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Monodraw

https://monodraw.helftone.com/
108•mafro•1h ago•41 comments

The Therac-25 Incident

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-therac-25-incident
174•lemper•5h ago•97 comments

QEMU 10.1.0

https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/10.1
52•dmitrijbelikov•59m ago•12 comments

WebLibre: The Privacy-Focused Browser

https://docs.weblibre.eu/
40•mnmalst•3h ago•21 comments

Claude for Chrome

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-chrome
686•davidbarker•16h ago•367 comments

Ember (YC F24) Is Hiring Full Stack Engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ember/jobs/OTB0qby-full-stack-engineering-intern-summer-2026
1•charlene-wang•1m ago

Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded. Now they want to silence him

https://electrek.co/2025/08/25/scientist-exposes-anti-wind-groups-as-oil-funded-now-they-want-to-...
330•xbmcuser•5h ago•146 comments

Gemini 2.5 Flash Image

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemini-2-5-flash-image/
969•meetpateltech•22h ago•439 comments

F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/alaska-f-35-crash-accident-report-hnk-ml
18•Michelangelo11•23m ago•5 comments

Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward

https://www.ghacks.net/2025/08/27/your-word-documents-will-be-saved-to-the-cloud-automatically-on...
62•speckx•1h ago•27 comments

Internet Access Providers Aren't Bound by DMCA Unmasking Subpoenas–In Re Cox

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2025/08/internet-access-providers-arent-bound-by-dmca-unmas...
12•hn_acker•2d ago•1 comments

Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
543•alsetmusic•10h ago•113 comments

Show HN: FilterQL – A tiny query language for filtering structured data

https://github.com/adamhl8/filterql
18•genshii•2d ago•5 comments

Light pollution prolongs avian activity

https://gizmodo.com/birds-across-the-world-are-singing-all-day-for-a-disturbing-reason-2000646257
82•gmays•3d ago•16 comments

GNU Artanis – A fast web application framework for Scheme

https://artanis.dev/index.html
229•smartmic•15h ago•51 comments

Rv, a new kind of Ruby management tool

https://andre.arko.net/2025/08/25/rv-a-new-kind-of-ruby-management-tool/
274•steveklabnik•1d ago•102 comments

Chinese astronauts make rocket fuel and oxygen in space

https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/chinese-astronauts-make-rocket-fuel-and-oxyge...
242•Teever•2d ago•106 comments

The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Ka42eyudA
51•smarm•6h ago•22 comments

Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed

https://fortune.com/2025/08/23/neuralink-participant-1-noland-arbaugh-18-months-post-surgery-life...
309•danielmorozoff•3d ago•350 comments

Reverse Engineered Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5

https://github.com/schlae/cm5-reveng
50•_Microft•2d ago•9 comments

One universal antiviral to rule them all?

https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/one-universal-antiviral-rule-them-all
311•breve•21h ago•137 comments

US Intel

https://stratechery.com/2025/u-s-intel/
472•maguay•1d ago•493 comments

Bypass PostgreSQL catalog overhead with direct partition hash calculations

https://www.shayon.dev/post/2025/221/bypass-postgresql-catalog-overhead-with-direct-partition-has...
24•shayonj•3d ago•8 comments

Molluscs of the Multiverse: molluscan diversity in Magic: The Gathering

https://jgeekstudies.org/2025/08/24/molluscs-of-the-multiverse-molluscan-diversity-in-magic-the-g...
10•zdw•2d ago•0 comments

Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/25/japan-osmotic-power-plant-fukuoka
267•pseudolus•2d ago•85 comments

SpaCy: Industrial-Strength Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python

https://github.com/explosion/spaCy
99•marklit•4d ago•35 comments

A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html
322•jaredwiener•21h ago•372 comments

iOS 18.6.1 0-click RCE POC

https://github.com/b1n4r1b01/n-days/blob/main/CVE-2025-43300.md
215•akyuu•1d ago•47 comments

The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

https://jsomers.net/blog/the-mcphee-method
172•jsomers•1d ago•45 comments

Michigan Supreme Court: Unrestricted phone searches violate Fourth Amendment

https://reclaimthenet.org/michigan-supreme-court-rules-phone-search-warrants-must-be-specific
502•mikece•18h ago•93 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: Regolith – Regex library that prevents ReDoS CVEs in TypeScript

https://github.com/JakeRoggenbuck/regolith
25•roggenbuck•9h ago
I wanted a safer alternative to RegExp for TypeScript that uses a linear-time engine, so I built Regolith.

