Hacker News Reader

SloopJonon “It'll all be over by Christmas” (Part 2)

> Also, who was being quoted in the title?

It's from World War I. See this comment on the (flagged) submission of the last post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22897805

You can distribute unmodified copies; just don't use it to disparage Goldman Sachs.

SloopJonon Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

One of the About This Mac dialogs showed an A12Z with 16 GB, which is consistent with the developer transition kit, basically an iPad Pro in a Mac mini case: A12Z, 16 GB, 512 GB SSD.

SloopJonon Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

Besides native apps from Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe (Universal 2), the demo included Maya and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Rosetta 2), and Parallels Desktop (unspecified virtualization improvements). I couldn't tell if the guest O/S was Debian for x84-64 or Aarch64.

SloopJonon Deciphering Single-Byte XOR Ciphertexts

Here are a couple of submissions on the cryptopals challenges:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8166064

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12720009

One comment in the first discussion is from a user stuck on the problem discussed in this blog post.

SloopJonon Hashcat 6.0

I had to check to see whether John the Ripper is still maintained. As a matter of fact, 1.9.0 was released last year, four years after 1.8.0:

https://www.openwall.com/lists/announce/2019/05/14/1

The release notes mention that CUDA support was dropped, but that 88 formats out of 407 have OpenCL support.

A few formats also have support for the ZTEX 1.15y, a now-discontinued FPGA-based board popular for crypto mining, which is something I don't think Hashcat has. Here's an article I found on that topic:

https://medium.com/@ScatteredSecrets/bcrypt-password-crackin...

Edit: the two HN submissions for JtR 1.9.0 got no comments, but this Slashdot post does have some comments from a maintainer:

https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/05/18/1841245/new-john-the-...

SloopJonon Hashcat 6.0

Hashcat has long been a user of OpenCL. I wondered whether that was because CUDA really wasn't much better for this application, but this release puts that to rest:

> One of the biggest advantages of CUDA compared to OpenCL is the full use of shared memory ... This and other optimizations are the reason we improved the performance of bcrypt by 46.90%.

Also interesting that they specifically call out CUDA on ARM devices like the Jetson Nano and Xavier. I suspect that the GPU in the Nano is better than the MX150 in my laptop.

SloopJonon I Replaced My MacBook Pro with a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB for a Day

I'm not sure what the author's background is, but if he did all of this in one day as a Mac-using Linux newbie, I'm actually pretty impressed. There are references to previous posts about the Pi, but it's not clear whether he's used Linux as a desktop O/S before.

I'm using Ubuntu on a 4 GB Pi for some Docker experiments, because I couldn't get ARM64 images to work on Raspbian. Is Raspbian the best distribution for the desktop, or is there something better for a 4 or 8 GB Pi?

SloopJonon Apple plans to announce ARM transition for all Macs at WWDC 2020

Note that the only source for this article is the Bloomberg article posted earlier today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465364

SloopJonon Evidence that blood type plays a role in COVID-19

It seems that they're inferring the blood type from the ABO gene, although displaying this on the web site is a "sunsetted feature." Edit: the rhesus factor, on the other hand, seems to have been self reported.

SloopJonon Show HN: Grid.js – Advanced table library that works everywhere

> How many columns/rows can you realistically fit in screen?

I don't know why you think many rows is an indication that you're editing. Tables are the first resort for reports, and reports tend to have lots of data (i.e., rows).

While I'm not a fan of horizontal scrollbars, I absolutely prefer to render thousands of rows with a vertical scrollbar than use pagination. Give me a sort key or two, a filter box, and I'll whittle it down to what I'm interested in.

I've seen Airtable show up on some sites lately, and its scrolling performance is abysmal. None of the examples for Grid.js has more than a handful or rows, so I won't take its performance on faith. So far, DataTables has been my go-to option for web tables, but I'd happily switch to something else if it performed as well.

SloopJonon Americans, it turns out, would rather visit a store than buy food online

Whole Foods amusingly substituted hot sauce for baking powder. Less amusingly, Peapod (Stop and Shop) substituted Diet Coke for regular. What am I supposed to do with that? Maybe I'll order some Mentos next time.

SloopJonon Modern C++ gamedev: thoughts and misconceptions

There is definitely disagreement in C# as to the proper usage of var.

SloopJonon Apple unveils biggest update to Logic since the launch of Logic Pro X

The first two things I looked for are the price (free upgrade):

"Logic Pro X 10.5 is available today as a free update for all existing users, and is available on the Mac App Store for $199.99 (US) for new customers."

