HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

edwinbalani

769 karma · joined December 13, 2017

https://www.balani.xyz

https://github.com/edwinbalani

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/EdwinBalani

submissionscomments
edwinbalani··on Why Janet? (2023)
From memory, it was for Joint Academic Network. I'm surprised the Wikipedia article doesn't mention it at all, but it seems hard to find an authoritative source.
edwinbalani··on My peanut allergy nearly killed me – now I eat them every day for breakfast
A handful of peanuts a day to avoid dying in the event of (accidental, inadvertent) exposure sounds like a pretty good deal! I think that's the value here:

> "It's a wonderful feeling," Chris says. "I'm no longer afraid of dying."

edwinbalani··on Hacking misconfigured AWS S3 buckets: A complete guide
It costs money to serve S3 objects out to the internet though. S3 GET request billing + the usual AWS egress fees, after you've burned through the free quotas. Egress is currently $0.09 per GB + tax.
edwinbalani··on RFC 9592: Retiring the Tao of the IETF
It seems like a good move. The Tao was a big single document with heavyweight edit/revision burden, which probably made more sense when it was updated by publishing a new RFC, as if it were a print publication.

This looks to be the replacement, a website area with topic-oriented pages: https://www.ietf.org/participate/

edwinbalani··on Hiew Hex Editor
Says not a three letter agency ;)
edwinbalani··on VectorDB: Vector Database Built by Kagi Search
Wrong article I think; there was another post about a bookmark manager on here.
edwinbalani··on The Twelve-Factor App (2011)
For anyone new to SOPS like I was - https://github.com/getsops/sops
edwinbalani··on Buildkite has removed their $9 "Team" plan
I don't follow, was $9/user/mo (presumably what the Team plan was) low enough for it to be "effectively free" and invite problem customers?

I would have thought those sorts of people just go for the $0/mo option here.

edwinbalani··on Cloudflare is now powering Microsoft Edge Secure Network
Their posts in the last few days are all tagged "Birthday Week", so I guess their PR office has been queueing them all up for a little while.
edwinbalani··on Show HN: Open-source Auth0 alternative Ory Kratos v0.13 released – nearing v1.0
Scrolling down from the "create an account" button, all the "Ory vs [thing]" links from that page open up just fine for me.
edwinbalani··on 0x0: Share Files from Terminal
Wormhole is a synchronous transfer between two peers; this site is essentially a paste bin/upload bin.
edwinbalani··on The Most Dangerous Codec in the World: Vulnerabilities in H.264 Decoders
Better to link straight to the paper: https://wrv.github.io/h26forge.pdf
edwinbalani··on MSVC: The Devourer of Const
Yup, right on. We found a bug that crops up when a certain compiler (proprietary, not MSVC) tries to reuse the result of a float comparison originally made in a ternary expression.

The compiler ends up omitting most of the rest of the function's assembly, which breaks things as much as you'd expect. (For bonus fun, our ternary expression was deep under about four layers of macro.)

edwinbalani··on Why We’re Sticking with Ruby on Rails at Gitlab
And CRUD -> create, read, update, delete.

By "LOB CRUD" GP means those fairly generic apps that are mainly a front-end to some database, with a bit of business logic or integrations tacked on. They're not the apps making money for a business, they're just helping it tick along and do the things that actually bring in revenue.

edwinbalani··on Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
My favourite aspect of this story is how the academics, being academics, took it upon themselves to characterise the problem in detail before telling the postmaster about it. Could just as easily have said "huh, that's weird" and thrown it at them on day one.
edwinbalani··on Imap-backup: Backup Gmail or other IMAP accounts to disk
You can also find the 'GitHub version' (which I'd guess is where distributions get their versions from) at https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync . I used this for an uncomplicated transfer from one IMAP server to another; it felt pretty slow but with the right CLI flags it is interruptible/restartable, and I didn't end up with lost or duplicate mail.

It comes with the author's custom "no limits" licence (looks a lot like the WTFPL), so it probably qualifies as free & open source, but you don't get a support contract of course.

The author's site also has a "give me your IMAP credentials and I'll migrate your mailbox for you, free up to a size limit" service, https://imapsync.lamiral.info/X/ , which boggles the mind. On principle I couldn't trust it.

edwinbalani··on In C, how do you know if the dynamic allocation succeeded?
(All that said, embedded systems sometimes don't have virtual memory, so the original problem stated in the link is just not a thing...)

> working from a fixed-size pool or arena created in code (possibly itself carved out of RAM with malloc(), but importantly only once at first setup, where you have a better guarantee that the allocation will succeed)

And I should add to this that you probably want to access all of the pool/arena to do setup, or just ensure it's physically allocated if you are running in a virtual memory space. This is something that is reasonable at setup time, though.

edwinbalani··on In C, how do you know if the dynamic allocation succeeded?
That's right - some "safe" coding standards like MISRA C go as far as forbidding use of malloc() without explicit justification.

