cperciva

7 ms·

91.
by cperciva 7mo ago
Re-seeding is easy. The hard parts are (a) finding everything which needs to be reseeded -- not just explicit RNGs but also things like keys used to pick outgoing port numbers in a pseudorandom order -- and (b) making sure that all the rel
92.
by cperciva 7mo ago
Don't forget about entropy! You've just created two identical copies of all of your random number generators, which could be very very bad for security. The firecracker team wrote a very good paper about addressing this when they
93.
by cperciva 7mo ago
for obvious reasons What are the obvious reasons? If you're protecting a client system, you don't want to allow in any bare SYNs. (And for that matter, if you're protecting a server, you probably want to discard ill-targe
94.
by cperciva 7mo ago
I've seen plenty of firewall rulesets over the past 25 years which only consult state after doing some initial stateless inspection. I don't have a convenient source though.
95.
by cperciva 7mo ago
RFCs may say that simultaneous connect must be allowed, but that doesn't mean that firewalls can't block it. Plenty of setups block incoming SYN,!ACK packets, and if both sides do that, the connection is never getting established
96.
by cperciva 7mo ago
Yeah but nobody else has as many a FreeBSD developers on staff to fix stuff when it breaks. Or, you know, to run monthly stabilization weeks and extensively QA before deploying to a herd of cattle. There are so many factors in favour of Ne
97.
by cperciva 7mo ago
14.4 is a maintenance release. If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0 This is not the recommendation of the FreeBSD project. (I would know, because I'm the person in the project who makes that recommendation where appro
98.
FreeBSD 14.4-Release Now Available(lists.freebsd.org)
4 points by cperciva 7mo ago|0 comments
99.
by cperciva 7mo ago
Writing the release announcement for FreeBSD 14.4! The release is ready (aside from propagating to mirrors and clouds) but I have until 2026-03-10 00:00 UTC to get the announcement email ready to go out.
100.
by cperciva 7mo ago
Yeah, I would definitely characterize it as an instruction following problem. After a few more round trips I got it to admit that "my earlier passes leaned heavily on build/tests + targeted reads, which can miss many “deep” bugs
101.
by cperciva 7mo ago
The Champernowne numbers were already known to be irrational, but this makes the proof much easier! (But to clarify: When I said "proving that a value is transcendental", I was thinking of numbers specifically constructed for that
102.
by cperciva 7mo ago
In the same vein, algebraic irrationals (e.g., √2) all have an irrationality measure of two, but the proof of this is fiendishly difficult and netted its discoverer the Fields Medal back in 1958. It's worth noting that this is a stan
103.
by cperciva 7mo ago
Related: In FreeBSD we used to talk often about the Wemm Field. Peter Wemm was one of the early FreeBSD developers and responsible for most of the early project server cluster, and hardware had a phenomenal habit of breaking in his vicinit
104.
by cperciva 8mo ago
To be fair, a hypergolic blanket would still keep you warm. Potentially for the rest of your life!
105.
by cperciva 8mo ago
Oh, I entirely agree. There are cool ways that radioactivity can be used entirely safely. But I also understand that a lot of people don't understand -- so I see why even entirely safe uses of radioactivity are concerning to the publi
106.
by cperciva 8mo ago
This is worth reading for the line "For some reason difficult to divine the radioactive ATM card did not catch on." alone.
107.
by cperciva 8mo ago
principles are easy when they're free Indeed. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority; you only know that something is a real priority when you get an answer to the question "what will you sacrifice for this".
108.
by cperciva 8mo ago
There were two red lines, as I understand it -- first, automated kill bots, and second, mass surveillance.
109.
by cperciva 8mo ago
Sure. They're still figuring out exactly how to decide who qualifies for this -- seriously, 5000 github stars or 1M monthly NPM downloads? -- and they don't want to make long-term promises to people who might not qualify under fu
110.
by cperciva 8mo ago
I'm guessing that this is an initial trial and they're intending to extend it further; 6 months is a reasonable trial period given the very rough metric for deciding who qualifies.
111.
by cperciva 8mo ago
If you change the email address, you change the commit hash. And yes, suddenly your local branches are orphaned. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from using a git-only email address (nospam-6thbit@yourdomain) and routing that t
112.
by cperciva 8mo ago
I think the important question here is whether Linux filesystems are more or less hazardous than statistical mechanics. (For anyone not familiar with the text, Goodstein's treatment of the subject opens with "Ludwig Boltzman, who
113.
by cperciva 8mo ago
facepalm Yeah, that's what I get for posting late at night.
114.
by cperciva 8mo ago
There seems to have been a spike of interest in BSDs on Hacker News lately; BSDCan is the leading BSD conference and has been held annually (pandemic excepted) since 2004. I'm on the organizing team and will be delivering a talk about
115.
BSDCan 2006 Talks, Tutorials, and Registration(blog.bsdcan.org)
7 points by cperciva 8mo ago|3 comments
116.
by cperciva 8mo ago
The company hires N people per year, you get hired by 1 company every N years. Sure, but the company hires you even less often -- at most once every 2N years and probably even less than that. If you are interchangable with all their oth
117.
by cperciva 8mo ago
If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it! But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some w
118.
by cperciva 8mo ago
You're assuming there has to be a "meaning". There isn't. We're just manipulating meaningless symbols.
119.
by cperciva 8mo ago
I mean, yes of course i is an element in C, because it's a monic polynomial in i . There's no "intend to". The complex numbers are what they are regardless of us; this isn't quantum mechanics where the presence
120.
by cperciva 8mo ago
The complex numbers are just elements of R[i]/(i^2+1). I don't even understand how people are able to get this wrong.

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