HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

alexozer

193 karma · joined June 20, 2017

submissionscomments
alexozer··on The US Department of Agriculture Bans Support for Renewables
Wow, that is unbelievably degenerate. I'll never understand how someone can pidgeon-hole themselves into an identity like that.
alexozer··on Replacing tmux in my dev workflow
Wow, I was wondering if e.g. Ghostty could implement something like this but that's cool it's already proven out.

Does everything still go "through" tmux (so parsing etc. is still done twice), or does iTerm handle most of the rendering and just delegate scrollback storage/session persistence to tmux? The latter seems like the best of both worlds.

alexozer··on Parsing Protobuf like never before
So am I identifying the bottlenecks that motivate this design correctly?

1. Go FFI is slow

2. Per-proto generated code specialization is slow, because of icache pressure

I know there's more to the optimization story here, but I guess these are the primary motivations for the VM over just better code generation or implementing a parser in non-Go?

alexozer··on Double Pendulums are Chaoticn't [video]
Where are all of the upvotes and comments?!? I love this and 2swap's other work so much.

Btw, I believe this entire video is animated with custom C++: https://github.com/2swap/swaptube

alexozer··on Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized
Tried starting a "run every day for a year" initiative last year. Wish it was for me, after 42 days I realized that I actually actively despise running and spend most of my time not running dreading the next one. Easiest habit I've ever dropped :(
alexozer··on Show HN: I built a tool to remove news articles from HN
Thanks for this! I was quickly able to find some interesting new and niche types of things to read, in contrast to what my normal strolls through news.ycombinator and hckrnews give me.
alexozer··on The Linux kernel's inability to gracefully handle low memory pressure
A couple weeks ago, one of my physical stick of RAM completely stopped working after yet another Linux out-of-memory-force-poweroff situation. No idea if that could be the proper cause, but I do find it a little funny.

I just arrived at this thread after my entire system stalling completely at yet another low memory situation.

Let's just say I'm extrememly grateful to discover some of these userspace early OOM solutions in this thread.

alexozer··on Assholes: A Probing Examination
Favorite quote from the article: "It's better to have a hole in your team than an asshole."
alexozer··on AMD Immune to MDS Vulnerabilities
I'm not exactly sure the monoculture argument is valid for Windows vs. Linux though; Linux still dominated server usage while Windows was attacked more often, despite the fact that you could potentially reap a much greater reward infecting a server. Unix-based OSs were just inherently more secure for the most part.
alexozer··on AMD Immune to MDS Vulnerabilities
I'm also building a computer and just purchased an i7 9700K for $400. I also wonder what the equivalent-performance AMD processor would be given the performance loss of these patches. Unfortunately it's a bit late to back out without returning the motherboard as well, though.
alexozer··on Super Mario Bros. Commodore 64 Fan Port Hit with DMCA
Mario 64 romhacks are sometimes distributed as patches to the original game instead of the complete modified game as well, and since it's just a diff it's not subject to copyright.
alexozer··on Should you be concerned about LastPass uploading your passwords to its server?
Nice reference! On Linux I have a keybinding which opens a terminal with a fzf listing of my password entries. when I select the name I want, it types the password with xdotool into whatever is focused. I bet it's just as fast if not faster than the browser password managers' autofill.
alexozer··on Low-quality sleep can lead to procrastination
Interesting, it's the opposite for me. If I'm feeling rotten, unmotivated, unproductive, and guilty about it, I'll tend to stay up later because my "self-discipline for the day" will feel eroded and I'll want to procrastinate the arrival of the next day where I'll be faced with dealing with the thing I put off. I can only usually make myself go to bed early if I feel like I'm already in a "disciplined state" for the day.
alexozer··on Italy bans unvaccinated children from school
Preventing unnecessary deaths of children is not exactly in the same class of severity as preventing a computer from running malicious code in my opinion.
alexozer··on Show HN: The Jankest Autonomous Drone Built and Programmed from Scratch
I originally used an Xbox controller as a case, but the hardware was my own. Eventually I ended up putting everything inside a Raspberry Pi case. Inside I put a protoboard with an Arduino and a radio module which communicates with the radio module on the drone. The code for message serialization is custom.
alexozer··on Show HN: The Jankest Autonomous Drone Built and Programmed from Scratch
Interesting, I've never noticed that before. I would guess it's a lens artifact, since it seems to move depending on where the sun is in the frame.
alexozer··on Show HN: The Jankest Autonomous Drone Built and Programmed from Scratch
Yes, my use of jankest is possibly 100% contrived.

Also, I recently added a comment with a photo album if you are interested!

alexozer··on Show HN: The Jankest Autonomous Drone Built and Programmed from Scratch
Hi, I'm the creator! Thank you all for your thoughtful comments.

Some of you wanted a photo album of the journey; I quickly collected one here [0]. Apologies for duplicates, no descriptions, and Google.

The full album shows a lot more of the process, but I also linked some quick highlights / milestones at the end of this comment.

Also, to those who were wondering, I am still in the market for a Summer 2019 internship.

