HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dark-star

1,930 karma · joined October 30, 2021

submissionscomments
dark-star··on The lost malloc()
> you're forcing the memory allocator to keep track of these sizes when it shouldn't have to

Sounds much safer to me than have every single developer, program or library keep track of those sizes properly... I mean that way it's at least only done in 1 place and done correctly, instead of forcing every developer to suddenly keep track of yet another value

dark-star··on Kitty 0.50
I was happy that this nice little PuTTY clone[1] finally got an update... until I realized that it was some other, unrelated terminal emulator that just happened to use the same name.

Why do people not do a web search before naming their project, to look for "prior art" under the same name sigh

[1] https://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!pages/download.md

dark-star··on Ubuntu still has not released patch for Linux 0day RCE in almost 3 weeks
Yeah, I thought we stopped posting freenode links here on HN a while ago. Kinda surprised about this one (especially since it is covered in detail elsewhere as well)
dark-star··on Wir müssen wissen – wir werden wissen
"hätte man wissen können..."
dark-star··on Supermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack
> a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumers

I would bet that if it will ever be resolved, it will turn out to be just some bored kids[] who read the recent report from France and had access to Shodan and a competent AI model.

[] I'm using the term "kids" loosely here, not refering to a certain age group but to a certain mindset, similar to the original term "hacker"

dark-star··on Railpass
How can I select a specific line in a country? I keep getting new (random) lines when I click on the same country again, is there any way to actually choose a specific line?
dark-star··on Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
simply creating a Microsoft account would have been far quicker and easier ;-)
dark-star··on Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
So what's stopping people from creating their own indivicual law, everyone for him/herself? That would be the closest you can get to the people ;-)
dark-star··on Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
That's different. They cant create new "laws", and they can't spy on you etc. Also that's just for one building usually (the building where you live in) not a whole community
dark-star··on Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
but why would you need an HOA for that? If your neighbor drops their junk on the street you can just call the cops on them yourself
dark-star··on Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
So they are able to enact their own laws? That's pretty different from Germany, where a municipality cannot override laws from higher courts.
dark-star··on Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
Can someone explain to me (an European) what purpose HOAs serve? I mean do they actually have any benefits? I only know them from videos where people are being harassed by them
dark-star··on VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
no idea who Frank is (neither do I care) but these files have been readily available for years (and still are), all they're doing is collecting them at a central place and make them searchable (and vievable at a decent speed, compared to IA).

So yeah, I'm fine with people funding that

dark-star··on VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
works fine here. Maybe try a different browser, or disable Adblocker/NoJS (the reading page looks like it uses lots of JavaScript)
dark-star··on VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
That very blog post describes where they got their materials from, most of it comes from Retromags and out-of-print-archive. You can find downloads over at their sites, and those sites usually also upload to IA.

I don't think you can download directly from VGHF as that is not what it's intended for (it's a research tool)

dark-star··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
I've been telling people for years that it's probably easier that they get used to the thought that everything about them is "public" in some way than waiting for the day when computers and databases are suddenly safe from hacking.

That doesn't mean that all of your neighbors know your medical history, but you have to assume that someone who wants to know those details about you will know them.

I have lost faith in people protecting any significant database from hackers.

dark-star··on AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?
Usually you do "rdrand % <some-number>" anyways, and in that case you will still get zeroes. True, your result might be skewed by 1/(maxint/some-number) but I guess that's not a big problem in practice
dark-star··on AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?
this is not how crypto works
dark-star··on Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms
Yeah but I don't want Chachacha, I prefer AES. If you can't do AES, I'm not interested in the website :)
dark-star··on Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms
I don't get what this is supposed to prove. That my browser doesn't allow websites to declare what encryption they use? I am pretty sure there's a point to all of this, but please let me (and my browser) choose which encryptions I want to trust.

Is this a spec violation or something?

dark-star··on German companies rely almost exclusively on AI models and services from the USA
I mean what other competitively similar AI models are there? DeepSeek is nowhere near. Are there others?
dark-star··on Linux from Scratch
I used CLFS (Cross-Linux From Scratch) once to bootstrap Linux on my SGI Indy, and I learned quite a lot from this. That was back in 2008 or so, so way before AI and extensive online guides for almost everything. It taught me how cross compilers work, what dependencies exist in the GNU toolchain, how the SGI boots, and much more.

Too bad Cross-LFS is no longer a thing. Then again, with all these microcontrollers and ARM and RISC-V systems today, cross-compiling is no longer as magic (and tricky) as it was back then...

dark-star··on A 386 PC for Your RP2350
here you go: https://archive.org/details/386BSD1.0

probably faster downloading it than searching around in the attic ;-)

dark-star··on A 386 PC for Your RP2350
At least the Wolfenstein screenshot is VGA, not EGA. Yes, it looks weird with that dithering effect, but it's still VGA (too many/wrong colors for EGA, and also: Wolfenstein never was released with EGA graphics in the first place)
dark-star··on A 386 PC for Your RP2350
it would be awesome if there was an ISA bus emulation using some sort of modern protocol. You could create "modern" ISA cards using an RP2350 on every card that does the emulation, to split emulation between multiple RP2350's (one emulates a VGA card, one emulates a sound card, one emulates a network card, etc.)

Bonus points for a standardized connector that everyone could develop towards. Imagine a tiny ISA PC that you could place on your desktop, swap miniscule (ISA)-cards in and out of, and play retro games etc.

dark-star··on A 386 PC for Your RP2350
it's not that bad. At 120MHz, the PSRAM still gets only around 90-100ns per word in the worst case. If you use some SRAM for caching and do bulk transfers, you can get that down quite a bit. Also you can easily overclock the PSRAM to 133MHt (10 decrease in latency) with no problem, maybe even (much?) more.

normal dynamic RAM back then was at 60-70 ns so it's really not that bad. And YT videos show that it also works fine in practice

dark-star··on A 386 PC for Your RP2350
How is the RP2350 6 times faster than the RP2350? That must be a typo...
dark-star··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
yeah, this is a bug. And yes, it should be fixed. But I don't think it will affect many users, I mean who has a 32000 -evels deep directory on their system?
dark-star··on Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)
maybe this is the real reason why governments don't switch to Linux: the nerdy images. Because we can't have that in an official government building, no sir, it's all numbers and abstract icons in here please :-)
dark-star··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
Is there a way to just browse hosted projects without creating an account? I couldn't find anything
Page 1 of 29Next →