Hacker News Reader

fwsgonzoon EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided

Is there any living person that thinks the UK people want ChatControl? No? Me neither.

fwsgonzoon A Claude Code 5-hour limit Tracker

The whole thing has made me unsure if I want to continue using Claude at all.

fwsgonzoon Hollow Knight: Silksong causes server chaos on Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo

Yep, when steam didn't work I got it immediately on GoG. Glad I did because it works flawlessly on Linux, and it comes with a Linux installer!

fwsgonzoon Ask HN: How did you come up with original ideas?

The best way (anecdotally) for me has been to not understand the subject matter at all, and just work work work on something until it's near completion. At that point understanding the subject matter is much easier, and you can compare it to your own understanding and work. Many times I've since improved my work from subject matter because other people have had great ideas that stood the test of time, and very occasionally my work has created a new frontier without me really understanding it at the time. Still, revolutionary ideas are not always something that can be turned into a business. Funnily, I see many business ideas are just gluing things together, and I don't think anyone is really upset about that.

As you said though, sometimes you have to go the wrong way (knowingly or unknowingly) just to see what's there or if there aren't missed opportunities. Heavily established (sub-)fields can be very rigid and hard to find new ground in.

fwsgonzoon South Korea's military has shrunk by 20% in six years as male population drops

Yeah, I'm watching people walk around in SK and JP and I really want to visit one day. One day before it's too late. Both countries will evaporate.

fwsgonzoon Ask HN: What are you working on this weekend?

I'm working on an addon for Godot called Godot Sandbox, and we're trying to also build it as a module. A module is embeddable into Godot, so that you can have only one executable be the whole game. Addons are dynamically loaded at run-time. It's been a lot of work, but integration is just as important as making the addon itself.

fwsgonzoon ‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video]

This is a white lie.

fwsgonzoon What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

I've read so many comments, many of which I agree with and some which I don't. Either way, this comment is the only one that touches on the subject of womens careers. We are new parents and my wife is scared that she will lose her job despite protections. We are sick a lot (almost permanently so far) as childcare is a petri dish. We are also sleeping poorly almost every other day. She sometimes has meetings in the afternoon because people can't respect other peoples time off, and has to sometimes have a screaming child in the background. If she were to lose her job, we would have serious economic issues, despite both of us having good jobs. It's not great. It's becoming very clear to me that something is wrong both economically and politically when it comes to child rearing.

fwsgonzoon Ask HN: Where have the posts with open source projects of enthusiasts gone?

I can see a few cool projects on show: https://news.ycombinator.com/show

fwsgonzoon What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

Yep, we are new parents and we are almost 40. There just wasn't any moment before where it was possible to start a family. We are comfortable but utterly alone in our box, with no grandparents or extended family in sight. Also, with the expectation that outside is for cars. So, there's 1-2 hours at the end of the day for us which is largely cleaning and de-stressing. If anyone had laid this fully out for us before we made this choice, it would have been an easy heck no.

fwsgonzoon Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly (2020)

I tried optimizing my CPU emulator dispatch in raw assembly to see if I could run a simple fibonacci program faster than C++. And I was not even close. In the end I merged it and made it a default-disabled dispatch option, because ... there has to be a way to make it faster!

If you are daring, you can find my puny attempt here: https://github.com/libriscv/libriscv/blob/master/lib/librisc...

I did manage to improve it once I figured out some of the various modes of accessing memory, and I even managed to cut the jump table down from 64- to 32-bit which should help keep it in memory. I made the jump table part of .text in order to make it RIP-relative. For the fibonacci sequence program, not many bytecodes are needed. I would greatly appreciate some tips on what can be improved there.

fwsgonzoon I built an ADHD app with interactive coping tools, noise mixer and self-test

Same for me, except I'm nearing 40. All my brothers have it to various degrees, and since I have a job and doing OK, I cannot be helped. It's extremely annoying that access to medicine is gated by the personal opinions of professionals (and that the medicine is jail-worthy to begin with). Specifically, I was denied because too old, in writing.

fwsgonzoon Technical co-founder, built everything. Offered 4%. Oof

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Completely meaningless. Being able to create something from nothing and deliver a usable product is, as you know, everything.

Your situation is eerily similar to something in my past, and probably many others. I don't think it's a good idea to do things without formal agreements. Try to do it solo for as long as possible and hire the help you need.

