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HackerThemAll

430 karma · joined November 14, 2023

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HackerThemAll··on America.gov
> drinking up water for data centers

As long as your law allows it, it's not Google's liability. Just change the law. But you call regulations "communism".

HackerThemAll··on Gemini 4 Argon
> They have the only vertically integrated AI stack, insane capital

and paying enterprise customers.

HackerThemAll··on I got tired of never knowing what ports are running, so I built WhatThePort
> couldn't stand how opaque the process is to see what ports are occupied

Discover shell aliases... You only need to remember "port"...

This is for Linux

  alias port="sudo ss -tulnp"
This is for macOS

  alias port="sudo lsof -nP -i -sTCP:LISTEN"
HackerThemAll··on More floating point alternatives
Yeah I wonder why they aren't used for neural networks. It's been claimed they'd require far less power and they'd offer better accuracy and faster computations, although I am unable to verify that claim.
HackerThemAll··on Engineering Memory: On learning to memorize first 100 digits of pi (2024)
NASA requires 15 decimals of pi for interplanetary navigation. On the range of 16 bn miles to Voyager 1 it gives them calculations being off by 0.6 inch. For universe-sized circles they need 37 decimals of pi.

Trying to remember 100 digits of pi won't give you any advantage in cognitive functions apart from memorizing 100 digits of pi, for a little while. Better spend your time elsewhere.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do...

HackerThemAll··on AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?
the what?
HackerThemAll··on I said no and Apple said yes
> You buy it because it's what the cool people use.

I apparently define cool people differently :joy:

> Imagine applying for a SF startup job

No, thanks :joy:

HackerThemAll··on I said no and Apple said yes
I never really understood the craze for the overpriced Apple products. After many years of using PCs with Linux and Windows, I got forced to use a MacBook Pro as the company laptop and I found it hard to use. The OS is so limiting, Finder so crappy, oh my. There are some advantages, like the hardware is good, but on the other hand there are countless tiny issues where "Apple knows better" such as tying mouse scroll direction to the trackpad direction which is awkward for me. And now this what you're describing. So no, thanks, I'll stick to ThinkPad.
HackerThemAll··on Raspberry Pi 5 EEPROM update now blocks manual RAM upgrades
Yeah that practice is not unheard of. I can easily imagine having a ready-made device to desolder the original chip out of Raspberry and solder another one, of poor quality and/or counterfeit, and then sell that modded Pi for profit. Heck, remember fake SD cards, USB drives etc.

Therefore I agree with manufacturer's decision.

HackerThemAll··on Jemalloc 5.4.0
I'd happily see performance, latency and stability of your allocators in massively multithreaded, long-living programs with workloads where hundreds or thousands of parallel threads continuously create and destroy short-lived small and medium objects.

Writing allocators for domain-specific access patterns is easy. Writing a general-purpose high performing, stable allocator with bounded P99 latency is hard.

Give your friend, Dunning–Kruger, some better pills to keep him from speaking through you.

HackerThemAll··on Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
I've seen this kind of performance coming out of PostgreSQL, so they do help somehow.
HackerThemAll··on Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
Two things. One is that to remind folks that PostgreSQL has used a tiny form of "artificial intelligence", that is GEQO - Genetic Query Optimizer, since 2001.

Second. How would that LLM-based query optimizer work in a real-world 10,000 qps ERP system with very large shape of queries? I'm not saying it's useless, it just won't replace a real query planner soon. Latencies would skyrocket.

HackerThemAll··on My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
The JavaScript world is littered with stuff comparing to which your patch seems like a complex project. See those examples:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even

https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-whitespace-character

https://www.npmjs.com/package/isarray

HackerThemAll··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
While I supported that idea of Rust coreutils, this your experiment showed me how bad it is. My results are totally different, but not what I expected (edited out long strings of "a/a/a" for brevity). I wouldn't call it stable...

  root@71a8c5a6c5e3:/# mkdir -p $(yes a/ | head -n $((32 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n')
  mkdir: File name too long
  root@71a8c5a6c5e3:/# gnumkdir -p $(yes a/ | head -n $((32 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n')
  gnumkdir: cannot create directory 'a/a/a/.../a/a': File name too long
  root@71a8c5a6c5e3:/# gnumkdir -p $(yes a/ | head -n $((3 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n')
  root@71a8c5a6c5e3:/# rm -rf a
  rm: cannot remove 'a/a/a/.../a/a/a': Directory not empty
  root@71a8c5a6c5e3:/# gnurm -rf a
  root@71a8c5a6c5e3:/# rm -rf a
  root@71a8c5a6c5e3:/#
And then they plan to move to a new Rust-based NTP. No comment...
HackerThemAll··on Principles for Fast Tokio Applications
Spinning is covered in the article.
HackerThemAll··on Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead
Why do I still need swap space at all, be it a swap file or swap partition? I have 64GB of RAM and I don't overprovision it.

