I'd rather read the prompt
https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/ [claytonwramsey.com]
2025-05-04 22:18
tags:
ai
essay
hoipolloi
ideas
language
Don’t let a computer write for you! I say this not for reasons of intellectual honesty, or for the spirit of fairness. I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into. For the rest of this piece, I’ll briefly examine some guesses as to why people write with large language models so often, and argue that there’s no good reason to use one for creative expression.
source: HN
What went wrong with wireless USB
https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/what-went-wrong-with-wireless-usb.html [oldvcr.blogspot.com]
2025-05-04 17:34
tags:
article
hardware
tech
wifi
But what if the USB connection could be made wirelessly? For a few years, real honest-to-goodness wireless USB devices were actually a thing. Competing standards led to market fracture and the technologies fizzled out relatively quickly in the marketplace, but like the parallel universe of FireWire hubs there was another parallel world of wireless USB devices, at least for a few years. As it happens, we now have a couple of them here, so it’s worth exploring what wireless USB was and what happened to it, how the competing standards worked (and how well), and if it would have helped.
Also with a detailed explanation of UWB.
The key basis technology instead was the concept of ultra wide-band, or UWB, which in modern parlance collectively refers to technologies allowing very weak, very wide-spectrum (in excess of 500MHz) signals to become a short range yet high bandwidth communications channel.
source: HN
The Future Of Solar Doesn’t Track The Sun
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2025/04/29/the-future-of-solar-doesnt-track-the-sun/ [terraformindustries.wordpress.com]
2025-05-03 21:41
tags:
article
business
energy
PV modules are cheap enough today that the simple fixed East-West arrays are cheaper and faster to install than the industry’s darling, the single-axis tracked array.
source: HN
A Strange Phrase Keeps Turning Up in Scientific Papers, But Why?
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-up-in-scientific-papers-but-why [www.sciencealert.com]
2025-05-02 08:42
tags:
ai
factcheck
science
web
Earlier this year, scientists discovered a peculiar term appearing in published papers: “vegetative electron microscopy”. This phrase, which sounds technical but is actually nonsense, has become a “digital fossil” – an error preserved and reinforced in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that is nearly impossible to remove from our knowledge repositories.
source: HN
How a Single Line Of Code Could Brick Your iPhone
https://rambo.codes/posts/2025-04-24-how-a-single-line-of-code-could-brick-your-iphone [rambo.codes]
2025-04-28 05:20
tags:
exploit
iphone
security
turtles
This is the story of how I found one of my favorite iOS vulnerabilities so far. It’s one of my favorites because of how simple it was to implement an exploit for it. There’s also the fact that it uses a legacy public API that’s still relied upon by many components of Apple’s operating systems, and that many developers have never heard of.
However, just as any process on the system can register to receive Darwin notifications, the same is true for sending them. Considering these properties, I began to wonder if there were places on iOS using Darwin notifications for powerful operations that could potentially be exploited as a denial-of-service attack from within a sandboxed app.
source: HN
Cheating the Reaper in Go
https://mcyoung.xyz/2025/04/21/go-arenas/ [mcyoung.xyz]
2025-04-21 23:49
tags:
garbage-collection
go
malloc
programming
These things mean that despite Go having a GC, it’s possible to do manual memory management in pure Go and in cooperation with the GC (although without any help from the runtime package). To demonstrate this, we will be building an untyped, garbage-collected arena abstraction in Go which relies on several GC implementation details.
source: HN
Marching Events: What does iCalendar have to do with ray marching?
https://pwy.io/posts/marching-events/ [pwy.io]
2025-04-18 05:31
tags:
format
programming
rust
I’ve found a way of describing occurrences through distance functions. This means that instead of implementing logic for all combinations of frequencies and parameters - as that spooky table from before suggests one might do - we can simply compose a couple of distance functions together.
source: HN
How a $2,000 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured
https://www.404media.co/how-a-2-000-made-in-the-usa-liberty-phone-phone-is-manufactured/ [www.404media.co]
2025-04-11 03:43
tags:
business
hardware
interview
policy
solder
tech
valley
But there is currently one smartphone that qualifies for a “Made in the USA” title from the FTC. It’s the Liberty Phone, which is made by a company called Purism. The phone is a version of Purism’s Librem 5. The Made-in-China Librem 5 costs $800, and the Liberty phone costs $2,000. It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated. Not every single component in the Liberty Phone is made in the USA, but the company has been trying very hard to make it as American-made as possible.
source: HN
Apache ECharts
https://echarts.apache.org/en/index.html [echarts.apache.org]
2025-04-09 06:38
tags:
graphics
javascript
library
visualization
web
Apache ECharts provides more than 20 chart types available out of the box, along with a dozen components, and each of them can be arbitrarily combined to use.
source: HN
Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM
https://spectrum.ieee.org/building-the-system360-mainframe-nearly-destroyed-ibm [spectrum.ieee.org]
2025-04-09 06:25
tags:
article
business
hardware
history
retro
In the years leading up to its 7 April 1964 launch, however, the 360 was one of the scariest dramas in American business. It took a nearly fanatical commitment at all levels of IBM to bring forth this remarkable collection of machines and software. While the technological innovations that went into the S/360 were important, how they were created and deployed bordered on disaster. The company experienced what science policy expert Keith Pavitt called “tribal warfare”: people clashing and collaborating in a rapidly growing company with unstable, and in some instances unknown, technologies, as uncertainty and ambiguity dogged all the protagonists.
