Hacker News Reader

mkeeteron Testing WebGPU data layouts with Facet

Nice, I'll keep an eye on that!

Right now, I'm targeting everything (native / Firefox / Chrome / Safari), so minimizing use of extensions; this also means I get to run head-long into fun cross-platform behavior differences [1][2][3]

[1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/8785

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1870699

[3] https://github.com/mkeeter/halfspace/issues/1#issuecomment-3...

mkeeteron Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache

For the curious, this is technically possible in Rust using a dynamically sized type [1], but in practice is difficult and doesn't really play nice with the rest of the language. The nomicon entry concludes with "Yes, custom DSTs are a largely half-baked feature for now." [2]

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/dynamically-sized-types....

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/exotic-sizes.html

mkeeteron Zig’s Io.Threaded is neat

Probably because this is a post about Zig’s threaded IO, and complaints about Rust syntax is two conversational leaps away from that subject!

mkeeteron Every fast write moves work somewhere else

Another fun failure mode in the same vein: if you are emulating an NVMe device and declare that a write operation is successful once bytes are in memory, you will quickly find yourself buffering arbitrarily large amounts of data as "persist to disk" (SSD speed) falls behind "acknowledge writes" (RAM speed). If you do not add backpressure to your system intentionally, it will be added for you – and you may not like where it's placed!

(This also happens at the SSD level: burst writes can be very fast as data is buffered in the SSD's own RAM, then performance steady-states at the true write speed once that's saturated)

mkeeteron Flowise is shutting down

Flowise was acquired by Workday in August 2025 [1].

At the time, they posted "Flowise isn’t going anywhere, we’re doubling down. In fact, we’re only just getting started!" [2]

I wonder if "keep the platform running for >= 1 year post-acquisition" was part of the terms! Ah well, another one for Our Incredible Journey [3]...

[1] https://newsroom.workday.com/2025-08-14-Workday-Acquires-Flo...

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/flowiseai_were-thrilled-to-sh...

[3] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

mkeeteron The full stack of terminals explained

> This is a clean separation, and clean separations are worth noticing. They tend to be load-bearing.

oh hi Claude

mkeeteron Task Paralysis and AI

Does one also get dopamine from using LLMs to write comments on Hacker News?

mkeeteron Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

A repository search shows 2.2K repos with the text "A Mini Shai-Hulud has Appeared", all created within the past day:

https://github.com/search?q=A%20Mini%20Shai-Hulud%20has%20Ap...

mkeeteron A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it

Cryptic Titles Are All You Need

mkeeteron Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

Fair enough, I accept "the blog post was written by someone from the 1800s" as an alternative hypothesis.

edit: For what it's worth, I also just tested the Gettysburg Address (using the "Bliss Copy" from [1]), and got a "100% Human" score.

[1] https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettys...

mkeeteron Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

The review is also heavily LLM-inflected, to the point of being distracting.

GPTZero gives it a 100% chance of being AI generated, and I've found that these tools may give false negatives from a well-prompted model, but false positives are rare.

If you are looking to tune your intuition for AI-written text, here's an interesting list of their quirks (ironically provided as a Claude skill for removing those quirks from emitted text):

https://github.com/stephenturner/skill-deslop/blob/main/refe...

mkeeteron We broke 92% of SHA-256 – you should start to migrate from it

The "Intermediate Report" [1] lists the authors as "Robert V. and Claude (Anthropic)". Is there any reason to believe this is not AI hallucinations?

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/papers/2/intermediate-report.pdf

mkeeteron Dune3d: A parametric 3D CAD application

Congrats!

(We had one back in December; you’re in for a fun ride!)

mkeeteron Dune3d: A parametric 3D CAD application

They certainly have ambitions – the most recent changelog claims to add "Full PCB design pipeline: schematic capture, routing, DRC, Gerber export, and signal integrity simulation."

It also seems to have a physics engine, a slicer for 3D printing, an embroidery mode, and a entire ecosystem of math crates (https://tang.toys/).

Whether any of that works – or whether it's pure LLM slop – is less clear. I tried to import a trivial STEP file, and it crashed my browser tab [1]. Every commit is co-authored by Claude.

[1] https://github.com/ecto/vcad/issues/7

mkeeteron From Oscilloscope to Wireshark: A UDP Story (2022)

Not a typo, but you’re correct about the sample rate - with those settings, the scope was doing interpolation between samples.

mkeeteron Postgres Is Your Friend. ORM Is Not

More evidence: the user posted three well-formatted multi-sentence comments within 15 seconds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110801 (13:23:08)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110803 (13:23:15)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110804 (13:23:23)

mkeeteron Tell HN: Yet Another Round of Zendesk Spam

I have received 168 support ticket emails in the past 30 mins, and Gmail has not yet learned to flag them as spam.