... and the system requirements (doesn't require Catalina):

"macOS 10.14.6 or later"

SloopJonon April Unemployment Rate Rose to a Record 14.7%

"Information" is probably the most representative category, which shows an unemployment rate of 11% in table A-14, compared to 3.5% a year ago.

SloopJonon BLS Reports 14.7% Unemployment Rate

For those who aren't a fan of monospaced text at 120 characters wide, there's a PDF link at the bottom of the page that includes the tables and an FAQ list:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

SloopJonon New Lenovo ThinkPad Range with Ryzen 4000 and 4000 Pro Mobile

For all of its quirks, I love having a 3:2 display on the MateBook X Pro. Besides the Surface Laptop and Surface Book, there's not much else on the market with this aspect ratio.

SloopJonon 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

> The majority of my mortgage payment goes towards ownership of a product - my house

For many (most?) people that's not true. Even ignoring that mortgage payments often include property taxes and/or private mortgage insurance, you can expect to pay more interest than principal for the first fifteen years or more of a thirty-year mortgage.

SloopJonon File Integrity 6: Which image format is most resilient?

A previous post in the series tests a Parchive utility called MacPAR deLuxe:

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/04/20/file-integrity-5-how-wel...

SloopJonon The new Clang _ExtInt feature provides exact bitwidth integer types

There's something to be said for the new Java approach of releasing often, with a stable LTS release every now and then, even if Oracle is muddying the waters with their licensing. The only release after 8 that interests me right now is 11. Meanwhile, the features of Java 12, 13, and 14 are available for people who do want to experiment with them.

I think we'll see this implicitly with C++. C++11 and the mostly non-controversial updates in C++14 comprise "modern" C++, whereas adoption of C++17 seems to be a bit slower.

SloopJonon The new Clang _ExtInt feature provides exact bitwidth integer types

C++ has sped up the pace of its releases, but I don't have a sense of where C is. I didn't realize until I looked it up just now that there's a C18, although I gather that this is even smaller a change than C95 was.

Safe to say that a feature like this would be standardized by 2022 at the earliest?

SloopJonon Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A

I'm curious what you're comparing JavaScript to. Decimal is the native numeric datatype for the stored procedure language of the database I use. Otherwise, even in languages that have a decimal class in their standard library, it's usually pretty clunky to use; no better than, say, https://github.com/MikeMcl/decimal.js/ C# is perhaps the best among mainstream languages, although its implementation is a bit weird.

SloopJonon Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll

I have an office with a door, and I generally prefer to go into the office, but the company is converting to cubicles, one floor at a time. When my floor gets the ax, I will probably transition to 100% WFH. This experience has shown me that I can do it.

SloopJonon Undefined behavior can result in time travel (2014)

I see the same errors using Clang with -O1, -O2, and -O3.

SloopJonon Undefined behavior can result in time travel (2014)

I don't remember what UBSan looked like in 2014, but it does something not entirely unhelpful for each of these examples, although they are caught at run time, not compile time:

runtime error: index 4 out of bounds for type 'int [4]'

UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer: SEGV on unknown addres

runtime error: reference binding to null pointer of type 'int'

SloopJonon A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

I'm amazed that this is even possible. I seem to recall that there are countries with unusable fighter jets, because the U.S. will no longer supply parts and expertise for maintenance. The article indeed states: "the purchase does include all of the RAAF's F/A-18 spare parts inventory and test equipment, valued at over a billion dollars alone."

SloopJonon Ask HN: Who has been laid off?

I also came across this the other day:

https://candor.co/hiring-freezes

I'm curious as to why the redraw performance for the embedded Airtable is so terrible. Is that normal?

SloopJonon Amazon begins temperature checks and will provide surgical masks at warehouses

Amazon has sponsored a picking challenge for a few years now, but I'm not aware of this level of automation being deployed in production. The last I saw, a Kiva robot would bring a shelf of items to a human picker, who transferred an item from a bin to a box.

SloopJonon Simdjson 0.3: Faster JSON parser

Here's the discussion of the initial release:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214387

The inability to handle embedded NULs (issue #40) felt like cheating, but that has been fixed.

It looks like I can fetch a number as a string, so I can read into a decimal type. I'll have to try that. Edit: nope, doesn't work. "The JSON element does not have the requested type."