If you still need dynamic allocation, you might choose to have a custom allocator working from a fixed-size pool or arena created in code (possibly itself carved out of RAM with malloc(), but importantly only once at first setup, where you have a better guarantee that the allocation will succeed).

edwinbalani··on Awesome Lattice FPGA Boards
Worth knowing that are two "nmigen"s nowadays - the one originated in M-Labs and one under a project also called nmigen:

https://github.com/nmigen/nmigen

It's a fork, made for reasons, but more actively developed. whitequark (long time author/contributor) works on this fork, and no longer the M-Labs version.

edwinbalani··on Met Police seize record £180m of cryptocurrency in London
Whenever law enforcement snags a "major haul", be it illicit cash or substances or arms or anything else, I guess I focus on its physical size as the thing that makes it impressive -- and worthy of tallying up records and high scores. The bigger the stash, the harder it is to hide, after all.

So when the haul is something like this -- without direct physical scale, which could fit in anyone's pocket regardless of its volume -- it doesn't have the same wow factor for me. But I feel like it should!

edwinbalani··on Car manufacturing hit by global semiconductor shortage
Crash testing will be part of a wider testing plan. The logic there is that you have shown all the tests to pass using that particular hardware+software configuration. Only that configuration (and any future ones you put through testing, verification and validation) is what you're allowed to ship to customers.

(I work in a regulated environment, but not automotive, and we run into the same barriers, often for even minor changes. We work agile, but changes will get released in planned batches every few months, rather than shipping instantly. For automotive, I'm guessing their update cadence would be every model year.)

edwinbalani··on Apache OpenMeetings – Video chat, messaging, white board, doc editing and more
BigBlueButton is largely led by Blindside Networks -- they also oversee the holding of the BigBlueButton trademark, logomark, etc.

Blindside's commercial element is to to consult on educational deployment of the software (which is its intended use).

edwinbalani··on Apache OpenMeetings – Video chat, messaging, white board, doc editing and more
> BigBlueButton [...] doesn't use Jitst and WebRTC, but it doesn't include any document editing.

With a few others, I struggled through setting up a "distributed" (i.e. not all on a single machine) BBB deployment early in the pandemic, back when the documentation and community explosion hadn't quite happened. Such a deployment is nonstandard and you're left to your own devices to make it work, albeit with some decent architectural documentation so that you can work out which component needs to run where.

BBB does rely on WebRTC exclusively for its media. The so-called 'HTML5' client is in-browser. There is a Flash-based client that's officially deprecated, and they're slowly stripping out support for it.

There is also some optional Etherpad integration, so that you can collaborate on in-meeting notes that are made available afterwards.

BBB's biggest problem right now is that the Debian packaging, which is the only official way of deploying the software, is not open source. It's also really messy -- some stuff goes into /usr/local, some into /opt, with a fair deal of leftover crud that isn't used any more like the Flash client.

This is an unintentional situation, but the maintainers have deprioritised making the software truly "open source" (IMO) in favour of bugfixes and features.

I don't think this situation meets the GPL it's licensed under, regardless of whether you would qualify this as "open source" or not.

edwinbalani··on Production-Oriented Development
To temper this a bit: thankfully, all those industries are full of regulation and V-model and piles of documentation (for every line of code, multiple lines of other stuff on paper). Serious customers won't touch your product if you don't have a certified quality management system that fits The Standard.

I work in one of these industries -- I don't see much safety-critical engineering content on HN, and I think it's fair enough that it's glossed over. I agree that you can't move fast and break things when those things can hurt, or physically are, people.

edwinbalani··on We’ve decided to rename Riot
That said, "email" — "electronic mail" — pretty clearly conveys in its name what it's about.

If I hear the word "matrix" out of context I'm probably going to think of mathematics or material science or something else first. In other words, "matrix" is already an overloaded term, and its other meanings aren't going to go away any time soon.

edwinbalani··on A Hermes “thermal event” (2003)
I should add that the SRCF offers services to pretty much anyone at the University (or its colleges), including staff and of course the students you mentioned.

I am involved in running the SRCF nowadays. It's always encouraging to hear that it's been beneficial as an educational aid, as well as through pure utility!

Some people migrated their work pages to our web hosting from the University's equivalent service, which was abruptly shut down recently [0]. This follows an incident that got some attention on HN [1] -- chronologically at least, if not causally as well.

[0]: http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283922

edwinbalani··on Repositories held for ransom by using valid credentials
"Gitlab.com was compromised" is a bad title. _Accounts on_ GitLab, and the credentials to access them, were compromised, but the title suggests that the whole platform was affected, which doesn't seem to be the case.
edwinbalani··on Ask HN: Founders, what is the worst experience you had with developers?
Yep - in reality it's the number/code of the HMRC (tax authority) form you get when you leave a job.
edwinbalani··on Judge grants search warrant for Cambridge Analytica's offices
I think they'd want to look at email trails (and local copies of such e.g. Outlook data files) as much as looking for the 'big datasets' that Cambridge Analytica claims are now deleted. It's more likely, maybe, that internal emails from the time of the US presidential elections are still archived, and those would shed a light on the company's true conduct at the time.

I don't know if they're allowed to seize actual computers/hard drives (let's hope they have on-disk encryption), but I imagine that would be very valuable too.

edwinbalani··on The day I accidentally killed a little boy
In the USA (and perhaps Canada), yes, but it's not illegal here in the UK (inferred since the British Oxford has a Cowley Road, which is a busy radial route).

The advice given to children here is "don't cross at the front of a bus, always behind it". That and "look right, left, and right again".