This is an absolute clown show.

Edit: whoops, this was incorrect! I had received over 1,000 Zendesk emails, 168 of which made it into my inbox.

mkeeteron Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

Which NRTL did you end up using for certifications? Can you say more about that process?

mkeeteron Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

oh hi ChatGPT

The giveaway is that LLMs love bulleted lists with a bolded attention-grabbing phrase to start each line. Copy-pasting directly to HN has stripped the bold formatting and bullets from the list, so the attention-grabbing phrase is fused into the next sentence, e.g. “Potential for abuse Attestation enables blacklisting”

mkeeteron Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://mattkeeter.com

Lots of projects, ranging from embedded systems to DIY CAD software and GPU algorithms.

mkeeteron [dead]

The publisher describes itself as “Fusion of Researcher and AI: Independent publisher of peer-reviewed research in post-biological epistemics“

Is there any reason to believe this isn’t an AI-assisted crank publication?

mkeeteron I see a future in jj

> jj undo is great but it's a one time thing.

For what it's worth, this changed in v0.33.0:

> jj undo is now sequential: invoking it multiple times in sequence repeatedly undoes actions in the operation log.

(release notes: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/releases/tag/v0.33.0)

mkeeteron Creating a VGA Signal in Hubris

(I work at Oxide, though I wasn't around for the initial chip selection process)

It's at least partially a matter of timing: Oxide was picking its initial hardware in roughly 2020, and the RP2040 wasn't released until 2021.

A handful of people have done ports, e.g. https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris/pull/2210, but I expect to stick with STM32s for the foreseeable future – we've got a lot to do, and they're working well enough!

mkeeteron How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos

The LLM tics are strong in this writeup:

"No manual overrides, no exceptions."

"Our VDP isn't just a bug bounty—it's a security partnership"

mkeeteron Our $100M Series B

The server and switch hardware is designed in-house (from the PCBs on up), though we do source DRAM / SSDs / CPUs / ASICs from the usual vendors.

The "secret sauce management layer" is available at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron, released under the MPLv2 license.

(I work at Oxide)

mkeeteron Our $100M Series B

I'm not aware of folks outside the company running the whole control plane, but people have definitely gotten parts of the system running at home:

https://artemis.sh/2022/03/14/propolis-oxide-at-home-pt1.htm...

(The author of this blog post now works for Oxide!)

mkeeteron Gradients Are the New Intervals

(OP here)

This is taken directly from the paper's introduction, which admittedly uses the more specific terminology of "1-Lipschitz signed distance bounds".

The paper cites the original Hart '96 paper on sphere tracing; quoth Hart, "a function is Lipschitz if and only if the magnitude of its derivative remains bounded".

https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs348b-20-spring-conte...

I wonder if there's a terminology schism here between computer graphics and numerical analysis folks.

mkeeteron Gradients Are the New Intervals

Interesting post, thanks for the link!

You may also enjoy "Spelunking the Deep: Guaranteed Queries on General Neural Implicit Surfaces via Range Analysis", which uses interval arithmetic (ish) to raymarch neural implicit surfaces:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02444

mkeeteron The Prospero Challenge

> What are the practical implications of this kind of assembly language? Surely there’s more efficient means of describing 2D SDFs?

By analogy, you wouldn't program in LLVM IR, but it's a useful intermediate representation for a bunch of higher-level languages. Higher-level tools can target this representation, and then they all get to use a standard set of optimizations and algorithms (fast evaluation, rendering, etc).

(I gave a recent talk that's a broad overview of this research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGxsGnbyJ4)

> My next thought would be to evaluate the program at a low resolution to create a low res SDF texture for the shader to draw at a higher resolution.

Glad you're enjoying the challenge! You may also be interested in

https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2403-distance-field-fonts/

mkeeteron The Prospero Challenge

> Can anyone explain where this blob of "assembly language" comes from?

Assembly language is definitely the right analogy: it's a low-level target generated by higher-level tools. In this case, the expression came from a Python script calling this text(...) function:

https://github.com/mkeeter/antimony/blob/f6a56dd7/py/fab/sha...

The font is hand-built from geometric primitives (rectangles, circles, etc) and CSG operations (union, intersection, difference)

> What is considered an acceptable preprocessing or transformation?

I'm looking for interesting ideas, and to mine the depths of PLs / compiler / interpreter / runtime research. Just returning a fixed image isn't particularly interesting, but (for example) I just updated the site with a compile-to-CUDA example that shows off the brute force power of a modern GPU.