jbangert

8 ms·

1.
by jbangert 5y ago
I built a (research) library a few years ago to rewrite ELF binaries; our research projects ran into a lot of limitations with doing incremental patches to a binary (ELF has a lot of redundant representations of the same data). For us, pars
2.
by jbangert 8y ago
I don't think the pilot factors in that much into the cost of operating a helicopter. Even a small helicopter (e.g. Robinson R-44 which is a bare bones trainer) needs a ~250k complete overhaul every 2200 hours/12 years in service.
3.
by jbangert 8y ago
Well, we start running one instruction, it just never quite finishes. The other OISC systems run way more than one instruction, they’re just always the same one with different parameters.
4.
by jbangert 8y ago
Atomic clocks show up on surplus auctions/stores somewhat frequently (they’re called a Caesium frequency standard, e.g. the HP 5071). There’s a few reports of enthusiasts keeping them running at home ( http://leapsecond.com&#
5.
by jbangert 9y ago
It’s not even desktop users; most desktop users download Ubuntu and never touch anything, on reasonably common PC hardware. Kernel regressions mostly get caught in the Ubuntu betas or testing tracks (e.g. Debian Sid). The typical user the k
6.
by jbangert 9y ago
But do you want your box to send silently corrupted data for the next two years? Or would you rather reboot every night, and maybe escalate to your red hat support contract, where someone will then fix the underlying bug (for which you now
7.
by jbangert 9y ago
Fixing all memory corruption bugs is infeasible without fundamentally changing the way Linux is developed. There is so much code (and it’s being added to, changed, etc.) written by humans that make mistakes. There will always be some bugs t
8.
by jbangert 9y ago
A few points: 1) failing loudly is better than failing silently. A memory corruption issue (or a bad refcount, etc.) is not a benign issue that only becomes relevant under carefully crafted exploit conditions. You need the carefully crafted
9.
by jbangert 9y ago
At least in the east bay, one reason why HOV lanes might run more effectively is that they are also express lanes (limited points at which you can merge in and out). On the other lanes, passing on the right/not passing in the left lane
10.
by jbangert 9y ago
Car companies (at least European ones) tend to be pretty transparent about this: - Audi (example): letter (car/SUV/race car)+ number (quality: 1-cheap, 8-luxury) - BMW: first number is a quality class, two numbers is the Engine s
11.
by jbangert 9y ago
This simplified algorithm doesn't distinguish between learners (readers) and proposers (writers) to the value. I'd say this conveys the core ideas of paxos, and it makes sense to treat learners as a (performance-critical) extensio
12.
by jbangert 10y ago
Error-prone is somewhat tied to a specific version of the Java compiler -- so you need Javac 8, but you can set --source to an older version of the language. If the newer Javac does not emit bytecode that works with your runtime, you can r
13.
by jbangert 10y ago
A lot of research has been made in this direction by the PaX team/brad spender of grsecurity. In fact, many of these techniques were first implemented on modern kernels by that bunch. However, political moves have always clouded that -
14.
by jbangert 10y ago
C++ compilers (at least on most current code bases that don't need modules) still need to parse and lex headers though -- so actual executable code is pretty rare. Most compilations are also debug builds which don't optimize(but c
15.
by jbangert 10y ago
One approach to reducing vehicle collisions that wasnt mentioned much in the discussion so far are road rules and design. It is unrealistic to expect perfect responses from human drivers, or even compliance with rules. Also, human attention
16.
by jbangert 10y ago
This argument will seem a bit more empathetic if you don't consider it as killing 59 people outright, but increasing risk factors so that on average 59 additional deaths occurred(unclear over what timeframe and what the methodology is)
17.
by jbangert 10y ago
Your mechanic doesn't do much work Porsches. I have used them a lot in the past when I had a Saab (which is ultimately gm/American technology), but now that I have a decade old Mercedes and a decade old Porsche (I prefer maintenan
18.
by jbangert 10y ago
guidelines on what rules can do (e.g. That restrict rules on other actions) act to increase agency, not decrease it so I'd say they reduce the amount of bureaucratic hassle (they also decrease the total complexity of rules)
19.
by jbangert 10y ago
Yes, but that exists in other places as well (usually zoning is done locally -- in Germany it's on the city or county level). However, the different categories and what zoning can do vs. what it can't do (preserve 'character&
20.
by jbangert 10y ago
In the other places in the US that I've visited or lived in, similar situations happened (e.g. University owned housing vs private student housing in the exact same building treated very differently). Perhaps one of the causes is that
21.
by jbangert 10y ago
It always surprises me that a country that supposedly is one of the most "free-market" economies in the world and has a political rhethoric based on ridiculing overzealous regulation has zoning regulation that covers minutiae (whi
22.
by jbangert 10y ago
this style of evaluating people (what interesting things have you done) is quite problematic at that age, and forces students to do things for show from early one. I know there are a lot of people who do really exciting things even at a y
23.
by jbangert 10y ago
Change your mechanic. The cheap (elm327) dongles can't write firmware onto ecus in any setup I am aware of -- elm327 is its own protocol and only supports the obd 2 standard operations (and those poorly). Of course a bad dongle could d
24.
by jbangert 11y ago
Clever idea, however keep in mind that you are trusting both your file system permissions to be sane and your kernel to enforce them correctly (I.e. Not have bugs). a lot of projects have tried to do this (i.e. SeLINUx, trusted bsd) and it
25.
by jbangert 11y ago
But marketing to a higher income demographic is considerably more expensive (per eyeball/impression). High income demographics are targeted with ads for high-margin goods (cars, vacations, fashion goods), which have 3- to 5- digit marg
26.
by jbangert 11y ago
MIT PDOS also cleaned up its infrastructure a while back. Jon (a student there who does cool scalability research) replaced the old ailing server that hosted a lot of things and that wasn't really maintained by anybody with a set of mo
27.
by jbangert 11y ago
Verifying length fields is absolutely a parser issue. Heartbleed and similar bugs arise from the fact that the length is encoded (at least) twice -- once, in the explicit length field, once implicitly in the length of the transmitted data (
28.
by jbangert 11y ago
Before I moved down to MIT, I studied with Sergey, so the name is not at all coincidental. Nail tries a slightly different agenda. Instead of trying to make people design their formats in a reasonable way (which is excellent in the long ter
29.
by jbangert 11y ago
Author here. The point of this work is not only the specific result (lots of VM edge cases, very hard to reverse engineer source of computation), but to promote this general class of 'problem' -- things that are typically not thou
30.
by jbangert 11y ago
Very interesting methodology, but it would be very nice to correlate this data with long-term job performance. Interview decisions (of which of course you get more than long-term results, and they are clearer to quantify) are hopefully, but

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