Hacker News Reader

userbinatoron Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees

I believe that is actually a Broadcom chip, originally BCM43455.

userbinatoron Code-execution flaw in UEFI firmware threatens most servers on planet Earth

Another breathless fearmongering. "threatens"? No, I don't think network booting is even all that common outside of extremely niche scenarios.

Instead, it applies only to organizations with machines that boot from local networks, or conceivably from Internet-connected resources.

Who is PXE-booting over the open Internet!?

userbinatoron Assembly Nights (2021)

I wouldn't call it "atrophy" unless you were already reading and writing Asm regularly.

userbinatoron Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs

IMHO this is one of the OSes with the weirdest decisions I've seen on here. I do agree with using PE instead of ELF, as the dynamic linking situation of the latter (and Unix-likes in general) is, to put it bluntly, a horrid mess.

The POSIX functions are split over ucrtbase, iphlpapi, and ws2_32, as on Windows, with anything that Windows doesn't implement put in mnposix.

LOL. POSIX in ucrtbase! Those are words that I never expected to see together.

I used AI to help with the mechanical parts of porting

I feel like it won't be long before someone comes up with a crazy chimera of an OS that can run DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and macOS binaries. It doesn't look like AI is replacing software developers, but rather boosting them quite significantly; there seems to be a lot of activity and new projects I've seen recently from many who aren't even using AI themselves, but must be somehow being inspired by others to do more.

userbinatoron Assembly Nights (2021)

Using GDB to debug Asm is... certainly a choice.

userbinatoron Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11

Wrote a few small utilities in Win32 in the early 90s; still use them today unmodified, but most recently in WINE. I have some slightly older DOS utilities that are also quite usable.

userbinatoron What goes into making an animated film?

I think another important point that AI is revealing is how diverse the population's preferences are. Legacy entertainment is nowhere as precisely tailored, because it tries to appeal to a wide audience.

Personally, all the Harry Potter AI shorts recently have been rather amusing, although they also vary significantly in detail and wit.

userbinatoron GPU-unlock: FP/BF16 instruction issue rate on Nvidia 3000's cards

Did you use AI tools to do it? The README reads like Claudish. It's amusing to see Nvidia-powered AI used to unlock their GPUs.

userbinatoron AI compute is the new oil–and needs a new market

The latter is leading to the former.

userbinatoron Reverse engineer of PC-98 Touhou games retires

I'm an experienced reverser, and have been doing it for decades, but I think it's great that LLMs have brought this power to everyone and the old gatekeepers are being made irrelevant. IMHO the ones who are complaining about it were always just seeking fame and fortune, not freedom and user empowerment. Like I said in another comment recently, I don't think Stallman ever anticipated this development, and that his focus on "open source" was always misguided.

Incidentally I've also been writing Z80 and x86 Asm for roughly as long, and saw the complaints about "compiler slop" (we didn't call it that) at the time. I could probably still beat one if I wanted to, but clearly "close enough is good enough" and there's so much useful software which would not have been created if compilers couldn't exist and everyone still had to write machine code using a hexpad.

Edit: got any counterarguments? It's not like I won't get a boost from using LLMs either.

userbinatoron Why my Asus laptop kept rebooting after sleep and how to fix it

You can tell your LLM to patch out the driver signing checks too, and probably write something that can merge updates to your custom kernel while keeping your specific patches.

userbinatoron Evolving Threat: http2shell is an RCE in Node, Python, and more

You don't. Any real compression algorithm, including all the other standard ones, doesn't need such a thing.

userbinatoron Evolving Threat: http2shell is an RCE in Node, Python, and more

Brotli, another one of those pseudostandards[1] from Big G that I was avoiding all along. Dodged another bullet.

[1] When more than half of the "standard" https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7932/#page-44 is an opaque binary blob, they're really not encouraging independent implementations.

