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wglb

69,532 karma · joined January 13, 2008

At home, Simple country boy wgl at ciexinc.com twitter: @wgl8 w8lvn, 7019, 3519, 1819 and occasionally 7074.000

Formerly at kCura/Relativity, security. I do application penetration testing for hire these days. Happy to chat about application security, programming, and ham radio. My conversations about agriculture are not that interesting.

Security: https://ciexinc.com/ Of particular interest are the solarwinds articles at https://ciexinc.com/blog/solarwinds/index.html Old very fun projects: https://ciex-software.com

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.”

Beware the anxiety industrial complex.

submissionscomments
wglb··on Lisp's Influence on Ruby
But macros and s-expressions are two of my favorites parts of lisp!
wglb··on How to earn a billion dollars
Here is one oft-repeated quote: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/05/12/aoc-.... Her statement is properly interpreted by pg.
wglb··on Orthodox C++
Agree but nowhere as easy as what we did https://ciex-software.com/coroutines.html
wglb··on Orthodox C++
It is still a bit amazing to me that it was significantly easier to do coroutines in Sigma 5 assembly and likely most any assembly than in C or C++. Two languages supposedly close to the machine.
wglb··on JWST reveals dawn-dusk atmosphere split on ultra-hot exoplanet WASP-121B
Published in Nature Astronomy: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02887-6
wglb··on Covered Models (Claude.com)
Those of you working in privacy-related fields or under retention restrictions, note

    *30-day minimum retention by default*
wglb··on A giant star may have destroyed itself in one of the rarest explosions
Arxiv reprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16487
wglb··on Found: Milky Way black hole's missing wind
Paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae63cf
wglb··on Local 'Little Red Dots' stay eerily steady for up to 15 years
A paper in The Astrophysical Journal: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae6b89
wglb··on NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
I was responding to the headline that says:

>NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore

I did not address the issue of the hardware documentation, just the issue raised by the headline. I fully understand the issues that the hardware and the problems of not having a full map of the hardware or a test bed to check out the code.

wglb··on NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
Regarding "that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore", I claim this is nonsense, and definitely not an obstacle.

I've audited codebases in languages that I haven't programmed in. It is a matter of grasping a few basic concepts, like branch execution, branch destination, where data is stored, how it is communicated. Don Lancaster told us how to do this: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/enhance_vI.pdf.

wglb··on Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format
If you wish to explore a new concept, perhaps ask duckduckgo "what is ctf" an you may well get a response such as:

    CTF stands for Capture The Flag, which is a cybersecurity competition where participants find hidden "flags" in vulnerable programs or systems to test and develop their security skills. There are two main types of CTFs: jeopardy-style, where teams solve various challenges for points, and attack-defense, where teams defend their systems while trying to exploit their opponents'.
wglb··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
I use Lisp for my projects

1. Type checking built in 2. More concise and readable than most languages 3. Trivial to inspect while running, ability to change a running program 4. There seems to be a massive amount of lisp that it is inhaling from somewhere 5. Large amount of libraries.

This has the added benefit that even if you publish the code, nobody will be stealing it.

Edit -- I find it very useful to write tests for critical functions. This catches situations where the agent decides some interesting functionality is no longer interesting.

wglb··on Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties
Dr. Daniel Hajovsky, associate professor in Texas A&M University's Department of Educational Psychology published study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40863201/
wglb··on AI is breaking two vulnerability cultures
Everything I can find says they are not obfuscating
wglb··on AI is breaking two vulnerability cultures
How are they obfuscated?
wglb··on Astronomers uncover > 1k radio galaxies with 'wings,' expanding a rare class
Paper in arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22347v1
wglb··on A lost galaxy called 'Loki' may be hiding inside the Milky Way
From article in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/548/2/stag563/8537783...
wglb··on Oak trees outwit their predators
Paper at Nature Ecology & Evolution https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03071-9
wglb··on Universal patterns emerge across 22 languages, mapping how vocabularies evolve
Published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2068/202...
wglb··on Two blazing quasars caught waltzing into a merger
Paper link in Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06504
wglb··on Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected
Paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525919123
wglb··on Ask HN: Can HN ban new accounts? or charge money?
Here is a typical day's posting tally

  job  2
  flagged  204
  dead  336
  story  1664
  delayed  687
  comment  12312
That is approximately 513 comments each hour or 8.55 each minute.

Not humanly possible for two moderators to view and make judgement on even a small fraction of these comments.

wglb··on [dead]
Let's not post down announcements. They are not interesting in the sense of HN.
wglb··on 8087 Emulation on 8086 Systems
While I was at Mark Williams back in the day, the engineers wrote 8087 emulation floating point for the Mark Williams 8086 compiler. This involved some quality time with the Volume 2 of Knuth in the log division section.
wglb··on Scraped from ancient Roman toilets, remains expose a pathogen found earlier
Article in npj Heritage Science https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-026-02475-x

Crypto is older than you thought!

wglb··on Physicists revive 1990s laser concept to propose a next-generation atomic clock
From Physical Review of Letters: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/v6jq-m6sk
wglb··on Colorado River disappeared record for 5M years: now we know where it was
Interesting. I don't recall any of my submissions had an auto title change.
wglb··on Colorado River disappeared record for 5M years: now we know where it was
I submitted and had to edit the title for length—no other changes.
wglb··on Colorado River disappeared record for 5M years: now we know where it was
Paper in Science: https://phys.org/news/2026-04-colorado-river-geological-mill...
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