boricj

10 ms·

91.
by boricj 1y ago
> License is the obvious blocker, aside from all the technical issues. Btrfs is GPL WinBtrfs [1], a reimplementation of btrfs from scratch for Windows systems, is licensed under the LGPL v3. Just because the reference implementation uses
92.
by boricj 1y ago
I think it's too weak as a paper for me to put out there. I also haven't even applied the minor corrections from the reviews. If you want to take a peek at the case studies, I've blogged about my butchering of aln across C st
93.
by boricj 1y ago
Well, that's a long story. I'll try and keep it short. So I've worked in my spare time for the past three years on an extremely esoteric and mind-bending reverse engineering technique I call delinking [1] and my tool for it [
94.
by boricj 1y ago
I recently wrote a paper for a conference that ended up being rejected, with a split review (2 for, 1 against). As a non-academic that wrote a paper for the first time, I'll say that writing a good science paper takes an absurd amount
95.
by boricj 1y ago
Exam mode, or test mode. It's something that appeared about ten years ago, to ensure that a graphical calculator isn't loaded with cheats or has certain features enabled. The technical reason is that the RESET button no longer cle
96.
by boricj 1y ago
As in, Java ME? Unless I'm mistaken, it's been on life support for the past 15 years. It's probably more heavyweight and firmware size/Flash usage is a concern. I don't think performance would be on par with WASM an
97.
by boricj 1y ago
Does WASM still have 64 KiB pages? I get why for desktops, but there are use-cases for running WASM on microcontrollers where that's either inconvenient or outright impossible. The one in particular I have in mind would be to put WASM
98.
by boricj 1y ago
The original author later sent an apology email explaining that it sounded too harsh in English and it wasn't meant to be offensive: https://lwn.net/ml/all/bece61a0-b818-4d59-b340-860e94080f0d@...
99.
by boricj 1y ago
> However, if your API ever interfaces with users in a corporate environment, parsing simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV is suddenly quite beyond the reach of however is nibbling at your endpoint Excel can directly ingest a CSV file served
100.
by boricj 1y ago
As a software engineer, I was summoned twice from high-up to directly deal with an end-user issue. Once, it was an issue with the installation of a legacy product I didn't work on that failed on a specific platform. I was handed a RDP
101.
by boricj 1y ago
The simplest thing that would've worked was for the initial firmware to do nothing besides putting the new firmware in the secondary slot, tell mcuboot to upgrade and then reboot. That shifts the responsibility of working upgrades to l
102.
by boricj 1y ago
I disagree. You prototype the simplest thing that could possibly work. Then, you design stuff so that you don't end up regretting it later. I happen to have a recent example with an add-on card. For reasons that I won't get into
103.
by boricj 1y ago
I've burned out of my first job, where my work responsibilities steadily increased until I was simultaneously a software developer, a sysadmin for five racks of servers, a devops for one entire software platform, the help desk of ~50 u
104.
by boricj 1y ago
> European grids aren't that much better either, loads of investments needed in order to connect more renewables. On one hand, Spain and Portugal recently suffered a complete blackout. On the other hand, instead of cascading the bla
105.
by boricj 1y ago
I've seen relational database schemas degenerating into untyped free-for-all key-values because they weren't expressive enough. I've seen massive code duplication (and massive amounts of bugs) because no one invested into a q
106.
by boricj 1y ago
> At the (very) low end it's pretty easy to build your own "cloud" with a NAS, containers, and reverse proxies and tunnels to the outside world. And this will get you suprisingly far. Anyone can throw together a bunch of p
107.
by boricj 1y ago
> There was some design oddness that plagued early MIPS and SPARC that future architectures avoided. I wrote a Ghidra extension that can export relocatable object files. The MIPS analyzer for it is the hardest algorithmic challenge I&#x2
108.
by boricj 1y ago
Sometimes, megacorp hits a problem and it doesn't have the right cog in the drawer. Maybe it's because no one in-house has the needed knowledge for it. Maybe because it's a genuinely hard problem. Maybe it's because ever
109.
by boricj 1y ago
If you have no one else to talk to, asking an LLM to give you a blunt, non-sugarcoated answer on a specific area of concern might give you the hard slap across the face you need to realize something. That being said, I agree with the abstra
110.
by boricj 1y ago
We wouldn't need to if we used capability-based operating systems.
111.
by boricj 1y ago
I've ranted previously on that topic [1] [2] [3], but as a former contributor MINIX3 in my opinion is a technological dead-end that ran out of steam. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41673634 [2] https:/&
112.
by boricj 1y ago
> I think they were expecting you to fail. Maybe, but I already had a reputation of being the dark wizard back then. If anything, the other students in my group went along with this because they knew I could overcome any problem... reg
113.
by boricj 1y ago
The primary purpose of the traditional European launch industry is to provide an independent launch capability for government payloads. Cost is irrelevant because the French government in particular wants to be able to launch payloads into
114.
by boricj 1y ago
That reminds me of a three week, three person group project I had back when I was in university. There were a couple of topics we could pick from, including writing a very simple operating system from scratch. I asked the professors if we c
115.
by boricj 1y ago
I recall reading in Just for Fun that Linus described VMS as horrible and reading in Showstopper that Dave hated Unix (allegedly quipping "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" when asked about its I/O model). I c
116.
by boricj 1y ago
Impressive work. Maybe it's my memory from 20 years ago playing tricks on me, but to quote Civvie 11: "It's like playing a version of [Extreme Tux Racer] where everything was moved two inches or so to the left."
117.
by boricj 1y ago
grug obviously never took on invisible t-rex this grug keeps one on one invisible t-rex, grug cursed
118.
by boricj 1y ago
There's the other side of the coin of reporting bugs besides initial friction: if the user feels like the bug reports end up in a black hole, then they will disincentivized from doing so. What happens after the user files a bug from t
119.
by boricj 1y ago
From www.gameoftrees.org: > No mention of openbsd on the internet is complete without a long thread about source control migration. — tedu@ So... Is a migration in sight for OpenBSD?
120.
by boricj 1y ago
Machine code isn't scary, but its nature is severely misunderstood. Skipping over the bundling of instructions into code blocks, the next logical construct are functions. These have references to code and data in memory; if you want to

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