Edit: the votes really show what an echochamber for Big G this place has become. FUCK YOU, GOOGLE!

userbinatoron I turned my TV into a Game Boy Color with a Pokemon town as my home screen

When I read the top-level comment, I was almost certain it was going to be AI-assisted. Before, your only chance at something like that was either having the skills to RE and mod everything yourself, or finding someone equally motivated and skilled to do it. Now you can pay AI to do your bidding, and while vibecoding is definitely not perfect, it has definitely lowered the bar. What an interesting era we live in.

userbinatoron German court calls Google aerial imagery 'spying'

The US definitely has much more detailed aerial photographs already. Good luck suing the US government.

I wonder if we're going to get a Streisand Effect this time. Maybe we'll end up with the amusing situation of Google blocking only Germans from seeing their own country, while everyone else still can.

userbinatoron AI compute is the new oil–and needs a new market

People are vibecoding and vibemodding software like never before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50196718 is on the front page as I write this, and there have been many others sharing their story of how AI fixed bugs in software they didn't have the source to, by patching the binary.

The thing about AI entertainment is that it's far more targeted and niche, so you're unlikely to find huge central gatherings around one popular thing, but instead it's spread out over many smaller channels.

userbinatoron Why my Asus laptop kept rebooting after sleep and how to fix it

The ultimate solution would be a fixed MT7922 driver, but try as I might, I haven't been able to find one online.

Perhaps it's time to ask an LLM of your choice to make one.

userbinatoron AI compute is the new oil–and needs a new market

I think that's starting to happen. There's a new vibecoded project shown off here almost every day. YouTube has gotten a lot more entertainment rising above the slop. People are beginning to realise what AI can do for them.

userbinatoron ThinkPad I9990303 Error Catch-22

The trick is to do a few reads and compare to make sure you're getting the same data every time; and only then do the write. I have not had any problems with the cheap clips this way, but reading first and verifying is always recommended regardless.

userbinatoron Why Windows 11 still ships with Windows 95's memory manager hidden inside it

and your "OS" will just be manager of lightweight VMs.

You mean like Windows/386 through Windows Me? They were effectively a hypervisor for DOS VMs.

userbinatoron Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?

we don't read the assembly code produced by the compiler, nor do we read the code of all open source dependencies

When you actually have to debug, you sometimes need to.

userbinatoron Footage of the Flock search that a judge ruled was uncosntitutional

100% fabricated bullshit. Good thing we have bodycams to tell the truth.

userbinatoron Laptop Based on 6502 CPU

Many of the cheap "educational toy laptops" which were somewhat common before "real" ones took over, also used a 6502-based SoC: https://github.com/davidgiven/vtech6502

The Z80 has likewise experienced the same use: https://hackaday.io/project/166921-v-tech-genius-leader-prec...

userbinatoron Laptop Based on 6502 CPU

A pic in a different post shows the 48k ram chip, and not far away is an SD card of 1 gigabyte - that's a dramatic contrast

Incidentally, cheap MP3/MP4 players in the last decade had a few hundred KB of RAM, an 8-bit CPU at a few dozen MHz, and a few GB of NAND flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player

userbinatoron Someone behind the software

I don't think more empty lines and useless whitespace is "more readable" at all. Once again, the "taste" argument comes back.

userbinatoron I electrified my push scooter with a power drill

I suspect there's very little power needed once you're up to speed and cruising, but constant stop-and-go and long uphill runs will certainly cause it to overheat.

It's brushless so brush wear isn't a problem, but these motors are air-cooled and will actually be cooler at high speed, low-demand. Lugging it up a hill would be a worst case.

userbinatoron I electrified my push scooter with a power drill

Wonder how this would work with an impact?

Not very well. It will work as long as the power demand is below the point it starts hitting, and then just stall with the tires absorbing all the impact hits once it reaches that point.

userbinatoron Someone behind the software

That isn't more concise than

   foo = bar ? 1
             : baz ? 2
                   : 3;

userbinatoron Someone behind the software

I would actually prefer chained ternaries over more verbose if/else expressions with duplicated LHS, so this does go back to the argument about "taste".

userbinatoron One parser, two bugs, many routers: Exploiting Broadcom WiFi across eCos, Linux

unless affected Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are willing to migrate.

...or someone spends a bit of time with an AI to come up with a patch? Bonus points for one that can be remotely installed using the same exploit...