HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

xvilka

8,083 karma · joined December 2, 2013

Reverse Engineer
submissionscomments
xvilka··on US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears
This is why Kagi and Kagi Assistant is the "next-level" of web search. Well worth every cent spent on the subscription. Even in the AI era.
xvilka··on Today's PHP security release, and how we're strengthening security
Zero-knowledge proofs and PKI system could fix all of that. Nobody needs to know all of your personal information, only on the "need-to-know basis" and via easily revocable access. But as long as humans are the ones who decides on this I don't believe it will ever happen. At least until sentient AI is in control.
xvilka··on BIPM decides to stop adding leap seconds to UTC
At this point we really should start working on interplanetary time standards, as well as better handling relativistic time effects. With more and more satellites and computers in deep space it might become a point of failure in the near future.
xvilka··on NRC issues first U.S. construction permit for a BWRX-300 small modular reactor
In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized. Thus, pivoting to SMR is unnecessary, since they produce significantly less energy.
xvilka··on Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
Would be nice if they also push conversion of Nix to Rust, to finish what Lix [1] and Snix[2] started.

[1] https://lix.systems/

[2] https://snix.dev/

xvilka··on Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
Given how slowly it progresses in Forgejo, there are better alternatives - Radicle[1] (full decentralization, not a federation) and Tangled[2] (federation).

[1] https://radicle.dev/

[2] https://tangled.org/

xvilka··on Vinix – A modern operating system written in V
Just like V but without sharp edges?
xvilka··on Homebrew 7.0.0
I am quite disappointed by their decision to remove wine[1] from brew. The utility of it is obvious, and it's very popular software.

[1] https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/wine-stable

xvilka··on Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
Hopefully, such deals will also convince countries to build more nuclear power plants or expand existing ones. Europe urgently needs more electricity.
xvilka··on MathKernel: An evidence-aware multi-engine mathematics kernel and MCP server
You could add support also for the Woxi[1][2] for most of the symbolic math, also should be way faster than bunch of glue over different Python libraries.

[1] https://woxi.ad-si.com/

[2] https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

xvilka··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
Some argue that Lean breaks a few type-theoretical properties. See full discussion here:

https://github.com/rocq-prover/rocq/issues/10871

xvilka··on Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
To help with such tasks for real chips (given the good quality images) there is Degate[1][2] open source software.

[1] https://www.degate.org/

[2] https://github.com/DegateCommunity/Degate

xvilka··on Hackers had a live feed of every ID verification company scanned for over a year
The original idea for the ID verification was broken by design anyway. The only safe and secure way is a chain/tree of trust, e.g. with PKI, where you could generate some certificate just for that particular service, while keeping your root key safe. Then, in the case of leak, the most you lose, is one particular key for one particular service that could be immediately revoked. You could even slap zero-knowledge proofs for particular properties (e.g. if the person has a driver license or not) without de-anonymizing the account. In the rare even of root key leak you should be able to physically go to the authority and make a new one, while revoking the old key. I don't see any other better alternatives than this.
xvilka··on The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
Would be nice if they donate to LibreOffice then, to improve the support of various MS Office features in files, as well as comparison/diffing features. Win-win to everyone.
xvilka··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
One option to resolve current worrying trends is to invest in development of alternative network protocols/structure, Yggdrasil[1][2], for example.

[1] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-go

xvilka··on I attended the State of the Map conference
Street maps are already in a good shape. What's not in a good shape - public transportation software and data - metro, tramway, commuter rails and big railways, buses. For example, OpenMetroMaps[1][2] barely gets any attention. And usually such maps are limited to particular cities or countries. Creating something like MetroMan app that supports so many cities, would be great. There are also Transportr[3][4] or abandoned (it seems?) Transito[5]. More people should collaborate on such projects. So far, most of them tend to be just solo developers.

[1] https://www.openmetromaps.org/

[2] https://github.com/OpenMetroMaps/OpenMetroMaps/

[3] http://transportr.app/

[4] https://github.com/grote/Transportr

[5] https://git.sr.ht/~mil/transito

xvilka··on Visualizing Binary Files
Rizin[1][2] has the byte-level highlight (enter visual mode with `V` key then rotate through modes using `p` or `P`)[3], and there is an issue[4] for Cutter to add binary visualization as a plugin, if anyone is up to the task.