Sometimes if you're lucky you'll meet incredible people who contribute in ways that is essentially innovating on their own, maybe even adding more legs to stand on. I think that's where it's natural for 50/50 partnership discussions to occur. How you can make an agreement if you don't know who you're partnering with? It generally takes some time to get to know someone.

Anyway, just my rambling.

fwsgonzoon Deno Under TinyKVM in Varnish

https://github.com/lrowe/deno_varnish

It's very much still a work-in-progress. But it works!

The main plugin repo is here: https://github.com/varnish/libvmod-tinykvm

fwsgonzoon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

Yes, you can use glibc with -static!

fwsgonzoon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

I really should ask him what's up with that.

fwsgonzoon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

For the Varnish integration I added permission-based access to local files. Network stuff can be accessed through custom APIs. A simple fetch(url, options)-like system call. Just have a look at the VMOD repository. It's something I'd like to move into TinyKVM when I feel like it.

fwsgonzoon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

> the big challenge is rather to decide on the right set of tradeoffs

Agreed. That's a good way to sum it up.

fwsgonzoon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

There's many ways to go about it, but essentially yes, brk and mmap and a few others just to get into main() for some common run-times.

But you can do whatever you want. For example in libriscv I override the global allocator in my guest programs to use a host-managed heap. That way heap usage has native performance in interpreter mode, while also allowing me full control of the heap from the outside. I wrote about this here: https://medium.com/@fwsgonzo/using-c-as-a-scripting-language...

fwsgonzoon A more robust raw OpenBSD syscall demo

Perhaps, but I can't imagine its buggy for general registers like those used in system calls. I haven't seen that bug, but I don't doubt it. There's many obscure registers for various architectures that could bug out.

fwsgonzoon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

Yep. I could imagine a deterministic method of just sending the executable + changed pages. Then load the program in the same way on the other machine, and then apply the changed pages. It would be a minimal transfer. Thread state can also be migrated, but Linux-kernel stuff like FDs cannot or at least, that's not my area of expertise!

fwsgonzoon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

You can run v8 jitless, if you want. It's going to be much faster than QuickJS. Adding JIT support means adding a fixed executable range, which you also can do already, but you can't run it in the dumb CLI example. JITs love to be W+X. So, not sure if it's an afternoon amount of work yet, due to security implications.

I have experience with this from libriscv, where I also embed JIT run-times like v8 and LuaJIT already.

fwsgonzoon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

Someone joined my discord recently and showed me this one: https://github.com/ashishbijlani/kwarantine

It runs on bare metal, though. I just thought it was very interesting to see. Must have been a lot of work.

fwsgonzoon A more robust raw OpenBSD syscall demo

Register variables are idiomatic when you're locking down every single register anyway, which is always the case for system calls. If you're writing assembly where you want the register allocators help, by all means use regular inline assembly.

fwsgonzoon A more robust raw OpenBSD syscall demo

This is inline assembly.

fwsgonzoon A more robust raw OpenBSD syscall demo

The inline assembly is not idiomatic. Today you should be using register asm. Here is a RISC-V example:

    register long a0 asm("a0") = arg0;
    register long syscall_id asm("a7") = n;

    asm volatile ("ecall" : "+r"(a0) : "r"(syscall_id));

    return a0;

This is an example where a0 is an in/out integer. For memory, change long a0 to a pointer to some struct and add a "m" input or "+m" in/out. It's even easier in other languages like Rust and Zig.

fwsgonzoon Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

Yep, the amount of contradiction one can hold probably has no bounds when not subjected to some kind of deprogramming. I occasionally look at conservative messaging boards and most members are just asking for what to think not really asking why something (really bad) happened.

Among endless examples, here is a Trumper begging to be educated on why Trump said he is king: https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1itkmen/expla...

fwsgonzoon Zstandard v1.5.7 brings performance enhancements

Well, I updated my submodule to latest dev and it doesn't even build. Trying to figure out what broke. Looking forward to seeing the improvements.

EDIT: Found the offending PR and made an issue

fwsgonzoon WASM will replace containers

As someone who has written a RISC-V sandbox for that purpose, I say stay the course. We need more competition to WASM. At the end you'll find that register machines make for faster interpreters than Harvard architectures. You can have a look at libriscv or message me if you need any help.

Source: https://libriscv.no/docs/performance/

fwsgonzoon Ask HN: Why are we all pretending everything is normal?

Indeed, just look at the perp walk of Luigi Mangione. I've never seen so many feds in one place for one guy. I guess the rulers didn't like that one bit.