Hacker News: tptacek threads

New comment by tptacek in "Ask HN: What cryptography book do you recommend for reading with 10 year olds?"

tptacek — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 05:22:42 +0000

I don't want to go off on a whole thing here given this is a thread about books for children, but this is definitely not true and hasn't been true for decades; it might never have been true. The cryptography in "Applied Cryptography" would have gotten you in pretty deep trouble as far back as the late 1990s. It's missing most of modern cryptography.

New comment by tptacek in "A thousand fewer paths to root"

tptacek — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:56:11 +0000

I think this is basically true, but it didn't "die" in the sense that we gave up on it; it just never worked. Systems software was much worse in the 1990s than it today; you could breathe on something with a string of AAAA's and get a 0x41414141 register core dump.

New comment by tptacek in "The lost malloc()"

tptacek — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 18:25:53 +0000

Malloc implementations are anything but boring!

https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/docs/dsa.pdf

New comment by tptacek in "Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI"

tptacek — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:49:33 +0000

A mod log doesn't solve any of these concerns. People will just argue about whether the mod log is complete or abridged.

New comment by tptacek in "Life with Down Syndrome"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 22:14:03 +0000

Nobody denies that psychometric 'g' exists, but there is contention about what it means. There's more than one theory here among psychometricians, including mutualism, or even (as Cosma Shalizi writes) that g is just a statistical artifact (he shows persuasively that any battery of tests you construct with the same structure as IQ tests are going to have some kind of g factor, even if the tests themselves are meaningless).

New comment by tptacek in "How McDonald's first got its start (2016)"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 21:39:33 +0000

It's good, and not entirely complimentary of Ray Kroc. A good startup movie.

(Not as good a startup movie as Ghostbusters, but still good.)

New comment by tptacek in "America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 21:18:49 +0000

No, I think disabled people are very important and their needs are important. I just don't think they should get an extra vote.

New comment by tptacek in "Bear turns 10, and it still feels like day one"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 18:57:52 +0000

See, I could not in fact make a good movie. But I'm very sure there are apps I can do a good job with; I am in fact a professional software developer. So that comparison doesn't seem super on-point.

New comment by tptacek in "Bear turns 10, and it still feels like day one"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:33:52 +0000

I've written about this a bunch before and wasn't looking to take the thread off on a tangent; I'm really just saying how much I like Bear. Bear is great. I don't think I could come up with many ways to make it suit me better, which is not something I can say about a lot of other software.

New comment by tptacek in "America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:29:13 +0000

No, it's not. Early voting creates (up to) a 30 day window within which everyone can register their opinions. Public comment happens on one specific night that almost nobody knows about, because it is not normal to pay super close attention to public meetings where you live. The people that do do so because they are concentrated special interests.

Take an American at random out of this thread and estimate: how many local public meetings have they attended, in their entire lives? The reasonable guess is zero.

New comment by tptacek in "America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:14:01 +0000

That is also problematic and a very common critique of American elections, but at least it's a widely-publicized agreed-upon day. It's also not true in much of blue-state America, where you can vote any day you want up to a month before the agreed-on heavily-publicized election day.

I continue to notice how many people are bumfuzzled by this point. It's not like I'm the one who came up with it. Public comment process being problematic is an extremely widely-held position among political thinkers and social scientists. This is not news. It is not a spicy take.

New comment by tptacek in "Tell HN: Please Vote"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:10:07 +0000

Wait, Colin. You're Canadian. You already had your election day. Stay in your lane!

New comment by tptacek in "Bear turns 10, and it still feels like day one"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:06:30 +0000

I'm gradually replacing most of the software I use with software I conjure myself, and Bear is the reason I'm probably never going to write an editor; it's not clear to me how I could improve it. Emacs is probably out the door by the end of 2027, but I'd be surprised if I wasn't still using Bear for years from now. It's quite good.

New comment by tptacek in "America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 16:59:45 +0000

No, it's a bad thing, because it's not universal: it selects for specific people and privileges them with what is in effect a second vote. It's not hard to explain why this is a problem, and if you can't engage with that argument, we're just talking past each other.

I will tediously continue to point out that this is not one of my hot takes; it's an extremely au courant policy argument in 2025-2026; maybe one of the biggest ones. It's hard to see how anyone could be paying attention to domestic US politics and not have confronted it already. Barack Obama dedicated some of his 2024 convention speech to it!

Is it possible we're just talking past each other because you're not American? I have no idea who you are and in these kinds of conversations one failure mode is assuming everyone's coming from the same political tradition.

New comment by tptacek in "America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 16:58:45 +0000

Sorry, I've lost track of what you're trying to argue. But I'll say again: it's easy to find examples of people negatively polarized into support of NIMBYism, which is exactly what is happening when people valorize public comment in opposition of development. There's an entire Current Affairs cover story where Nathan Robinson gets negatively polarized into opposing housing. It's a thing.

New comment by tptacek in "America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 16:57:06 +0000

I have no trouble understanding why NIMBYs show up to protest development; that isn't at all striking. What's funny here is watching people on a site that is demonstratively, performatively oriented towards in-depth curious conversation scandalized by what is, again, a very banal conclusion of social science research. The funniest response I've seen so far: "you're not a social scientist". Yeah, I'm not a physicist either, but you can take my word for it that none of us can walk through walls.

New comment by tptacek in "America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments"

tptacek — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 14:20:00 +0000

NIMBYism is inherently wrong.

New comment by tptacek in "Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)"

tptacek — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 21:27:12 +0000

The idea of national mappings of "IQ distributions" are mostly fictitious. Nobody has ever run even plausibly-powered surveys to establish such a thing. Most people reading this thread have never even been offered a proctored IQ test, let alone been requested to take one to help establish an American national IQ statistic.

From what I understand, a reliable "America vs. China" IQ comparison is mostly hopeless.

New comment by tptacek in "A proposal: how to hire junior engineers in the age of AI"

tptacek — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 20:27:07 +0000

Thanks for posting this clarification. It's actually even simpler than that: for white collar employment there's going to be a presumption that IQ is relevant to the job, and there's no procedural hurdle you have to clear to IQ test applicants. The sole concern is, presumably, whether a candidate who is rejected can mount a successful disparate impact claim.

Several household name corporations routinely apply general cognitive tests to candidates. The companies who deliver these tests have logo crawls just like any other SAAS company. If this was a lucrative field for plaintiff's lawyers, you'd expect that not to be the case.

IQ tests aren't more widely used because they're not very useful for qualifying most candidates for most jobs. You generally want to know if a candidate can do the job, not how well they do on IQ tests.

New comment by tptacek in "America on Data Centers: listen to 10,000+ city council comments"

tptacek — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:01:25 +0000

Do you think that means I make my own data centers? Like, to get my next product off the ground, I have to go site a data center somewhere near you? How do you think the world works?

You are relaying NIMBY talking points (down to "you have a vested interest in shutting down public comment", which is a first-ballot hall-of-famer), because you're so negatively polarized against data centers. It's a weird thing to be proud of.