0x0aff374668's comments

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: I built a DIY license plate reader with a Raspberry Pi and machine learning

The reason for the negativity is that this demonstrates the "Design by StackOverflow" mentality where the solution is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer and no real domain knowledge. Plus the author didn't even train the neural nets: it's just a LEGO project. I'd higher this person to be a lab intern, but nothing above that. The fact the author couldn't solve it locally and had to invoke the CLOUD is... laughable. This problem has been solved for over two decades on lesser hardware.

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Mutexes are faster than Spinlocks

This is a great example of how so many programmers think they are the first to discover something that is "ancient". In reality this is a problem older than Linux (linux just had the advantage of a huge and diverse open-source userbase from which to draw data). On the flipside, lots of good information takes years to go from discussion groups to books, so it can be hard to find relevant research. Applied compsci is literally the cutting edge of reality.

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: WiFi deauthentication attacks and home security

He doesn't describe an attack, he describe literally what 802.11 was designed to do. An attack is forcing a deauth and then stealing the 4-way handshake data and, say, cracking WEP. Which is why WEP was decommissioned ... checks notes ... 15 years ago.

No need to edit aircrack-ng, WireShark does what he did natively (filter out and set channels), and a good realtek chipset allows you to set the scan interval so you can cover more channels (which is why the new ALFAs suck).

Also the DTIM and keepalive can be set such that the MCU can sleep while the phy link maintains a connection without a costly handshake, esp. if using TLS <1.3 to talk to the cloud. Reconnecting costs a shit ton of energy so they usually don't disconnect.

Hacking Wi-Fi has become exceptionally more difficult, as noted by the slow dating of materials at DefCon's WiFi Village over the past 8 years: cracking WPA2 is basically so hard no one bothers, even in CtF games.

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Americans are retiring to Vietnam

I've spent significant time in HCMC (about 6 months over four years). It is vibrant, friendly, booming, tech heavy, and goddamn cheap. I didn't need medical care, and didn't have to cook because food is amazing and cheap. I computed about 1/10th to 1/12th the cost of my life in Northern Cali. I hope when I'm older it is still cheap and not environmentally wiped out. (I'm also biased because twice I met a woman who I thought was waaaay out of my league and we ended up dating.)

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Oxide Computer Company: Initial boot sequence

Kinda reminds me of Transmeta. Except they had a product, a shitty one, but a product. Or Ampere, but they only have one product they inherited and no flashy names.

Silicon startup challenges are rough. RISC-V is probably the best hope for a new architecture (hint: its not a new architecture).

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Oxide Computer Company: Initial boot sequence

> This reminds me of first time founders who can't wait to get "CEO" business cards.

I worked for such a CEO. In the first year we had four week-long retreats to: an island in WA state, Palm springs, Austin, and Banff (that's where the stats team was). TONS of swag. Aeron chairs. New MBPros. Oh, and champagne fridays. Needless to say it burned through it's good will seed round in 1 year, and the CEO begged for another year's worth of money from friends before shuttering. But hey, hype sells in the software world.

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why don't languages that support Promises include timeouts?

oh, shit. that means if i just send a timeout promise and a worker promise to Promise.race([...]), and the timeout finishes but the worker never does... then I have some unfulfilled promise hanging out somewhere indefinitely? I guess so... if I do Promise.race([p1, p2]) and p1 fulfills and p2 doesn't, p2 is still alive...indefinitely. Am I right or wrong...?

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

the author can't even be bothered to implement proper TLS/HTTPS on their website (Mozilla blocks it)... and they voted for domain names?

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Clang Format Tanks Performance

> Don't take this as trash-talking, though. I simply want to get things done, not fight my environment.

I think people don't understand just how badly C++ is broken in reality (vs conceptually) until their paycheck is tied to a real, years-old, multi-developer C++ project. It is not trash talking, it is pointing out truths.

It goes well beyond "any long-lived project has its issues." I think you and I (and many others) know that it is much larger than this, it is a fundamental issue with the language, the standards body surrounding it, and the mess of toolings.

This persists today because C++ is often used to bridge a performance gap between scripted languages and C among younger programmers and academics. (Admit it: we all like that sweet sweet dopamine hit when we take our Python to C++ and the syntax is almost the same.) But that slight performance boost and that "hey this looks like Python but it's really C++" feeling are soon demolished by the accretion of unresolved issues which have enumerated ad-nauseum on HN, including this article.

I've been working with C++ since 1993 (I got a big Borland C++ Compiler as an intern plus 12 VHS tapes of Bjarne himself explaining the language)... my experience with C++ continues right up to today as a contractor having to deal with Arm mbedOS (even Keil struggles to manage hypersensitivity, GNU is a trainwreck for embedded C++) and Tensorflow/OpenCV... and C++ has yet to shake off its flaws. In fact, I think it has added to them exponentially.

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Nine-year-old child to graduate university

I speak to nine year old relatives: they are barely articulate simians.

What is it like talking to a 9 year old who has completed a 4-year EE degree?

Can you walk up to the kid and say, "Hey, solve this bridge/op-amp circuit's transfer function?" or ask a humanities question, "What are the ethical dilemmas inherent in an open discussion forum?"

I guess this is what it feels like to be a young-earth creationist: I simply cannot wrap my head around a 9-year old being able to answer these question, so like a creationist I choose to believe it is a fake.

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

This is the coolest response. :)

(You didn't by any chance sail around Cape horn in 2016? I met this really cool older couple in Central America who had been living at sea for 17 years.)

Reading all of the replies I realize that sometime between 2007 and 2012 I just gave up entirely on storing media locally. I don't watch movies (e.g. no cable or netflix), but I've been using spotify for a decade maybe? One response makes a good point: it is a waste of overall bandwidth to stream content.

0x0aff374668 | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: What do you self-host?

Why are so many folks here running media servers? Are you really streaming your own video / audio libraries, or is there something else it is useful for? I'd be rather shocked to learn people still store digitally media locally.
page 1