Hacker News: Khoth

New comment by Khoth in "Ants that seem to defy biology – They lay eggs that hatch into another species"

Khoth — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 12:36:55 +0000

Four types! You missed Ibiricus female, ie the next generation of queen

New comment by Khoth in "“This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone”"

Khoth — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 18:00:24 +0000

It's mostly talking about the case where someone receives an encrypted message which is intended to later be published openly. If it was padded by adding stuff, an attacker can try to reconstruct the original plaintext by removing the flowery adjectives, whereas if things were deleted the attacker doesn't know what to add.

New comment by Khoth in "The reality of firearm suppressors vs. Hollywood"

Khoth — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 10:16:00 +0000

It's not just about the actual sound effects, it's also the writing. The movie clip the article uses as an anchor shows people using silencers to have a gunfight in public with bystanders having no idea it was happening. That's not just hollywood sound direction, it's hollywood giving a completely wrong impression about how good silencers are and why they exist

New comment by Khoth in "The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder"

Khoth — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 13:31:56 +0000

NP-complete is indeed the intersection of NP-hard and NP.

If you can solve any NP-hard problem then you can solve any NP-complete problem (because you can convert any instance of an NP-complete problem to an NP-hard problem), so NP-hard problems are "at least as hard" as NP-complete problems.

(But an NP-hard problem might not be in NP, ie given a purported solution to an NP-hard problem you might not be able to verify it in polynomial time)

New comment by Khoth in "NIST Interoperable Randomness Beacons"

Khoth — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 10:58:35 +0000

Someone who knew or guessed that you were doing it could find your key very quickly by trying out every beacon value in the time range your key was generated in

New comment by Khoth in "Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator"

Khoth — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 06:55:55 +0000

For 2/3, it does indeed work with fractions internally. For pi, it uses some floating point representation I think, you get about 50 digits.

New comment by Khoth in "An abundance of Katherines: The game theory of baby naming"

Khoth — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 09:07:43 +0000

Whether family names are more differentiated depends on where you live.

The USA has a wide variety, but there are also places like Vietnam where only a handful of family names are in common use and more than 30% of people are Nguyens.

New comment by Khoth in "PuTTY vulnerability vuln-p521-bias"

Khoth — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 05:04:13 +0000

Not sure about the pageant part, but it's a major problem when connecting to a compromised server leaks the client's private key.

(For example, if an attacker has compromised server A and you connect to it, they can now use your key to connect to server B which you also use)

New comment by Khoth in "Ask HN: How are quantum computing companies making money?"

Khoth — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 17:51:13 +0000

The search keyword to learn more is "post-quantum cryptography"

RSA and ECC cryptography could be broken, but (with a probably rocky transition period) we could move to other algorithms which are still secure.

Crytocurrency I'm not sure about.

I suspect probably keeping it secret - announcing it would push everyone to move from crypto you can break to crypto you can't.

New comment by Khoth in "Wait, what's a bookmarklet?"

Khoth — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 16:32:52 +0000

I use one to get rid of fixed headers on a page

   javascript:(function()%20{%20var%20s,e,i,ee=document.getElementsByTagName('*');%20for(i=0;%20e=ee[i];%20i++)%20{%20s=getComputedStyle(e);%20if%20(s%20&&%20s.position%20==%20'fixed')%20e.style.position='static';%20}%20})();

New comment by Khoth in "Hallucineted CVE against Curl: someone asked Bard to find a vulnerability"

Khoth — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 19:49:22 +0000

The thing they're they're reporting is that a CVE leaked and Bard found out about it before public disclosure.

Except that it's false because Bard made it up. There's no real curl exploit involved.

New comment by Khoth in "Warp drive's best hope dies, as antimatter falls down"

Khoth — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 13:51:06 +0000

I don't think anyone really expected antimatter to produce antigravity, but it had never been tested before so it was worth doing the experiment.

New comment by Khoth in "Interaction to Next Paint (INP)"

Khoth — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 05:52:16 +0000

Or to put it another way, people waste 10% of their time on the web waiting for slow bloated garbage to load (or more when you take into account pages that do more loading when you touch them afterwards)

New comment by Khoth in "Things that surprised me while running SQLite in production"

Khoth — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 06:02:39 +0000

Sounds like they were testing it with a small enough amount of data that the disk version could just work from cache and didn't actually have to go to the disk

New comment by Khoth in "Commuters prefer origin to destination transfers"

Khoth — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 05:26:33 +0000

For me it's that I want the most inflexible leg of the trip first. I'll often get a local bus to a railway station then get a long distance train. The trains are infrequent and it's cheaper to book a specific train in advance, so if a journey is bus then train I have to get an early bus to ensure that bus delays won't make me miss my train. Whereas going the other way I can step off the train and get whichever bus happens to be next, so train then bus is a shorter journey time.

New comment by Khoth in "Calling time on DNSSEC: The costs exceed the benefits"

Khoth — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 07:38:42 +0000

Browsers won't accept a certificate unless it comes with proof that it was submitted to a CT log.

So a government could MITM you but they'd have to burn a CA to do it, whether you personally noticed the attack or not, so it's a very high cost attack

New comment by Khoth in "Intel Issues New CPU Microcode for New, Undisclosed Security Updates"

Khoth — Sat, 13 May 2023 08:42:43 +0000

Yes, microcode updates are distributed as part of Windows Update

New comment by Khoth in "Bicycle"

Khoth — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 17:32:38 +0000

To expand on one of those things - bike chains get slightly longer as they wear out. Once it's about 1% longer than it started, it looks about the same as it always did, but it's starting to damage the drivechain and you need to replace it. An ancient Roman blacksmith has no hope of making a chain with anything like that level of precision.

New comment by Khoth in "Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API"

Khoth — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 18:58:04 +0000

> idk what it will cost

That's the problem GP means. It's less than a week until it happens, and nobody knows how much it's going to cost, how you convert your free account to a paying account, whether auth is also going to be paid, etc etc

New comment by Khoth in "Why VR/AR gets farther away as it comes into focus"

Khoth — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 08:47:01 +0000

I agree, facebook could have saved themselves a lot of mockery and bad press by spending 0.01% of their VR budget on hiring some people who know how to make simple graphics look good.