Why: Many CVEs happen because TypeScript libraries are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service attacks. I learned about this problem while doing undergraduate research and found that languages like Rust have built-in protection but languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python do not. This library attempts to mitigate these vulnerabilities for TypeScript and JavaScript.

How: Regolith uses Rust's Regex library under the hood to prevent ReDoS attacks. The Rust Regex library implements a linear-time Regex engine that guarantees linear complexity for execution. A ReDoS attack occurs when a malicious input is provided that causes a normal Regex engine to check for a matching string in too many overlapping configurations. This causes the engine to take an extremely long time to compute the Regex, which could cause latency or downtime for a service. By designing the engine to take at most a linear amount of time, we can prevent these attacks at the library level and have software inherit these safety properties.

I'm really fascinated by making programming languages safer and I would love to hear any feedback on how to improve this project. I'll try to answer all questions posted in the comments.

Thanks! - Jake Roggenbuck

Comments

spankalee•8h ago
It's very, very weird to speak of TypeScript and JavaScript as two separate languages here.

There is no TypeScript RegExp, there is only the JavaScript RegExp as implemented in various VMs. There is no TypeScript VM, only JavaScript VMs. And there are no TypeScript CVEs unless it's against the TypeScript compiler, language server, etc.

serial_dev•8h ago
I was also confused first, I thought it is against the TypeScript compiler, too.
maxloh•6h ago
Deno and Node use V8 under the hood, so the code should essentially run on the same VM regardless.
DemocracyFTW2•3h ago
This bothered me too; I think it should be re-framed as a difference between different JS engines (NodeJS vs Deno) because that's what happening. TS is just a fancy way to write JavaScript after all and a lot of TS source code gets literally erased in order to obtain runnable JS. Deno has been able to execute pure JavaScript from day one while NodeJS can now also execute a subset of TS without a visible translation step, all of which makes framing NodeJS vs Deno as "JavaScript vs TypeScript" even weirder.
xyzzy123•8h ago
It's great to have a safe options - and it would have been great if the default had been safe.

I think many people are annoyed with ReDos as a bug class. It seems like mostly noise in the CVE trackers, library churn and badge collecting for "researchers". It'd be less of a problem if people stuck to filing CVEs against libraries that might remotely see untrusted input rather than scrambling to collect pointless "scalps" from every tool under the sun that accepts a configuration regex - build tools, very commonly :(

Perhaps you can stop this madness... :)

bawolff•8h ago
Even in cases where malicious input could be hit, this bug class is stupid on the client side where the attacker can only attack themselves.
xyzzy123•7h ago
Stored... ReDoS, reflected... ReDoS(??)... [it pained me to type those] (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
roggenbuck•8h ago
> and it would have been great if the default had been safe.

I totally agree here. Safety can and should be from the language itself.

semiquaver•8h ago

  > Regolith attempts to be a drop-in replacement for RegExp and requires minimal (to no) changes to be used instead
vs

  > Since Regolith uses Rust bindings to implement the Rust Regex library to achieve linear time worst case, this means that backreferences and look-around aren't available in Regolith either.
Obviously it cannot be a drop-in replacement if the regex dialect differs. That it has a compatible API is not the only relevant factor. I’d recommend removing the top part from the readme.

Another thought: since backreferences and lookaround are the features in JS regexes which _cause_ ReDOS, why not just wrap vanilla JS regex, rejecting patterns including them? Wouldn’t that achieve the same result in a simpler way?

bawolff•8h ago
> Another thought: since backreferences and lookaround are the features in JS regexes which _cause_ ReDOS,

This is incorrect. Other features can cause ReDOS.

