Hacker News Reader

This is well written and insightful. Worth reading through to the end, at least in my opinion.

ghotlion Daylight Computer – New 60fps e-paper tablet

In one of the pictures on the site was it sitting on a dock with a keyboard. I use obsidian and would use this as an obsidian typewriter. If I order is it just the tablet itself or more? I presume it runs Linux so any keyboard that would work in that environment would work with the device? Even better if I can ssh into it.

Edit: I see elsewhere in this thread that it’s android. If I can adb shell into it and push my own custom launcher to it, I’ll buy one today :)

ghotlion Cracking Meta's Messenger Certificate Pinning on macOS

I think the person you're replying to perhaps meant that if you have total control of the hardware and the binary you can pull the value prior to being sent to the encrypt function.

ghotlion Oasis – a small, statically-linked Linux system

I make statics usually so this sort of just never comes up. If I wanted another malloc it would just be linked in at compile time like the rest.

ghotlion Oasis – a small, statically-linked Linux system

Agreed, if the binary is statically linked. If you run `file` on the output from that and it shows 'dynamically linked' then you're playing games with porting over libraries, changing the library loading path, or just going full chroot like linux from scratch does with the bootstrapping part of the install. I find static binaries simplest to work with in that context but agreed I use that pattern too with docker and generally build ad-hoc tools within containers like that. If only these devices could run docker but I'm left to my own tooling to figure out per device.

ghotlion Oasis – a small, statically-linked Linux system

https://musl.libc.org/releases.html

I maintain a large codebase, widely deployed, cross compiled to many cpu architecures that's built atop musl. You're right that historically in the context of people blindly using alpine for their container base that sort of thing might be the case. The newest version of musl solves the thing you're describing and in general most of the complaints about malloc perf or otherwise have been addressed. Avoiding musl to me seems like an outdated trope, but there was a time wherein that take was valid indeed.

ghotlion Oasis – a small, statically-linked Linux system

I routinely get embedded linux devices at $dayjob that need my time and attention and they basically never have the tooling I need to get my job done. I'm a pro at looking at how Alpine builds a tool and then just making my own statically linked / minimal size tool to drop in place on the device. The allure of something like this is that I can just potentially grab a drop-in binary and get on with my day. I simply don't attempt to link to libraries already on the device since they're all built in wildly different ways, old tools, old compilers.

Hopefully that's helpful context. Overall since I did linux from scratch half a lifetime ago I've always wondered why something like Oasis hasn't gotten more traction. It's got some ambitious ideas in the README so maybe others have other nice use-cases atop all that. I just see small, statically linked and think 'oh boy if i never have to build my own tools again for some weird board'. If so, I'm here for it.

ghotlion The Birth of Rock 'N' Roll Is Found at Sam Phillips's Sun Records (2016)

Agreed and I want to highlight this comment. Skip everything else and go straight to the Lorraine Motel / National Civil Rights Museum. It's basically the opposite of a waste of time. For those that don't know this is where MLK was murdered and is now a museum / memorial.

ghotlion Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will enable frame pointers by default

> Something has to be seriously wrong with the way it was compiled for gdb to have trouble.

Cargo culting culture in embedded devices of just using some old toolchain copy pasted from some vendor seems to be pervasive. I cut fresh compilers and align their output with the old crusty toolchains. Made entire classes of issues go away. Regardless, agreed the omission of the frame pointer was merely one issue at play with those particular core dumps on those particular devices, years back at this point. :)

ghotlion Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will enable frame pointers by default

I somewhat painstakingly figured this out the hard way pulling core dumps off of embedded linux devices that gdb had a hard time working with. At the time I was like whew why is omitting frame pointers the default at all in so many places when it didn't seem to make a measurable difference in the performance of the software. I guess it's just vestigial these days and yes please use a compiler flag like this when it measurably makes sense. Making debugging simpler for the rest of us is the way to go.

ghotlion Training of 1T Parameter Scientific AI Begins

For the uninitiated: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

It's my favorite short story.

ghotlion LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them

Ah, actually reviewing that more closely I found a link to it in the acknowledgements.

https://github.com/cg123/mergekit

ghotlion LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them

Do you happen to have a link to where that interwoven layers bit is described? As far as I can tell it's not clear on the model cards.

ghotlion Punica: Serving multiple LoRA finetuned LLM as one

Interesting. I'm not so sure I really 'got' that part of finetunes / LoRA adapters before reading this comment. Makes me want to make one to take it for a spin, see what comes out the other side.

ghotlion Dietary restriction of isoleucine increases healthspan and lifespan in mice

Hey hope this helps. I'm a normal person who wanted to understand all of this and I sincerely put in the work to be able to read these papers as if I had formal training. I try not to act like I know anything, but I certainly know what isoleucine is and you can too.

https://aklectures.com/subject/biochemistry/introduction-to-...

