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IcePic

302 karma · joined December 4, 2015

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IcePic··on EVs being trialled as giant batteries to power homes for less in Auckland
You could own one of those Teslas with free supercharge for life. Except they don't do V2G. Probably not a total coincidence.
IcePic··on Research carried out using NetBSD
The problem with missing drivers is not "typing code fast enough", it is knowing that you need to poke 5 into [base-address + $0562] within 5 milliseconds of receiving an IRQ or something stupid like that which good docs would tell you why and how, but most/many vendors will not hand out docs on how to program their chips at that level. They will have docs on how to paint rectangles on an existing surface using the gfx card, but not on how to actually start it at poweron or something along those lines. If you can't make it start painting a screen and waking up the monitor at boot, it is of very little use that you can paint rectangles in the dark.

So even if you can divine that a binary windows driver sometimes writes a 5 into that register at certain times, you will have a far harder time figuring out how and when it is needed to actually do that, and the source you get will be super hard for anyone else to understand if its all magic numbers getting written into "random" locations, compared to say, "wificard.driver.radio_enable = ACTIVATE_RADIO;" even if it compiles into writing 5 to offset $0562. Such reverse-engineered sources are super hard to keep working in the long run, when someone rewrites how and when IRQs are delivered to devices or whatever major is happening in the kernels so this leads to drivers no longer working even if they did have a short period of use.

IcePic··on Quine Clique: 51 programs in 51 languages that all print each other
This is totally crazy. And cool. But also crazy.
IcePic··on Denmark: EVs Make Up 97% of New Private Car Sales in July
In Sweden it has. When I got my EV 4 years ago, the list of public EV charging locations was about the same as the amount of petrol stations, now its 3-4x as many. And as others have mentioned, having a wall charger of your own is of course the easiest and cheapest, but fearing long distance travels with EVs in Europe is not a thing, I think.
IcePic··on Fastmail offers EU data region
Even then, what europeans would want is that noone could force them to copy or release it outside of Europe. Otherwise its kind of moot where its stored, if it can be coerced out anyhow.
IcePic··on "How 500 HN users crashed my 2GB server in 60 seconds – postmortem
Yes, did not mean to imply that everyone should know everything immediately, just that "the server was too small" feels a bit misguided. It might solve the problem to make the hw a real monster, but if you hit limits at 500 then I think one should look at the other parts of the equation. Glad you fixed it in the end.
IcePic··on "How 500 HN users crashed my 2GB server in 60 seconds – postmortem
In the 90s, people thought about the c10k problem, which is how to handle 10000 connections.

In those days, this 2GB server would have been a dream to have and probably had moved the needle to 20k, 50k or whatever the limit is. You only get problems with 500 connections on a modern machine if you are really really bad at handling each request.

IcePic··on AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn
It worked for Stephen Hawking, and he was totally worth listening to.
IcePic··on Microsoft's 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
C64 also has a token parsing routine in zeropage.
IcePic··on Ask HN: Why didn't the C64 come with Simons' BASIC in the box from 1983 onward?
It would also eat up even more RAM, so your 64k computer that "normally" gave you only 39k for BASIC, with Simons' BASIC loaded you would be down to 30.7k.
IcePic··on The 90 Day disclosure policy is dead
If we get new code by the "shovel", then it is likely trained on old bad code, so it might just (re)introduce old types of bugs by the shovel until all new fixed code overshadows the old code by a margin, which in turn will take a long while.
IcePic··on You gave me a u32. I gave you root. (io_uring ZCRX freelist LPE)
If they don't get scanned, then they also don't get fixed, so if they have the same amount of holes, they will stay vulnerable for longer.
IcePic··on Ask HN: Novel crazy ideas on reducing RAM usage
Go back to amiga and C64.
IcePic··on Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64
The 64Ultimate goes to 64MHz, the Ultimate64 cartridge goes to 48MHz "only".
IcePic··on The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
I don't really know which "we" you refer to that did find enough v4 ips. Once you could get a /24 by just applying for it, now you have to purchase second-hand ranges from some previous spammer network taken down so the ip reputation of those is total crap, and if you don't intend to run a "whole" network, you more or less have to lease one v4 ip from an American company in order to host something yourself.

