HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jeff_marshall

211 karma · joined December 31, 2014

email: jeff@betaredex.com
submissionscomments
jeff_marshall··on Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin
Ublock Origin (or equivalent) compatibility is a deal-breaker for me.
jeff_marshall··on How to Decide What to Build
The reaction here is interesting, but it won't change my opinion without concrete feedback. Please tell me why this opinion is wrong.
jeff_marshall··on Fuchsia is not Linux
Yes, as well as some lower-level software. (sharing portions of a PCI BAR region isn't trivial in a hypervisor, when multiple guests are involved).

Mixing safety criticality levels is hard.

jeff_marshall··on How to Decide What to Build
This kind of question is a gold mine, IME. When I interview network protocol devs, my favorite question is:

"tell me what happens between the time you type something into the address bar and when you see a result". so many opportunities to show understanding at various levels there.

jeff_marshall··on Fuchsia is not Linux
I've got a customer that wants to get access to the PTP[1] registers of a NIC from user space. The customer suggests that context switches introduce too much latency and indeterminism (pre systems integration phase - lots of software from different teams ends up running on the final platform) to introduce a reference monitor (capability-based microkernel or otherwise) given known techniques on modern hardware. I'm afraid I can't share the specifics because I don't have them, but I trust the source.

I will grant that this case is an outlier, but this customer use-case is real enough to drive development dollars. It may not be the norm, but precision timing access appears to be very useful in some hard real-time contexts given current hw/sw realities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol

jeff_marshall··on Agent on Demand – Job Offer Negotiation as a Service
> The misunderstanding first...we are not selling anyone to anything. We have no involvement in finding you the job, we are not recruiters, we are not headhunters. So we have no alignment with anyone other than YOU.

How do you get paid? ... and the obvious corollary, why should I trust that our interests are aligned? (either as a candidate or a hiring manager?)

jeff_marshall··on Safety-critical realtime with Linux
Xilinx has being doing CPU+FPGA for longer than that. I did some C runtime enhancements for the PPC 440 included in the FX70 for a product made by a former employer (shadow stacks for better CFI, more locked down MMU use, etc).
jeff_marshall··on Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation
Is any employee of Docker, inc. critical to your use of containers? Is any copyrighted, non-OSS Docker, inc. code critical to your operations?

Where does the money go.

jeff_marshall··on Annual note to self: most of the world exists outside the tech bubble
>No, those are all policy choices we made.

Who is "we"?

I doubt it. I certainly don't recall being asked, and I'm in a privileged position, relatively speaking.

I'd be curious to see how I could participate in the current environment.

jeff_marshall··on Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies
How large is large? Hiring junior engineers or developers definitely happens in companies smaller than FB or GOOG.

Perhaps you mean something specific by "capable"?

I won't disagree that c++ (as a technology) can be a minefield, but this also holds for many technologies and markets (civil aviation being a great example).

I may have missed an implicit /s, for which I apologize in adavance...

jeff_marshall··on Twitch nabs exclusive streaming deal with Blizzard for e-sports events
Do you watch professional sports (football, basketball, etc)?

Watching competitive video games (starcraft 2 is my favorite) has a similar appeal, to me. If you don't watch any sports, than the appeal of esports may not make sense to you.

Of course, twitch is bigger than esports, but each viewer category has their own needs & content that fills them.

jeff_marshall··on Muen: An X86/64 Separation Kernel for High Assurance
Thanks for the references - I'll look into them, I'm definitely interested in multi-tool workflows given my experience (systems programmers aren't necessarily mathematicians). If only the systems programmer could be pointed at tools that don't have horrible false positive rates ... ;)
jeff_marshall··on Muen: An X86/64 Separation Kernel for High Assurance
Yeah, dealing with vendors can be frustrating, for sure.

I'm still a little sad about the I-178 eval, since a lot of the work I saw done by RC was quite good, if limited in scope. Seeing The vendor (imo) misrepresent that effort to sell other software was rather disappointing to someone who had (at the time) just spent a couple years jumping on the formal methods bandwagon.

I'm also not particularly happy with the trend towards process, rather than results based evals. (DO-178, and CSFC, I'm looking at you), but I can see how we got here after the EAL7 well was poisoned.

jeff_marshall··on Muen: An X86/64 Separation Kernel for High Assurance
Regarding the arxiv link on verification methods, I'd be careful reading too much into the summary tables. The authors don't appear to have done their homework there (they overstate the C&A accomplishments of the company I work at and our competitors).