This entire biochem series was worth watching. If you look up every word you don't know, things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoleucine are not as impenetrable as you might think.

Words, they're all worth putting in the work to understand. At least from my perspective :)

ghotlion Nrsc5: Receive NRSC-5 digital radio stations using an RTL-SDR dongle

If you're willing to share more on this subject, color me interested.

ghotlion Building a unikernel that runs WebAssembly – part 1

I probably should have mentioned I've built unikernels with some of the tooling you've described here. It just seems very academic and edge case compared to a single static user space Linux binary that while technically isn't a by the book unikernel, all I guess I meant was that it's diminishing returns beyond that.

ghotlion Building a unikernel that runs WebAssembly – part 1

This is the most realistic comment on this thread (so far).

ghotlion Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

Interesting and not surprised. I don't actually remember any but it's half my life ago at this point

ghotlion Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings

I liked the Niven/Pournell books and I still think back to them often enough. The Mote in God's Eye and Lucifer's Hammer I think I read back to back. It's been a long time but I really enjoyed them when I was younger.

ghotlion Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

I just use Firefox Focus when I want to keep it simple. Works fine on both android and ios.

ghotlion Linux from Scratch Version 12.0

Same, I'm closing in on twenty years since I did it on a Pentium 2 (which took a very long time to compile). But in a matter of weeks I had my own linux router that I built from scratch.

I was too much of a novice to completely understand everything I did but over time the puzzle pieces fit together and I realized it was just about the most solid foundation I could have engaged in. I'd suggest it to anyone that interacts with Linux and the time requirement to compile everything is far, far less than it was years back.

ghotlion PID Control Challenges

If you're willing to expand on this, color me interested.

ghotlion Habitually Skipping Breakfast Is Associated with the Risk of GI Cancers

I hear you and I have the same job as when I identified with what you're saying about not starting the day on your terms. However now I just start every day on my own terms and I am measurably getting more done overall. They just have to wait for me to get my morning routine done before they get replies to their slack beeps.

Yes there are exceptions to this rule but in general 'no' being my default until I'm up and running has basically only brought benefits. Hope things improve!

ghotlion Minecraft Wiki has decided to leave Fandom

Wow I've looked up stuff on the vampire survivors wiki on fandom a lot in the last year and this comment surprised me. Going to that website in regular ol' chrome without an adblocker was an experience indeed. I had no idea. You might find joy just putting a little bit of time into your browser setup. I was blissfully unaware of how bad that user experience was. Hope this helps!

ghotlion My solopreneur story

I don't mean this as anything but a constructive comment and I won't reply further. Feedback, for your perusal.

Some of your comments on this thread tipped your hand (to me at least) that you must be a new account here. I was right. You seem like you may not have read the comment guidelines.

I'd like to see the positives in some of this but my friend it comes across really tone deaf and dripping with bias. I don't really disagree with some of your points, but it's wrapped up in language that might be best suited elsewhere. There's room for improvement when it comes to your rhetoric and if the downvotes didn't make that clear I'm hoping this feedback helps ongoing.

ghotlion Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs

Won on that node, agreed. I suppose I meant the 'investigate programs' part of the title and if that aids in garnering info for attacking something it interacts with.

But of course it's all splitting hairs. A sufficiently dedicated / motivated / funded person can investigate even the most hardened static position independent binary. Dynamic linking with LD_PRELOAD is like propping the front door open in comparison.

ghotlion Just how constexpr is C++20’s std:string?

Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough but what sort of use-case is this sort of thing for?

ghotlion Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs

Sure. We agree. Cat and mouse. Can you help me understand what value you're adding to the discussion though? Low hanging fruit arguments based on semantics might be best suited elsewhere

ghotlion Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs

Worth mentioning that statically linked binaries prevent this attack vector. I won't weigh in on dynamic vs static in general but if you're shipping something you don't want fiddled with then maybe dynamic linking isn't what you're looking for.

My favorite nasty hack along these lines was to inject a new implementation of gethostname via LD_PRELOAD as the simplest path to prevent a CI server from surfacing a hostname in a place it shouldn't be.