The other problematic features have linear time algorithms that could be used, but generally are not used (i assume for better average case performance)

roggenbuck•8h ago
Yea, I can expand the description to include other features that may cause issues. Here is an example of how counting can cause latency too: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec22fall_turonova.pdf
thomasmg•5h ago
A static analysis of the regular expression has the advantage that many problematic cases can be caught at compile time. Not all: the expression is sometimes generated at runtime. There's also a risk that too many cases might be rejected.

Did you consider a hybrid approach, where static analysis is used to get compiler warnings / errors, combined with limiting the number of operations at runtime? An API change might be needed, so instead of just "matches(regex)" a new method might be needed with a limit "matches(regex, opCountLimit)" and a different return type (true / false / timeout).

thomasmg•7h ago
Right. An example regex that can be slow is CSV parsing [1]:

.*,.*,.*,.*,.* etc.

I believe a timeout is a better (simpler) solution than to try to prevent 'bad' patterns. I use this approach in my own (tiny, ~400 lines) regex library [2]. I use a limit at most ~100 operations per input byte. So, without measuring wall clock time, which can be inaccurate.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2667015/is-regex-too-slo... [2]: https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/src/test...

roggenbuck•8h ago
Thanks for the feedback! Yea, you're totally right. I'll update the docs to reflect this.

> why not just wrap vanilla JS regex, rejecting patterns including them?

Yea! I was thinking about this too actually. And this would solve the problem of being server side only. I'm thinking about making a new version to do just this.

For a pattern rejecting wrapper, how would you want it to communicate that an unsafe pattern has been created.

DemocracyFTW2•5h ago
> how would you want it to communicate that an unsafe pattern has been created

Given this is running on a JS engine, an error should be thrown much as an error will be thrown on syntactically invalid regexes in the source. Sadly, this can't happen a module load / compile time unless a build step is implemented, complicating the matter; but on the other hand, a regex that is never used can also not be a problem. The build step could be stupidly simple, such as relying on an otherwise disallowed construction like `safe/[match]*me/`.

0points•2h ago
> And this would solve the problem of being server side only.

Server-side?

You should look into how you compile your rust into wasm

btown•7h ago
As someone who's been saved by look-aheads in many a situation, I'm quite partial to the approach detailed in [0]: use a regex library that checks for a timeout in its main matching loop.

This lets you have full backwards compatibility in languages like Python and JS/TS that support backreferences/lookarounds, without running any risk of DOS (including by your own handrolled regexes!)

And on modern processors, a suitably implemented check for a timeout would largely be branch-predicted to be a no-op, and would in theory result in no measurable change in performance. Unfortunately, the most optimized and battle-tested implementations seem to have either taken the linear-time NFA approaches, or have technical debt making timeout checks impractical (see comment in [0] on the Python core team's resistance to this) - so we're in a situation where we don't have the best of both worlds. Efforts like [1] are promising, especially if augmented with timeout logic, but early-stage.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/74992735

[1] https://github.com/fancy-regex/fancy-regex

bbor•6h ago
Totally agree -- those are two incredibly useful features of regex[1][2] that are often effectively irreplaceable. I could see this being a straightforward tradeoff for applications that know for sure they don't need complex regexes but still must accept patterns written by the client for some reason(?), but otherwise this seems like a hell of a way to go to replace a `timeout` wrapper.

This paragraph in particular seems very wholesome, but misguided in light of the tradeoff:

  Having a library or project that is immune to these vulnerabilities would save this effort for each project that adopted it, and would save the whole package ecosystem that effort if widely adopted.
Honestly, the biggest shock here for me is that Rust doesn't support these. Sure, Python has yet to integrate the actually-functional `regex`[3] into stdlib to replace the dreadfully under-specced `re`, but Rust is the new kid on the block! I guess people just aren't writing complex regexes anymore...[4]

RE:simpler wrapper, I personally don't see any reason it wouldn't work, and dropping a whole language seems like a big win if it does. I happened to have some scaffolding on hand for the cursed, dark art of metaregexes, so AFAICT, this pattern would work for a blanket ban: https://regexr.com/8gplg Ironically, I don't think there's a way to A) prevent false-positives on triple-backslashes without using lookarounds, or B) highlight the offending groups in full without backrefs!