source: HN
Better Shell History Search
https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2025/better_shell_history_search.html [tratt.net]
2025-03-28 06:12
tags:
admin
sh
swtools
Using Ctrl-r and fzf roughly doubled my efficiency in the shell overnight. Interestingly, it had an even greater long term effect: I became a more ambitious user of shell commands because I knew I could outsource my memory to fzf. For example, since it’s now very easy to recall past commands, I no longer set global environment variables, which had previously caused me grief when I forgot about them. Now I set environment variables on a per-command basis, knowing that I can recall them with Ctrl-r and fzf.
source: HN
Blasting Past Webp - An analysis of the NSO BLASTPASS iMessage exploit
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2025/03/blasting-past-webp.html [googleprojectzero.blogspot.com]
2025-03-27 16:45
tags:
exploit
iphone
malloc
security
Whilst the Isosceles and Dark Navy posts explained the underlying memory corruption vulnerability in great detail, they were unable to solve another fascinating part of the puzzle: just how exactly do you land an exploit for this vulnerability in a one-shot, zero-click setup? As we’ll soon see, the corruption primitive is very limited. Without access to the samples it was almost impossible to know.
source: HN
CVE-2024-9956 - PassKey Account Takeover in All Mobile Browsers
https://mastersplinter.work/research/passkey/ [mastersplinter.work]
2025-03-20 05:23
tags:
auth
browser
exploit
security
web
An attacker within bluetooth range is able to trigger navigation to a FIDO:/ URI from an attacker controlled page on a mobile browser, allowing them to initiate a legitimate PassKeys authentication intent which will be received on the attacker’s device. This results in the attacker being able to “phish” PassKeys credentials, completely breaking this assumption that PassKeys are impossible to phish.
source: HN
Memory safety for web fonts
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts [developer.chrome.com]
2025-03-19 22:52
tags:
browser
graphics
library
text
The FreeType library is used by Chrome to compute metrics and load hinted outlines from fonts. Overall, use of FreeType has been a huge win for Google. It does a complex job, and does it well, we rely on it extensively and contribute back to it. However, it is written in unsafe code and has its origins in a time when malicious inputs were less likely. Merely keeping up with the stream of issues found by fuzzing costs Google at least 0.25 full time software engineers. Worse, we observably don’t find everything or find things only after the code has shipped to users.
source: HN
The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time
https://thephd.dev/c2y-the-defer-technical-specification-its-time-go-go-go [thephd.dev]
2025-03-19 22:48
tags:
c
compiler
programming
standard
Time for me to write this blog post and prepare everyone for the implementation blitz that needs to happen to make defer a success for the C programming language.
source: HN
Sign in as anyone: Bypassing SAML SSO authentication with parser differentials
https://github.blog/security/sign-in-as-anyone-bypassing-saml-sso-authentication-with-parser-differentials/ [github.blog]
2025-03-15 19:37
tags:
auth
format
security
turtles
web
Critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-25291 + CVE-2025-25292) were discovered in ruby-saml up to version 1.17.0. In this blog post, we’ll shed light on how these vulnerabilities that rely on a parser differential were uncovered.
As shown once again: relying on two different parsers in a security context can be tricky and error-prone.
source: HN
Zen and the Art of Microcode Hacking
https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-the-art-of-microcode-hacking [bughunters.google.com]
2025-03-08 06:03
tags:
bios
cpu
exploit
hash
programming
security
systems
In this post, we first discuss the background of what microcode is, why microcode patches exist, why the integrity of microcode is important for security, and how AMD attempts to prevent tampering with microcode. Next, we focus on the microcode patch signature validation process and explain in detail the vulnerability present (using CMAC as a hash function). Finally, we discuss how to use some of the tools we’ve released today which can help researchers reproduce and expand on our work (skip to the Zentool section of this blogpost for a “how to” on writing your own microcode).
source: HN
0+0 > 0: C++ thread-local storage performance
https://yosefk.com/blog/cxx-thread-local-storage-performance.html [yosefk.com]
2025-02-17 21:29
tags:
compiler
concurrency
cxx
library
perf
programming
We’ll discuss how to make sure that your access to TLS (thread-local storage) is fast. If you’re interested strictly in TLS performance guidelines and don’t care about the details, skip right to the end — but be aware that you’ll be missing out on assembly listings of profound emotional depth, which can shake even a cynical, battle-hardened programmer. If you don’t want to miss out on that — and who would?! — read on, and you shall learn the computer-scientific insight behind the intriguing inequality 0+0 > 0.
source: HN
"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."
https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app [chadnauseam.com]
2025-02-17 21:02
tags:
android
compsci
math
programming
ux
A calculator should show you the result of the mathematical expression you entered. That’s much, much harder than it sounds.
source: HN
How do modern compilers choose which variables to put in registers?
https://langdev.stackexchange.com/questions/4325/how-do-modern-compilers-choose-which-variables-to-put-in-registers [langdev.stackexchange.com]
2025-02-17 20:59
tags:
compiler
cpu
programming
This is a very broad subject. The problem of deciding how to map a program with arbitrarily many variables onto a fixed set of registers is known as register allocation, and it has been the subject of much research, study, and engineering effort since the very earliest compilers. One of the canonical approaches, graph coloring, was first proposed in 1981. Countless other approaches and variants have been explored since then, and I cannot hope to cover the full breadth of the topic in a single answer.
source: HN