Hacker News: AlotOfReading

New comment by AlotOfReading in "Teenagers Stayed Overnight at Their School and Found Hidden Ancient Roman Ruins"

AlotOfReading — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:09:25 +0000

"Writing" is a tricky term. Indigenous groups in what's now the US had property records, laws, and symbolically represented stories that could be read by others. What they didn't have was a system of symbols that can fully encode human speech (and vice versa). The latter is the typical definition of "writing" and it's not required to have the former.

On an unrelated note, Gwynne's book is fine as a fantasy story, but it's very badly regarded from the perspective of narrative history. Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire is a much better book arguing a largely similar position. Don't take that as applying to later books by the same author, sadly.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "Chopped, Stored, Secured – The Story of the Hash Function"

AlotOfReading — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:44:34 +0000

    ...then shuffled that array 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 (2^256) times uniquely, each time recording the resulting shuffled array.

Correct as an analogy for block ciphers, but note that there are (2^256)! unique permutations of the input space. You're selecting an unimaginably small slice of possible keyed pseudorandom permutations.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)"

AlotOfReading — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:27:36 +0000

The higher Himalayas are largely unpeopled as well, especially above 4000m. The only time I met people above those altitudes were at night in camps/settlements. I'm sure the EBC route is more crowded, but that's one very small trek in an enormous mountain range.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown"

AlotOfReading — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 03:49:32 +0000

    Oftentimes that comes from road taxes, so it's really car use subsidizing the car-centric projects.

The various vehicle taxes haven't fully covered roadway expansion and maintenance for years. The national average is somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% of costs, I believe.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "Trip report: June 2026 ISO C++ standards meeting (Brno, Czechia)"

AlotOfReading — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 07:33:17 +0000

C has had a catalog of undefined behavior since C99, Annex J. There's sample code demonstrating all cases too.

It's worth noting (as the report itself does) that these sorts of lists can only document explicitly undefined behavior, and not the much larger universe of implicitly undefined behavior. So they're not strictly all possible UB, just the most important cases.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

AlotOfReading — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:49:14 +0000

It's already a federal crime to lie to the census bureau, it's just not prosecuted for discretionary reasons.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "A whale necropolis has been found"

AlotOfReading — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 02:34:19 +0000

That's what OceanGate of imploding submarine fame was trying to be.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "Electric motors with no rare earths"

AlotOfReading — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:08:38 +0000

Polyethylene, like they use in food containers. Virtually nothing sticks to it unless specifically designed.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing"

AlotOfReading — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:59:11 +0000

I know it's not what you mean, but Lincoln dramatically shrank the size of the Confederate government.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "The RCE that AMD wouldn't fix"

AlotOfReading — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:54:27 +0000

   It's fairly trivial, but still significantly harder than computing a single CRC.

You can do it with a single GF(2) multiplication, ignoring the complications of reflection and such. A normal CRC is just the special case of making the remainder 0 (again ignoring complications). You can also brute force it, but that's a bit slow for 64 bit CRCs and well, nanoseconds vs minutes in your example.

    Noise is not the only thing they should be protecting against.

Sorry, can you point to the comment where I tried to defend AMD's use of CRCs in this particular application? I think I've made it pretty clear that I don't think they're appropriate for cryptographic applications. I was just talking about the math.

Different tools for different purposes. You probably don't want to be using your mac scheme for noise resistance, because then you're paying a cost in either buffer space, PDU size, or retransmits, and your error correction capabilities are nil. CRCs allow some error correction (albeit rarely used and inefficient for multibit errors vs FECs), good bit error detection properties, and are cheap. It's common to use both at different layers of a protocol stack.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "A new era for software testing"

AlotOfReading — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:25:30 +0000

Affine as in substructural linear types. They correspond to linear logic [0], and affine logic is named such because the way it's defined corresponds to affine functions. You don't literally need to scale your pointers though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_logic

New comment by AlotOfReading in "The RCE that AMD wouldn't fix"

AlotOfReading — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:38:00 +0000

The entire point of my post was that it's trivial, exactly as difficult as computing the CRC in the first place. Not sure why that was controversial.

Nevertheless, they're still useful protection against noise, and you usually want to detect it right as you're pulling protocol messages off the wire. Placing checksums in the last field of each message (as Ethernet does) simplifies the hardware implementation.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "The RCE that AMD wouldn't fix"

AlotOfReading — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:25:04 +0000

Computing a CRC is equivalent to attacking it. The checksum is the value that produces a certain fixed constant when appended to the data. This is why you'll often see checksums as the last field in a message. It allows for hardware to verify the entire message by checking if the CRC of the bytes equals that fixed constant without having to parse it.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "H2JVM – A Haskell Library for Writing JVM Bytecode"

AlotOfReading — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:15:17 +0000

You have to put on some very narrow lenses to argue that "most" serious software is written for the JVM. Operating systems, compilers, browsers, databases, planes, cars, the transaction processing for at least one major payment processor, major cloud services, etc predominantly use other languages.

I don't think there's any single language that most serious software is written in.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "Job: Head of Stonehenge"

AlotOfReading — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:23:30 +0000

The stones don't get tired, but the humans running the visitor center and keeping the tourists in line do. Operating a highly visited historical site like Stonehenge takes significantly more work than people realize.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "The 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) 2025 Winners"

AlotOfReading — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:19:03 +0000

It's a bit annoying getting frontier models to even work on IOCCC code because of "safety", but even if you get around that LLMs just aren't very good at it. Obfuscating code involves a level of creativity and deviousness that LLMs struggle to meet.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "The new bibliomaniacs"

AlotOfReading — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:44:41 +0000

Keep in mind that I primarily consume ebooks, but I generally find books cheaper unless we're counting piracy. You can get physical books from used bookstores for remarkably cheap and ebook/new book prices are kept as close as publishers can get away with.

That said, there are clear advantages to books. You can't page through an ebook nearly as well as a physical reference book. That's admittedly somewhat balanced by the existence of search. Physical books can also pay much more attention to the aesthetics of print and layout. Eink readers and epub/mobi/az3 formats are atrocious for this, whereas iPads with PDFs are somewhat better. There's still works that can't be captured in those formats though, like pop-up books, raised/embossed/textured printing (which I've seen used in poetry), or illuminated works. And books don't need power.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "Transformers are inherently succinct"

AlotOfReading — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:15:19 +0000

I'm not sure that's a great takeaway. Lots of problems are undecidable and have reasonably effective solutions in practice (e.g. finding bugs -> testing, static analysis, etc). Mind you, I don't expect we'll find anything like that for transformers, but there's a surprisingly large gap between what's possible in general and what's possible in the cases we care about.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "Transformers are inherently succinct"

AlotOfReading — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:22:55 +0000

No, this is in the same ballpark as ideas like big-O notation. The paper is saying that transformers can recognize a language with exponentially fewer symbols than other kinds of systems, i.e. they're more succinct.

It's exactly as related to real models as computer science is to real computers.

New comment by AlotOfReading in "Delacroix's Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople Restored"

AlotOfReading — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:21:56 +0000

You might not be aware, but Baumgartner has a generally negative reputation in the conservator community. From what I understand as a non-expert, he's overly aggressive with his swabbing/varnishing and he's taken power tools directly to an artwork numerous times. The former isn't obvious to me either.