[1] https://www.regular-expressions.info/backref.html

[2] https://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html

[3] https://github.com/mrabarnett/mrab-regex

[4] We need a regex renaissance IMO, though the feasibility of "just throw a small fine-tuned LLM at it" may delay/obviate that for users that can afford the compute... It's one of the OG AI concepts, back before intuition seemed possible!

dwoldrich•6h ago
Perhaps regex is just a bad little language for pattern matching.

I have a foggy recollection of compute times exploding for me on a large regex in .Net code and I used a feature I hadn't seen in JavaScript's RegExp that allowed me to mark off sections of already matched parts of the regular expression that prevented it from backtracking.

Perhaps the answer isn't removing features for linear regex, but adding more features to make it more expressive and tunable?

DemocracyFTW2•5h ago
FWIW there's also https://github.com/slevithan/regex "JS regexes future. A template tag for readable, high-performance, native JS regexes with extended syntax, context-aware interpolation, and always-on best practices". From the docs:

Highlights include support for insignificant whitespace and comments, atomic groups and possessive quantifiers (that can help you avoid ReDoS), subroutines and subroutine definition groups (that enable powerful subpattern composition), and context-aware interpolation of regexes, escaped strings, and partial patterns.

DemocracyFTW2•3h ago
I have another nitpick and I hope it's a constructive one.

You provide some performance figures; unfortunately they are caught in an image, no doubt to enable color-coding the results. IMHO that's not ideal, tables should be pure text, even if only for accessibility with screen readers. There are other means to provide guiding highlights, like red and green Unicode code points. GitHub is somewhat unique in its strict policy to remove almost any kind of user-side styling from the READMEs, but providing a "photo snapshot" of parts of the README just to get some colors does not feel like the right solution.

Next thing are the actual figures you provide: those range from 11.822µs (best) to 56.534s (worst). They are displayed as

    11.822µs
    56.534s 
making them look almost like the worst performer took around five times as long as the best performer—until you realize there's a mu in there.

I must say that personally I remove this so-called "human-readable" format almost wherever I can because I find it not human-readable at all. To me a good numerical display should try and keep the decimal points on top of each other, avoid too many non-significant digits, use digit grouping, and, crucially, use a single unit throughout. With those constraints, the two figures become

            11.8µs
    56,534,000.0µs
which incidentally obviates much of the need to color code anything. One could discuss what unit—ns, µs, ms, s—is the most appropriate in the given context but, generally, I feel that big numbers should stand out as having many digits.

Nobody will pick this up because it's much too elaborate and idiosyncratic for this conformist world, but I just love the 'Japanese' way of formatting where you do digit grouping with the SI prefixes, so one hundred and twenty-five meters is 125m, but one thousand one hundred and twenty-five meters doesn't become 1,125m, nor is it 1.125km, but rather 1k125m (preferrably with a thin space as in 1k_125m—imagine a thin non-breakable space there that HN wouldn't let me render).

1G 255M 368k 799B, what's not to like?

truth_seeker•3h ago
Magic-RegExp aims to create a compiled away, type-safe, readable RegEx alternative that makes the process a lot easier. https://blog.logrocket.com/understanding-magic-regexp-regexp...

example from blog:

import { createRegExp, exactly, wordChar, oneOrMore, anyOf, } from "magic-regexp";

const regExp = createRegExp(

  exactly("http")

    .and(exactly("s").optionally())

    .and("://")

    .optionally()

    .and(exactly("www.").optionally())

    .and(oneOrMore(wordChar))

    .and(exactly("."))

    .and(anyOf("com", "org", "io")),

  ["g", "m", "i"]
);

console.log(regExp);

/(https?:\/\/)?(www\.)?\w+\.(com|org|io)/gmi

conartist6•47m ago
FWIW JS has a library-layer non-backtracking regex implementation in @bablr/regex. It's still a slightly different dialect of regex than native JS regex which (currently) lacks lookahead and lookbehind support. It's not going to have Rust-y perf, but it shouldn't get ReDoS'd either.