Hacker News: GauntletWizard

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Dogs can distinguish between fearful and angry or sad human faces"

GauntletWizard — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 19:44:35 +0000

Obvious but good to get confirmation. Anyone who's owned a dog knows that they can tell your mood in myriad ways, but this is the kind of basic research that is necessary to clear the way for more serious insights.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2026)"

GauntletWizard — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:26:38 +0000

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Zohran and the Short Link"

GauntletWizard — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:32:30 +0000

The problem with these short pithy urls is that their lifetime is limited - there's only so many initiative names and they're going to collide and be removed and replaced.

Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services"

GauntletWizard — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:41:23 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75oun5gvDAU&t=116s

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras"

GauntletWizard — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:31:55 +0000

A big fuck-up, but some people prefer (nobly even if I don't abide by the same rule) to keep some words out of their mouths.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "OTel isn’t going well"

GauntletWizard — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:31:53 +0000

Jaeger doesn't really implement an otel spec - Otel wrapped itself around Jaeger.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "OTel isn’t going well"

GauntletWizard — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 01:35:57 +0000

The alternative is Prometheus (which is freaking great) and Jaegar (which is freaking great), each alone. This is better, because Otel is trying to put two distinct things (monitoring and metrics, distributed tracing) into one package, because they know how to use neither.

Neither Prometheus metrics nor Jaeger traces are magic bullets. Neither of them are complicated, either, and in fact the fact that they're not complicated is their greatest strength. You can and should understand every facet of what they entail. You should build the (very small) shims that they need for your company's framework every time. It's not hard. It's not hard because it's not complicated. The fact that it's not complicated seems to break people's brains. They are accurate because they're simple and they're easy to work with because they're simple, and OTel is neither.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts"

GauntletWizard — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:44:47 +0000

I don't even have a problem with every cop being equipped with an automatic ALPR... So long as the data is not retained. I do believe that we need better auditing and oversight in response to the availability, but it's not a great evil that an APB can be virtually guaranteed to catch a car... So long as we're using them carefully and judiciously, in response to immediate and recent threats or a clearly understood long tail. There's supposed to be a balance of power; it's not evil to give the police new powers, but it is evil to give politicians unanswered and unlimited tracking of the movements of anyone they so desire.

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

GauntletWizard — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:31:53 +0000

The primitives of a tpm ("observations", which in practice map to ca-signing keys of various levels of boot stage) are a very poor match for the real world. In order for them to be usefully consistent, you have to have consistent inputs. That means you can't observe the kernel itself, but instead you observe a key that signs a kernel. This is awful when it's Microsoft signing a series of kernels that advance one-way but the TPM doesn't actually ratchet to prevent downgrade attacks (and would be even worse if it did, because then you'd inevitably brick machines again and again). Instead you trust a long-lived CA and God help you when you need to rotate it.

It's even worse if you're self-hosting the signing, to the point that despite a ton of work put into making it safe and understood I wouldn't do it with the current design; a bare-state unlock is more predictable and reliable but I'll make sure to regularly exercise my backup key and header.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)"

GauntletWizard — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:38:18 +0000

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | US | Remote OK

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)"

GauntletWizard — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:21:52 +0000

I'm surprised we haven't seen a cheap, USB powered Bluetooth RE-232C dongle for home assistant yet.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "RTX 2080 Ti Memory Upgrade to 22 GB"

GauntletWizard — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:53:49 +0000

If the untrained "you"'s failure rate is above about 25% with the failure result being a merely inoperable but repairable card, it's not an acceptable outcome for most people, who quite reasonably see it as an unacceptable risk.

In practice, it's more like a 75-90% failure rate if you're unfamiliar with ball-soldering techniques, which most are since it's been considered impractical to do soldering in the US since the through-hole days, and so there's not a professional tradesman class to teach kids. What does exist of soldering is stuck in the far past from an electronics manufacturing perspective.

Tl;dr: https://xkcd.com/2501/

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)"

GauntletWizard — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:32:39 +0000

Unusual? Only because we've made it so. Cruel? Nah. Locking someone up because they're criminally insane is less cruel than letting them roam the streets, both to the perpetrator and the people around them.

Happy Independence Day

GauntletWizard — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:20:21 +0000

It is the 250th anniversary of the founding of America, and this great experiment in nation building is still going. Whether you're at home with your family or out celebrating with the national pastime of blowing up a little piece of our beautiful country, Happy July 4th to all - the young and the old, the residents and visitors, those here for work and play.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785613

Points: 37

# Comments: 10

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

GauntletWizard — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:32:51 +0000

The postal service is a quasi government entity that has operated (not to get too deep into the politics of it) for many years at a loss. It does compete with Amazon, as well as being used by Amazon, but it's very different as a business than Amazon.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2026)"

GauntletWizard — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:53:12 +0000

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | US | Remote OK

I'm particularly selling my skills in PKI/TLS. My clients are rapidly moving to MTLS for all service-to-service authentication and even for browser-to-service authentication for internal tools.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers"

GauntletWizard — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:29:37 +0000

They have done worse things, since the beginning, that they know about but people are not primed to understand yet. Each whistleblower brings us closer to full understanding, bit by bit, showing that even the lower ranks see and are party to things that are unthinkable to the older generation and that the younger are only now waking up to being not okay.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "The (real) dead economy theory"

GauntletWizard — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 03:43:25 +0000

I believe that AI is a singularity. Just like a Black hole, no information can escape and you're slowly (by subjective experience) dragged in and spaghettified.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "Kirkland Roundabouts"

GauntletWizard — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:37:43 +0000

Yes, because nobody goes that way anymore - It's too much of a time sink, significantly because you never end up where you want to go. Instead the real crossing points got even more crowded, or were until this abomination got installed.

Thankfully, I literally sold my house because of it, and my timing was good and I got out before prices dropped.

New comment by GauntletWizard in "There's still no point in gigabit broadband"

GauntletWizard — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:16:59 +0000

Don't let your average usage fool you. You do notice the snappiness of downloading a large file and having it take a third to a tenth the time. You rarely manage to fully saturate a gigabit connection, but while downloading isos and software updates in seconds rather than minutes, your Internet stays snappy the whole time.

Yes, your overall usage of gigabit is only a few percent. It's way oversold anyway, so you could never use all of that. It's still way worth it for those short bursts of speed.