I really ought to have a blog post detailing more of this, but here's a little backstory anyway. My best friend from high school and I wanted to experiment with creating our own modular drones, and although we bought a bunch of parts, we ended up leaving for college before we could do anything. A couple years later I had some time on my hands, and I decided that I wanted to see whether or not I could actually build and program a drone myself. For the project, I tried to focus on writing high quality software while still managing to build something flyable with my nearly-nonexistent mechanical skills. Even though much of this project was physical (and electrical), I still largely consider this a software project, actually.

Physically, my prototypes are something you might laugh at. Zip ties, styrofoam, and Gorilla tape were my go-to materials for the most part. I originally started by mounting (read: zip-tying and taping) components to PVC tubes and metal sheets; combined with the pretty large LiPo battery I bought, it should have been no wonder that four motors were no match for the weight of the thing. I later decided to screw together 6 strips of carbon fiber sheet (a "frame") and add two motors to help assure my drone can actually lift greater than two inches off the ground at a time. Reworking the flight controller to work with six motors instead of just two was a fun challenge; I decided to make the flight controller support an unlimited number of motors in a circle while I was at it.

Figuring out the optimal wireless technology for the drone was a bit of a process as well. It was frustrating when I thought I had everything ready for a test flight, but then slowly realized that, perhaps, I wasn't going to be able to get away with using Bluetooth LE over non-trivial distances. Eventually I found a radio module with superb distance and transmission rate; and after some struggle, I got them working. You can see in the video that I could control the drone from quite far away!

It took quite a few days of test "flights" to get the drone to fly as well as it did in the video (if you consider the oscillating nightmare in the video "flying well"). Even getting the drone to launch two feet in the air, instantly lose control and backflip, and crash back down on the ground felt like an AMAZING feat from my perspective; it demonstrated all my systems were at least online and functional. I slowly increased the hover time of each attempt by a couple seconds or so, adjusting my controller tuning and implementation as I went. The flight in the video was nowhere near as primitive as some of my early experiments, even.

I'm sure I skimped on many details, don't hesitate to ask for more information on anything.

[0]: Full album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/QhSZEyd4DA1r9S9G6

First physical prototype: https://photos.app.goo.gl/k6km6Hyrkq4FuxkH9

Second physical prototype: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sL1LjnAgeXrmGvgEA

Third physical prototype: https://photos.app.goo.gl/bY33peH7RZbXPxyx9

LED strip code testing: https://photos.app.goo.gl/wZJJJ4NrFENjpUkHA

Custom remote control assembled: https://photos.app.goo.gl/z577cVbH59vjW3g56

Final "boxy" physical prototype: https://photos.app.goo.gl/8ESsQidi5Tgsb1mm6

alexozer··on Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie
Blue light blocking glasses have had such a tremendously positive effect on my sleep habits (earlier bedtime, better sleep quality) that at this point I genuinely feel bad for people who don't use them.

I got a pair that claims to block a very large amount of blue light (at the expense of a distinct orange tint), and just wear them after it gets dark.

It makes sense that they work; your brain uses blue light to time the release of melatonin and such, and our ancestors were only exposed to non-blue light from sitting besides the campfire socializing after the sun went down.

Wearing these allows me to experience much less of a consequence for using a computer at night which I simply cannot get myself to avoid.

alexozer··on Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool
No worries, it wasn't dumb to say that! Your intention just wasn't 100% clear to me.
alexozer··on Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool
I'm also in the situation where I'd like to try to reverse binaries for the custom PowerPC chips in Gamecube/Wii/Wii U. I'm wondering if it might be easier to rewrite the assembly such that the SIMD instructions are rewritten in terms of standard instructions, and then just use that. I hope it's possible.
alexozer··on Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool
I believe Capstone is merely a disassembly framework, and retdec's decompilation process is custom implementation which works on LLVM IR.
alexozer··on Ghidra, NSA's reverse-engineering tool
I wonder how this compares to retdec, an open source cross-architecture decompiler by Avast.

https://github.com/avast-tl/retdec

alexozer··on A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
I've taken "porting" to equally mean either. Besides, porting to another language is in a good sense "porting to another platform".
alexozer··on Teen Gets Vaccines During Measles Outbreak, Despite Mom's Belief
I don't get it. If you don't feed your child, it's child abuse. Why is not providing vaccines any different? Why isn't this something you can make a CPS neglect case out of?
alexozer··on Ask HN: Anyone else find the new Gmail interface sluggish?
After the inbox debacle I decided I didn't want to use Gmail and am now a happy Mailspring user. If it could just implement Google inbox's sweep function, it would be perfect.
alexozer··on You Want 20% for Handing Me a Muffin? The Awkward Etiquette of iPad Tipping
I thought it was pretty clear spaces are better?
alexozer··on Ask HN: YouTube down?
Seems fine for me.
alexozer··on Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
It's only a political problem if you make it one. Better politics requires less technological innovation, and better technology requires less political innovation.

The political barrier suddenly becomes much less intimidating if an extremely efficient way to such CO2 out of the atmosphere manually was found tomorrow.

alexozer··on Twitter bans Alex Jones and Infowars for abusive behaviour
What makes you think that they said that Twitter must be just? Why not simply should be just? Why would you not want a platform as large and integral to modern open communication to be just?
Page 1 of 3Next →