Hacker News: tptacek threads

New comment by tptacek in "Launch HN: HyperProbe (YC S26) – Agents that do read-only debugging in prod"

tptacek — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:22:55 +0000

Counterpoint: nobody is going to care what the front page looks like designwise, as long as the words are right.

New comment by tptacek in "Show HN: ssh ssh.place"

tptacek — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:35:31 +0000

Right, I mean, I see the problem for browsers! Just not for SSH servers. (Capturing sessions like this used to be a contest at Usenix Security).

New comment by tptacek in "Waymo in Dallas"

tptacek — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:39:05 +0000

Seems about as common as it ever was? (I'm very bullish on Waymos here).

New comment by tptacek in "Bugtraq is back"

tptacek — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:34:54 +0000

Bugtraq had ceased being relevant at least a decade before it was shut down; it's kind of hard to see what place it could hold now. When it started, vulnerability research was a tiny niche, and disclosure was still a live debate; the norms today are totally different.

New comment by tptacek in "Pass the Passkey: A Novel Attack Surface in Passwordless Authentication"

tptacek — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:23:01 +0000

These are endpoint malware attacks, not attacks on Passkeys per se. This is already a game-over position for an attacker to be in.

New comment by tptacek in "Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees"

tptacek — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:35:57 +0000

The 8-hour workday movement in the US predates Marxism, let alone communism.

New comment by tptacek in "[dead]"

tptacek — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:30:16 +0000

There is no such thing as "average IQ by country". It's baffling to me that so many people believe there would be, because so few of us have ever been asked to take a proctored IQ test in any setting, let alone as part of a nationwide survey. These things aren't real; they generally source Richard Lynn's fraudulent numbered from "IQ And The Wealth Of Nations" and unproctored online IQ tests with, like, dropdowns where you can claim to be from specific countries.

New comment by tptacek in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

tptacek — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:55:19 +0000

Several (not many relative to the total industry, but several) large household-name companies publicly do general cognitive testing for white collar roles, and the companies that administer these tests have logo crawls just like any SAAS company of their clients. These companies have enormously deep pockets and would be juicy targets for employment law practices. But nothing happens, because this is mostly not a real thing.

The reason more companies don't do this is that the tests don't work well for this purpose.

New comment by tptacek in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

tptacek — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:28:34 +0000

It's a really widespread myth, hard to fault anybody for believing it. There's even a kernel of truth to it (Griggs).

New comment by tptacek in "Show HN: ssh ssh.place"

tptacek — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:46:40 +0000

I don't understand the impulse behind these things --- this is a bootstrap mechanism for a global PKI for SSH. But cold introductions to SSH hosts (that is, first connections to hosts you have no business or technical relationship with) virtually never happen. What problem does it solve?

New comment by tptacek in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

tptacek — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:14:24 +0000

I'm a broken record about this, but no, it's not illegal to administer IQ tests in white-collar employment, and it doesn't take a battery of compliance paperwork to do so. This is an Internet myth.

New comment by tptacek in "Show HN: ssh ssh.place"

tptacek — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:04:09 +0000

SSH does in fact have a PKI, just not a global one. Large-fleet SSH installs all tend to use certificate authorities, for this reason (and to simplify SSO).

New comment by tptacek in "Don't be a meat proxy"

tptacek — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:43:38 +0000

I mean it's certainly convenient! But that's a weak epistemic claim. Obviously, the cultural loading of g and of IQ tests is a complicated subject; I certainly wouldn't summarize it as "universal without cultural biases".

New comment by tptacek in "Don't be a meat proxy"

tptacek — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:58:12 +0000

Other things also correlate well with many practical measures of cognitive ability, but you wouldn't be so quick to say that they're privileged the way IQ is, so there must be more to the explanation.

New comment by tptacek in "Software for One"

tptacek — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:43:56 +0000

As a person who built and uses this feature several times a week, no, it never does this. It just plays a lot of Tom Petty.

New comment by tptacek in "Kenji/Serious Eats – 30-Min Pressure Cooker Pho Ga"

tptacek — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:42:53 +0000

It's always been the rule, so you might want to start a different site!

New comment by tptacek in "A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention"

tptacek — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 02:36:10 +0000

This is not a real thing, but people on the Internet badly want it to be.

New comment by tptacek in "Kenji/Serious Eats – 30-Min Pressure Cooker Pho Ga"

tptacek — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:53:32 +0000

You didn't overstep, the preceding comment did. Anything that's interesting is on-topic here; even if the recipe isn't a "hack", if it's interesting it's a legit submission.

New comment by tptacek in "Software for One"

tptacek — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:36:28 +0000

Oh, you two!

New comment by tptacek in "On the non-use of AI in my writing process"

tptacek — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:21:55 +0000

Parens and em-dashes do different things. A simple parenthetical is an secondary aside (it's a half step towards a footnote). An interrupting phrase is intended to (abruptly) command attention.

I mean, make the case em-dashes are overused and used lazily, I'm right there with you. I just don't see the pretense.