cperciva

6 ms·

61.
by cperciva 5mo ago
Debian is probably the best of all the Linuxes, but still suffers from split-brain: If patches are sent upstream first, Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public. With FreeBSD there's never any question o
62.
by cperciva 5mo ago
Alternatively, switch to an operating system like FreeBSD which doesn't take a YOLO approach to security. Security fixes don't just get tossed into the FreeBSD kernel without coordination; they go through the FreeBSD security tea
63.
by cperciva 5mo ago
Leaving aside the fact that, yes, unsigned integer types are definitely not negative -- my point wasn't about types at all. Objects cannot take up a negative number of bytes of memory!
64.
by cperciva 5mo ago
I don't get it. Is this a parody of poor design decisions? Sure, it's possible to write bugs in C. And if you really want to, you can disable the compiler warnings which flag tautologous comparisons and mixed-sign comparisons (a
65.
by cperciva 5mo ago
"et alia" usually means "and others", but technically in Latin "alia" can be either plural neuter or singular female!
66.
by cperciva 5mo ago
They're US based but I'm in Canada and haven't had any issues. Yes they ask for some information but it's not at all unreasonable.
67.
by cperciva 5mo ago
On the topic of bitcoin millionaires... I'm getting some sponsorship for my FreeBSD release engineering work from https://opensats.org/ . Have you asked them?
68.
by cperciva 6mo ago
Do you consider food and clothing to be "unnecessary stuff"?
69.
by cperciva 6mo ago
Yes, and a lot of major necessities haven't . CPI is an average -- of course some things will be higher.
70.
by cperciva 6mo ago
My wife grew up in a one-room apartment with her parents and two older brothers. I routinely tell her "I want our daughter to have everything you didn't get as a kid".
71.
by cperciva 6mo ago
See also SmolBSD -- similar idea, similar name, using NetBSD.
72.
by cperciva 6mo ago
Heh, I'm sure it's nothing like that. It wouldn't rule out the possibility that I'm tickling a firmware bug in the ENA device though.
73.
by cperciva 6mo ago
The same thing I do every night - try to make FreeBSD work better on EC2! Ok in all seriousness, right now I'm tracking down an issue with the ENA network interface which results in sporadic packet loss. Triggering the issue is hard a
74.
by cperciva 6mo ago
Yes, that's correct. They're not idiots and realize that spinning up FreeBSD instances in EC2 can be very useful for development purposes -- the largest EC2 instances can run a buildworld very very fast -- but they have no need f
75.
by cperciva 6mo ago
I do have a few "free" AWS accounts! But they're for FreeBSD stuff (development, publishing official images, and FreeBSD infrastructure which Amazon hosts) -- I would never use them for my business. I'm sure I could get
76.
by cperciva 6mo ago
I think cc1.4xlarge was the first instance I ran the Tarsnap service on. Being HVM made me far more confident -- PV dramatically increases the risk of VM/paging bugs, which is exactly the way to get silent data corruption. So... I&#x2
77.
by cperciva 6mo ago
Indeed, when re:Invent 2020 went virtual and we had a virtual space we could walk around I had a major sense of deja vu -- of course Second Life on a laptop was very different from wearing VR goggles.
78.
by cperciva 6mo ago
Right, I've got 19 years of NDAs so I try to be careful about what I talk about publicly...
79.
by cperciva 6mo ago
What alternative interface does the author propose we use to securely exchange credentials? If you read the linked post you'll see that at the time I suggested using XenStore to pass credentials to the OS kernel. Obviously a differe
80.
20 years on AWS and never not my job(daemonology.net)
260 points by cperciva 6mo ago|66 comments
81.
by cperciva 6mo ago
A complaint about the quality of posts and the comments they elicit here, followed by an allegation that Hacker News is turning into Reddit.
82.
by cperciva 6mo ago
I agree that 9/10 is a bit of a strange score there, but it's not all that bad: You can get a $15 wifi dongle and use that instead. It occupies a USB port and looks a bit ugly, but it's still a fairly easy workaround.
83.
by cperciva 6mo ago
I'm going with (3) I've been working in software security for over 20 years, I've seen what this model produces, and I know what I'm talking about.
84.
by cperciva 6mo ago
its very possible that this is Anthropic marketing puffery It isn't.
85.
by cperciva 6mo ago
FreeBSD 15 has lots of useful features! And better performance on other benchmarks; I just need to track down what's going wrong with this particular one.
86.
by cperciva 6mo ago
This makes me feel better about the 10% performance regression I just measured between FreeBSD 14 and FreeBSD 15.0.
87.
by cperciva 6mo ago
Only two remote code execution vulnerabilities in the default configuration. But that's not the only type of security bug.
88.
by cperciva 6mo ago
Note that most of this period falls before the modern inflation target was established in 1995. In the past 30 years we've had 75% accumulated annual inflation (aka prices have increased be a factor of exp(0.75) = 2.1) of which 16% (a
89.
by cperciva 7mo ago
Also fun: The Arithmetic-Geometric Mean can be used to calculate Pi! (Most usefully, the AGM of 1 and sqrt(1/2).)
90.
by cperciva 7mo ago
pushing the hot path out to userland where you can actually scale across cores What sort of kernel do you have which can't scale across cores?

More ›