On an unrelated note, I'm pleasantly surprised to see a tech report I contributed to as an undergrad cited - How on earth did they find it?

jeff_marshall··on Ask HN: People above 35, would you risk your job and start a company?
True enough, but so what? Who among us will claim that monetary success is not based on circumstance? Certainly not me.
jeff_marshall··on Avegant “Light Field” Display
volume pixel (voxel) is already a term of art. I'm not aware of jargon to decouple the sampling precision in different axis, though that probably exists too.
jeff_marshall··on Security Key for safer logins with a touch
I disagree that it's undesirable for back-up and restore to be impossible in all cases.

Instead, I would argue that plain-text export of private and secret keys is undesirable, as it removes any protections the HSM was supposed to provide (2 man rule for access, audit of use, etc). Back-up schemes that export these keys (in encrypted form) to another HSM that enforces the same rules as the original HSM can be useful, IMO.

jeff_marshall··on Security Through Transparency
Yes, please.

My email is in my profile.

jeff_marshall··on Compute Card, a Credit Card-Sized Compute Platform
Are you using and/or developing for SGX? I looked into it and got put off by the need to deal with intel for licensing and signing keys, but I'd be curious to know if anyone is doing something interesting with it.
jeff_marshall··on Compute Card, a Credit Card-Sized Compute Platform
Yes it is. Some variants even include a hardware security module so that you can store your encryption keys on it and keep everything but the bootloader encrypted (assuming proper software support of course).
jeff_marshall··on Bose Hearphones
Indeed. I've got a set for range use and they work great (esp. on outdoor ranges).
jeff_marshall··on Liquid Haskell: Haskell as a Theorem Prover [pdf]
There have been quite a few systems that can handle proofs of the kinds of propositions you list above using various different logical frameworks, programming languages, and automatic and/or user-guided proof assistants.

That said, it's no small feat to do a correct translation from the semantics of a full, modern, programming language into the semantics of a SMT solver (which appears to be the primary back-end for deciding propositions in this tool). I'll have to go read the actual dissertation to see how far that goes and whether any escape-hatches for user guidance exist (tactics, manual term manipulation, etc.). I haven't yet found a tool that doesn't allow extensive user guidance to be all that effective for proving things about code/systems that are interesting (to me).

jeff_marshall··on Secure ROM extraction on iPhone 6S
Something I've found helpful is pre-heating the board (e.g., with an under-board IR heater) before breaking out the hot air. As another poster has mentioned, chip-quick is also great stuff.
jeff_marshall··on Ask HN: What is your hardware/garage side-project?
Out of curiosity, how are you planning on handling plating for vias and through-holes?

The desire to stop handling chemicals (I have no convenient means of proper disposal) has got me using the on-line prototype services for anything multi-layer (though I've thought about using my CNC mill for some simple single layer stuff).

jeff_marshall··on Tensorflow Deepmath: Experiments towards neural network theorem proving
thanks!

(edit) I still don't see any rationale for the theorem prover kernel re-implementation. Again, pointers appreciated.

jeff_marshall··on Tensorflow Deepmath: Experiments towards neural network theorem proving
I wonder what the reason for the re-implementation is. Perhaps the existing kernel isn't fast enough at evaluation for training (wild guess)? I'll have to RTFM...

(update) their doesn't appear to be any FM. Can anyone post any links to papers/lists/etc.?

jeff_marshall··on The oldest computer in use by the U.S. government
Too true - both the negative (who wants to program an abacus), and the positive (there is no magic in this program/device).

I feel like developers tend to favor the magic, due to the burden it relieves, without having to consider the negatives due to the way the business of software works.

jeff_marshall··on Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT
There is nothing magic about networking! If you are interested, start reading things and playing around. The issue, like most complex subjects, is that most people aren't interested enough in the details to get to the point where they are confident enough to do something innovative and present it to the world.
jeff_marshall··on Show HN: Build your first real world React.js application
Would you mind sharing your rationale?

As someone approaching web front end development from a clean slate (es6 isn't the monster I though javascript to be, though there are some warts), can you tell me what vue does better than the alternatives (e.g., react)?

I'm building my first prototype of a web-based application right now, and sticking with raw ES6 to keep the cognitive load down (relative to javascript + a framework), but I'm likely to switch to one framework or another to get ride of some of the boilerplate I see happening.

jeff_marshall··on An account of a serious medical emergency on a transoceanic flight
I can't speak for other aspects of FAA oversight, but my limited experience with DO-178B (A process for certifying software for safety-critical applications) has been mostly positive. While the process is rather heavy (and restrictive, regarding development/certification methodology), the outcomes seem to be quite good.

Can you provide some examples of where the FAA is doing poorly due to regulatory capture in regard to safety?

Page 1 of 4Next →