.com/bollocks until twitter made it ridiculously complicated to use their API, there's a Linux kernel driver that does the same (http://www.fatsquirrel.org/veghead/software/bollocks/) and a Perl module (https://metacpan.org/pod/Dev::Bollocks) and I'm sure many others.

crustycoderon Yorkshire apostrophe fans demand road signs with nowt taken out

Absolute bollocks. Any DBMS and any competent developer will cope with punctuation just fine. And punctuation is specifically ALLOWED by BS7666, if they are part of the name:

Abbreviations and punctuation should not be used unless they appear in the designated name, e.g. “Dr Newton’s Way”. Only single spaces should be used.

crustycoderon Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

Yorkshire Surprise Major

crustycoderon America's Drivers Agree: LED Headlights Are Just Too Bright

Auto-dim rear view mirrors have been around for ages.

crustycoderon America's Drivers Agree: LED Headlights Are Just Too Bright

On my car it works from behind other cars as well. There's a tree lined road near me, drive behind someone at night and there's a dark box around them, with the the trees being fully lit up.

And it also works with over-reflective road signs, they too get a dark box.

crustycoderon Java virtual threads hit with pinning issue

Thanks for the explanation and - Ugh :-(

crustycoderon Java virtual threads hit with pinning issue

I didn't watch the preso (TL;DW) but isn't this just a case of good old fashioned Priority Inversion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_inversion

If so, it's pretty much an intractable problem, and is the reason (for example) why Solaris abandoned the two-level thread model and went back to a single level one? https://flylib.com/books/en/2.830.1.14/1/

But then again, as I said, TL;DW ;-)

crustycoderon JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

Gleaned from various tickets on the JetBrains bug tracker:

You can't uninstall it, you can only disable it. That's because it's a built in plugin, those can't be disabled without breaking incremental upgrades (which personally I don't use anyway).

And like many others here, my corp explicitly forbids ANY use of ANY 3rd party LLM technologies at work. It's a disciplinary matter. So JB forcing something on people that means they could potentially lose their jobs for using IntelliJ is just monumentally stupid.

There is a workaround which is to manually delete the plugin, see https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-1760/Can-not-remove... But as above, that breaks incremental upgrades.

crustycoderon Leveraging Rust in our Java database

https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/master/substratevm/src/...

And in any case:

JEP draft: Prepare to Restrict The Use of JNI https://openjdk.org/jeps/8307341

JEP 442: Foreign Function & Memory API (Third Preview) https://openjdk.org/jeps/442

crustycoderon Leveraging Rust in our Java database

Nowadays there's a much better technology than JNI for doing this sort of thing in Java.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/graalvm/jdk/21/docs/reference-man...