That is like saying "uranium is globally available to purchase" except you can't find it in stores anywhere and you go to jail if you seriously start asking around for where to buy it.

IcePic··on The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
Well, in a strict sense, it is "you" who chooses to run a nat'ing router there, you could just have one single computer per ISP connection. Or have it run a proxy for you, or nat.

I mean, I understand that this feels normal today, that 10-20-50 devices need internet and that the way to manage that is to nat the connections, but your ISP isn't doing nat, it is you.

IcePic··on Microsoft suspends dev accounts for high-profile open source projects
In some sense, "you did".

Your actions, intentional and direct or not, allowed for one more sale of Win11 and an accompanying sad Dell computer, giving them the signal (however weak from you as one single individual) that whatever crap they have been doing up to now, still is a good choice in order to sell one of those combinations.

IcePic··on IPv6 is the only way forward
Not on all OSes. And it's not all good to have one less socket, there are still issues with people not expecting v4 traffic on a v6-capable socket, like described here:

https://radar.offseq.com/threat/ipv4-mapped-ipv6-addresses-t...

If you want to handle two protocols, it is not unreasonable to use two sockets.

IcePic··on Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi
Then again, remote DMA to your memory via a port on the computer, while a great tool for debugging internal stuff, is also quite the wide door to getting hacked if someone every manages to plug in a malicious device in the same port.
IcePic··on How many branches can your CPU predict?
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/gcc... has some looong select/case things with lots of ifs in them, but I don't think they would hit 30k.
IcePic··on OpenBSD: PF queues break the 4 Gbps barrier
One thing could also be that by the time you have 10GE uplinks, shaping is not as important.

When we had 512kbit links, prioritizing VOIP would be a thing, and for asymmetric links like 128/512kbit it was prudent to prioritize small packets (ssh) and tcp ACKs on the outgoing link or the downloads would suffer, but when you have 5-10-25GE, not being able to stick an ACK packet in the queue is perhaps not the main issue.

IcePic··on The Firewall Doesn't Live in the Kernel
Yeah, someone wrote along the lines of "userland sets the rules, the kernel enforces them" which I thought was a neat short version.
IcePic··on You are wasting your non-US traffic
They will just move to a low-price country in Asia with their $100 and .. or not.
IcePic··on UFOs and the Higgs Field
Sounds like you would run into E=mc^2 for your "lets just not have mass and stuff solves itself". The words "easily" here and there have a lot of work in front of them.

For the Alcubierre drive which also speculates on acquiring negative mass, the quote: "the energy requirements still generally require a Type III civilization on the Kardashev scale." says something about how well the word "easily" fits into such a solution.

IcePic··on Inertia raises $450M to commercialize the only proven fusion science
Unfortunately it talks a lot of how they shoot lasers and get the plasma to emit a lot of energy, but less on how they are to turn this into electricity to first feed the reactor itself to keep it going, and get a net gain out of it.

A bit too common on the fusion reporting articles.

IcePic··on Kernel bugs hide for 2 years on average. Some hide for 20
I think NTFS get a bit of crap from the OS above it adding limitations. If you read up on what NTFS allows, it is far better than what Windows and the explorer allows you to do with it.
IcePic··on Bloat in software is getting WAAAY out of hand
And if you time travel to the 90s, this is what amiga owners with 1M ram said about PC/Win users needing 8,16,32M of ram to paint a few icons on the monitor. But noone listened then, because ram was cheap and you should not stand in the way of "progress".

So here we are, needing gigs to paint a single pixel. Congratulations everyone that chose bloat, you won.

IcePic··on NetBSD/Amiga
For some people, when you are not taking over the whole machine (as you would do in demos and games), then replacing the OS with something that gives you memory protections and virtual memory, uses all ram for caches, talks ipv6 and things like that is kind of neat. It will be a somewhat slow unix box, but it is still that same machine doing both kinds of tasks for you.
IcePic··on My contribution to the idea that we lived in a simulation
It does, you make certain claims in your text, and the parent questions how to test you alternate theory against the perceived reality to see which of those two are true.
IcePic··on Hardening Snmalloc
Bad link, this was better, https://github.com/microsoft/snmalloc/blob/main/docs/securit...
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