[1] https://rizin.re

[2] https://github.com/rizinorg/rizin

[3] https://book.rizin.re/src/visual_mode/intro.html

[4] https://github.com/rizinorg/cutter-plugins/issues/3

xvilka··on Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward
There is still work on symbolic and hybrid AI - ProbLog[1][2] and DeepProbLog[3], as well as DeepLog[4] for example.

[1] https://dtai.cs.kuleuven.be/problog/

[2] https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/problog

[3] https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/deepproblog

[4] https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/deeplog

xvilka··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
It would be nice if we have some "tracking" e.g. 30% of all known books are scanned. So far all information I searched in the Internet about the progress has been patchy. It's also impossible to understand if exact book was ever digitized or not.
xvilka··on Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
Thankfully, there is a Jira CLI tool[1].

[1] https://github.com/ankitpokhrel/jira-cli/

xvilka··on Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
Instead of creating one more centralized alternative, it's best to invest all effort into a decentralized solution, like Radicle[1][2] or federated Forgejo[3][4].

[1] https://radicle.dev/

[2] https://radicle.network/nodes/seed.radicle.dev/rad%3Az3gqcJU...

[3] https://forgejo.org/

[4] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...

xvilka··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
Now the question is - no one was born good or best engineer/programmer/scientist. Often it was a long path of sleepless nights, daily grinding, failing million times, doing dumb mistakes along the way, the usual package of suffering sometimes called "experience". What is the path now for the next generation of good or best engineers? There will be no opportunities/budget to do the same anymore.
xvilka··on Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation
Wish you luck. Hope one day instead of Sage that is a bunch of Python glue for completely different and disjointed systems like Maxima, SymPy, Octave, GAP, PARI/GP, etc we will get a one well-integrated (and blazingly fast because written in Rust). I am a big supporter of open-source but after struggling with Sage and Co, decided that buying Wolfram Mathematica license is well-worth it (never regretted since). It would be great if we don't need to do that anymore.

As for the "most wanted" features, I would vote for PDEs, since most other systems (apart from Mathematica itself) do not support them well.

xvilka··on NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year
I wish more robotic missions like that were sent. Not necessarily the most expensive ones, just one that can use only gravity assists and plutonium power generators. They could be relatively small ones. Maybe even trying to ride some of the small rocks/asteroids, now that we have a better catalogues of such.
xvilka··on Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library
Looks like it's Web-only, no mention of the native UI support (terminal UI excluded).
xvilka··on Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management
Using Logseq[1][2] for years and quite happy with it, especially since it has apps for tablets/iPad and phones as well, while being completely FOSS.

[1] https://logseq.com/

[2] https://github.com/logseq/logseq

xvilka··on Codeberg Divides
Maybe it will push more people and more effort into the true decentralization since the Forgejo/Codeberg federation[1] effort is way too slowly moving. Radicle[2] it is.

[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...

[2] https://radicle.dev/

xvilka··on Emacs Is a Lispboard
Something like Lem[1][2] could go even further because of the richer CommonLisp ecosystem compared to Elisp one.

[1] https://lem-project.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/lem-project/lem

xvilka··on A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows
It would make sense to implement it in QEMU instead. There was some previous work in the past, don't have a link right now to the original patchseries, but here is the repository[1]. In theory, it could be adapted to the modern QEMU code infrastructure and APIs and be a good starting point. Back in the past I started[2] doing that but quickly dropped because had no time to finish.

EDIT: It looks like it might be this one: https://github.com/syunnPC/qemu-system-ia64

[1] https://github.com/pvaibhav/qemu-ia64

[2] https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64/branches/all

xvilka··on Real-Time LuaTeX: Recompiling Large Documents in 1ms [pdf]
Looks like layout/format of this PDF is heavily broken - line overflows and out of the context/layout line at the end...
Page 1 of 34Next →