WHY DO I HAVE TO CONSIDER SWAP in 2026?

HackerThemAll··on One decision put Ruby into a downward spiral. It's not too late to fix it
Yeah so diverging from the gist of the article. The "sponsors" I recently see are more and more leaning towards shady business practices. SerpApi riding on the back of Google, abusing the infra without paying a single penny. They don't build their own index, crawler, classification, abuse and spam handling, but just leech on others who already spent money doing that and maintain the healthy search engine. I am aware that some American judge ruled that it's all okay, it just doesn't made me feel less disgusted.

Then there is this company that provides "customers" access to so-called "residential proxies," that is your home networks, to which they gained access in sneaky ways, essentially forming a large botnet. Then they allow the "customers" to use that your network to illegally scrap content, download who-knows-what using your IP address and making you responsible for that.

Yeah, those are "sponsors" I could certainly trust and recommend. Sure. Shame on you bloggers and youtubers.

HackerThemAll··on Hang on to Your Firefox
You'd want this browser for free, wouldn't you? Have you donated to Mozilla Foundation? So you're bitching because the free product that you don't support finds ways to sustain economically the hordes of developers that are trying to improve it for you.

And no, Chrome never "bought an ad-tech company, collected data on users, and used chrome to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force users to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings". NEVER IN THE WORLD. That's why you use it.

HackerThemAll··on A CVE Dispute
> it means that every CVE we publish trigger activities in many security teams all over the world, leading to a significant number of patches and subsequent software updates.

If it's just about that, fix those low priority issues and bundle them along with the next higher-priority fix pack, i.e. "lower than low" -> fix but not release immediately; "medium" or higher -> release with any earlier unreleased "lower than low" fixes.

Seeing how much energy you spent in dismissing the person's report on the "lower than low" vuln in https://hackerone.com/reports/3455037, it'd be easier and faster to just fix it rather than argue...

HackerThemAll··on An implementation of Conway's Game of Life for Windows 3.1x and later
People do crazy stuff in GoL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NDAZ5g4EuU

HackerThemAll··on Arbitrary code execution in QubesOS via copy-to-VM error reporting backchannel
> why it needs to show the dialog in dom0

I think it's the "secure screen" that cannot be manipulated by the malware in a VM. I'd expect a password entry dialog to also be handled like that.

HackerThemAll··on Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
Have you already brought your country through laziness and convenience to a state where you are subordinate to Amazon?

Don't you have other e-commerce sites?

HackerThemAll··on OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
It works very well for me. It handles non-English characters and diacritics without issues.
HackerThemAll··on OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM
Great news!
HackerThemAll··on Executable Is a SQLite Database
Yeah, I have been amazed for an entire life how many tools the IT industry invented during last 50 years to just disguise a database.

OK, in '70s, '80s or '90s when compute and storage resources were limited and every bit counted, specialized formats did make sense.

But nowadays we'd save enormous efforts by just packaging stuff in SQLite databases. Microsoft's proprietary file formats (Office, Power BI etc.), OpenOffice/LibreOffice OpenDocument format, or almost everything else would fit perfectly.

Documents, files, are all data (called "data files", aren't they?), including executables, which as can be seen in this article are also databases.

https://sqlite.org/aff_short.html

https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

HackerThemAll··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
> why are they falling so far behind in the AI race?

Are they? They provide AI overview to majority of web searches, and that alone requires enormous resources. Anthropic, OpenAI and others only serves their AI customers. Regarding the power of their model, my own experiences are that it doesn't fall behind. I've done many successful projects already, including quite a big one in Pascal. So no, I don't feel any difference between Gemini and others. I think it's just a long lasting fashion to whine about Google and its services.

HackerThemAll··on Breaking the WAL
So you got information where the bug is, and now you brag that your AI friend found it quickly :joy:

Go find bugs that haven't been yet found, and then brag about them :joy:

HackerThemAll··on Grok 4.6
Yeah we need more power-thirsty, climate-impacting models, so that the coders can produce trillions of new rubbish code for millions of apps that nobody uses. Or that people can generate rubbish cat pictures riding dogs and rubbish fake movies.

I wonder whether I'll be able to live my nice life to the end like I planned before Altman released his first model, or will it all end in a global disaster soon.

HackerThemAll··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
Did you get triggered so much to have to create an account to write that comment? I think of us two it's you who need to relax XD
HackerThemAll··on uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook
Those childish comments are so funny. 3 billion people use Facebook regularly, and there are folks that deem themselves superior to all others who claim "I know nobody who uses Facebook". XD
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