HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rrdharan

3,030 karma · joined January 15, 2011

submissionscomments
rrdharan··on It's 2026, Just Use Postgres
Both Redis (finally) and Valkey addressed the multithreading scalability issues, see https://oneuptime.com/blog/post/2026-01-21-redis-vs-memcache... and/or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860273...
rrdharan··on OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been
I don't follow this logic.

Forget about dating. If you want the AI to be able to send texts from your number, and you own an iPhone, I think your only other choice would be to port your number to Google Voice?

rrdharan··on Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones
This is often repeated but false - it’s not the vast majority, nor even a majority.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/19/bank-of-america-nearly-half-...

rrdharan··on Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
GitHub is owned by Microsoft which covers most of what GP is alluding to…
rrdharan··on I wasted years of my life in crypto
No, there actually aren’t. People just assume there are but the majority of desperate people turn to the barter system before crypto helps them.
rrdharan··on I wasted years of my life in crypto
I’m shocked it’s even that high
rrdharan··on Bronze Age mega-settlement in Kazakhstan has advanced urban planning, metallurgy
TIL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_anthropology founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss, not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss.
rrdharan··on Open Source Implementation of Apple's Private Compute Cloud
I think the parent has a valid point. The actual README says "inspired by Apple’s Private Cloud Compute".

I think it's more fair to say it implements the same idea but it is not an opensource implementation of Apple's Private Compute Cloud the way e.g. minio is an implementation of S3, so the HN title is misleading.

rrdharan··on Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system
https://access.redhat.com/articles/2201201 and https://github.com/git/git/security/advisories/GHSA-4v56-3xv... are interesting examples to consider (though I'm curious whether Rust's integer overflow behavior in release builds would have definitely fared better?).

> Unless the end goal is to rewrite the whole thing in Rust piece by piece, solving hidden memory bugs along the way.

I would assume that's the case.

rrdharan··on Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions
Actually Microsoft started this in the 1990s, long before FAANG was a thing. They just all adopted it.
rrdharan··on Making C and Python Talk to Each Other
What is c9k short for?
rrdharan··on Oracle VM VirtualBox – VM Escape via VGA Device
We can agree to disagree. I just don’t think it’s the high order bit in determining the rate of vulnerability discovery - in my opinion the commercial utility (white / black / grey) of the exploits is a more important factor in determining how quickly they are found.
rrdharan··on Oracle VM VirtualBox – VM Escape via VGA Device
It’s really not harder for the folks with this skill set, and plenty of these vulnerabilities have been found in VMware too over the years.

https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/KORTCHINSKY...

https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/vmware-z...

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/vmw...

rrdharan··on ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)
Kind of odd that the blog states that "The architect for ZFS at Apple had left" and links to the LinkedIn profile of someone who doesn't have any Apple work experience listed on their resume. I assume the author linked to the wrong profile?
rrdharan··on IronRDP: a Rust implementation of Microsoft's RDP protocol
I don't quite understand what happened to SPICE. I know Red Hat deprecated it, and I can't tell if it was ever fully opensourced or not?

https://www.spice-space.org/developers.html

rrdharan··on Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
That was 2023; more recently Microsoft is losing ground to Google (in 2024).
rrdharan··on Don't Call It a Substack.
I disagree, most podcast episodes and ads mention a few popular options plus “or wherever you get your podcasts” and the proprietary gated stuff hasn’t been doing that well!
rrdharan··on SQLite does not do checksums
All the native storage systems at Google do it at every level (block, file, database); I would assume the same is true at AWS and Microsoft.
rrdharan··on Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
Yes that’s one of the sites they bailed on:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/google-ends-agreement-with-l...

rrdharan··on FTC Report Confirms: Commercial Surveillance Is Out of Control
Try not worrying about as much stuff?

100 years ago well before the invention of so-called surveillance capitalism, people were making soft drinks out of radium, and inhaling asbestos.

Many things are better since then. Some new things are probably worse, but every reasonable measure of human welfare suggests we are better off than we were previously.

Something some subset of us are worried about right now, whether it’s WiFi or 5G or Covid vaccines, will turn out to have had horrible consequences and you can’t really fault the rest of us that we didn’t listen to the crazies.

Just embrace panglossian optimism because the alternative is to just be angry and exhausted and indignant all the time and then you’re no fun at parties.

rrdharan··on Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs
https://618media.com/en/blog/revenue-projections-for-apple-s...
rrdharan··on Deterministic Replay of QEMU Emulation
http://www.replaydebugging.com/2011/09/goodbye-replay-debugg...
rrdharan··on Deterministic Replay of QEMU Emulation
VMware had this many years ago; it was very cool:

http://stackframe.blogspot.com/2007/10/configuring-applicati...

http://www.replaydebugging.com/2008/08/vmware-workstation-65...

rrdharan··on Micro-libraries should never be used
> When's the last time ls, cat, date, tar, etc needed to be updated on your linux system? probably almost never.

Bad example: http://www.slackware.com/security/viewer.php?l=slackware-sec...

They find stuff like this fairly often in GNU coreutils even to this day.. it’s the main reason there’s a Rust coreutils effort.

rrdharan··on Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped appliance
> This is to let the military use AI to help kill people.

So are your tax dollars, and some portion of any money you spend or any productive engagement you have with the economy wherever you live on this planet.

rrdharan··on CrowdStrike fixes start at "reboot up to 15 times", gets more complex from there
> And gradual rollout of config files quite often seems like overkill.

Indeed, but it is still mandated at large companies (e.g. Google) because of exactly this scenario.

rrdharan··on What's in my location history?
The timeline backup is encrypted clientside before upload.

Meaning no casual FBI or police warrant is gonna vacuum it up (at least not from Google, they’ll just go to the cell providers / towers instead as siblings have pointed out).

Obviously yes NSA and CIA and various other nation state attackers will just get it directly off your phone or evil maid you or surveil you in any number of other more traditional ways.

rrdharan··on Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?
I work at Google on database systems and would still pick the VMware codebase (specifically the virtual machine monitor component).

It was by far the most impressive piece of software engineering I’ve ever had privilege of perusing.

rrdharan··on US EPA Enforcement and Compliance on Apple Fabrication
I had not heard of this person and it turns out there’s an entire Wikipedia entry for those interested in the backstory:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Gj%C3%B8vik

rrdharan··on ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack
They tried, it died:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/7/22/1204

Page 1 of 34Next →