Hacker News: Polycryptus

New comment by Polycryptus in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

Polycryptus — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:18:37 +0000

I really can't agree, there are so many great VNs out there and DDLC only really stands out in that it plays heavily to the English-speaking world's preconceived notions of VNs as "nothing more than simple dating simulators"

New comment by Polycryptus in "Unifi Travel Router"

Polycryptus — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 21:42:24 +0000

That's already an option, too.

New comment by Polycryptus in "Vince Zampella, developer of Call of Duty and Battlefield has died"

Polycryptus — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 21:23:03 +0000

There is video of the accident floating around. I recommend against going looking for it...

New comment by Polycryptus in "How do computers calculate sine?"

Polycryptus — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 03:48:02 +0000

For anyone curious, the video:

https://youtu.be/xFKFoGiGlXQ

New comment by Polycryptus in "Statement regarding the ongoing Sourcehut outage"

Polycryptus — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 16:49:10 +0000

Agreed, I've been through something like this before and it was not legit. They'd compromised a Bangladeshi police email account and used it to try to get data out of us.

New comment by Polycryptus in "Horcrux: Split your file into encrypted fragments"

Polycryptus — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 20:18:48 +0000

That's right, there's no guarantee the data hasn't been tampered with after encryption. The mechanics of the tampering you could do depend on the cipher mode you use.

To give a simplified example (which doesn't match what this program does but is useful to demonstrate), ECB is the simplest mode (which really shouldn't be used for anything). Your input is split into fixed-length blocks (16 bytes for AES) and each block is encrypted separately, producing a deterministic ciphertext for each block. (e.g. a block of all "A" will always encrypt to the same thing).

So if an attacker is able to figure out what plaintext a block of encrypted data corresponds to, they could use that knowledge to build a "fake" encrypted message. They could also remove blocks from a message, or shuffle them around.

If you're interested in playing around more practically with this kind of thing, I highly recommend the https://cryptopals.com/ challenge sets.

New comment by Polycryptus in "Lyrebird the Linux voice changer now supports PipeWire"

Polycryptus — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 19:42:28 +0000

Short for "voice (boi) changer (chen)"

New comment by Polycryptus in "Fedora 38 LLVM vs. Team Fortress 2"

Polycryptus — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 22:35:45 +0000

Steam on Linux already uses LD_PRELOAD under-the-hood to load the overlay. Valve signs the overlay SO files, so they could be making an exception for Valve-signed-preloads in VAC, but it's also possible that VAC does something else to check for suspicious libraries loaded in.

New comment by Polycryptus in "Ask HN: How to invest savings?"

Polycryptus — Mon, 30 May 2022 23:28:50 +0000

This is a good way to go; also the affiliated wikis, forums, and subreddit can be a useful resource.

New comment by Polycryptus in "Hackers gaining power of subpoena via fake “emergency data requests”"

Polycryptus — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 17:26:11 +0000

This could work for domestic requests, but the one example of this I've seen in the wild (and this was mentioned in the original post) involved a request (supposedly) coming from police internationally. Though, requests from foreign police are more likely to be handled with scrutiny, so maybe forcing more manual verification (and identification of the proper process in the first place) aren't bad things.

New comment by Polycryptus in "A letter to Microsoft for not attributing authors of the Edge Flatpak app"

Polycryptus — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 04:42:43 +0000

That's a matter of repository policy, but yes, Flathub (by far the largest and most popular repository) allows for this. I believe that they generally put a disclaimer that it's not an official package in the description, and allow the upstream developer to claim the application ID for themselves if they wish to maintain it.

New comment by Polycryptus in "The Boschian Horror of ‘Elden Ring’"

Polycryptus — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 20:59:56 +0000

I've heard that it works fairly well on Proton already. In fact, perhaps even better than it does on Windows in some regards as a result of Valve having implemented some mitigations for things the engine does incorrectly in Proton. (Thanks to a desire to have the game work properly on the Steam Deck)

I haven't tried yet, though, as I'm playing my way through the Dark Souls series proper before giving Elden Ring a try.

New comment by Polycryptus in "GitHub Copilot available for JetBrains and Neovim"

Polycryptus — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 19:37:23 +0000

It's _very_ good at "learn by example" with some twists. It _does_ make mistakes, and I do double check it, but it still definitely saves time. I used it to write the bulk of a new implementation of a new audio backend for a game engine yesterday - it filled out a lot of the "boilerplate" integration work (e.g. generating all the functions like "set volume/pan/3D audio position" that map over 1:1 to functions in the other library).

I will say, though, that it's also good at making up code that looks very believably real but doesn't actually work.

The ethics involved in Copilot are a bit strange, and I'm not sure I'll keep using it for those reasons, but it does a good job.

New comment by Polycryptus in "Will Cloudflare R2 Win Customers from Amazon S3?"

Polycryptus — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 17:32:23 +0000

I've been using Wasabi for a project where cost is more important than anything (i.e. a side project with reasonable scale that can't accept income) and on that front it is great. (S3 costs have been atrociously high to us sometimes.) For CDN-type resources we do a Wasabi bucket with Cloudflare with caching set very high. Reliability has been the only problem; it's not awful by any means, but there are a lot more "hiccups" using it. You get what you pay for, I guess.

That said I'm looking to see if just using R2 is a big improvement. It'll cost more but the reliability and performance might be worth it for us.

New comment by Polycryptus in "Open offices have driven Panasonic to make horse blinders for humans (2018)"

Polycryptus — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 23:30:23 +0000

Sorry, I assumed (incorrectly) given we're downthread of a bunch of purposefully awful ideas.

New comment by Polycryptus in "Open offices have driven Panasonic to make horse blinders for humans (2018)"

Polycryptus — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 20:32:14 +0000

You're joking, but I've read that Valve Software does/did something similar, every desk in their office is on wheels so you can move your desk to join up with whatever project you want.

Maybe unsurprisingly, I've also read stories of "clique"-ish behavior there over the years (though I can't confirm how true they are.)

New comment by Polycryptus in "Valve Steam Deck"

Polycryptus — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 20:24:16 +0000

I don't think it's currently possible for any cloud service to make this obsolete, at least in the ways that I'd want to use a portable gaming device. Which is to say, mostly in transit, which tends to have spotty (at best) internet accessibility. (In the air on an airplane, between stops on the subway, ...)

New comment by Polycryptus in "Epic Games steps up Apple fight with EU antitrust complaint"

Polycryptus — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 18:16:40 +0000

> It's not like there were Wallmart exclusive games, right?

It doesn't matter too much, but there actually have been... Nintendo's Chibi-Robo Park Patrol was a WalMart exclusive game in the US. (in 2007)

New comment by Polycryptus in "Twitter preconnects to the wrong domains"

Polycryptus — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 18:06:45 +0000

It does that for me even _in_ the app, so no, it's just broken...

New comment by Polycryptus in "Pleroma 2.0: a free, federated social networking server built on open protocols"

Polycryptus — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 15:56:56 +0000

> And the Known Fediverse timeline… Well, it's fun to browse but come on, imagine a timeline of all tweets on Twitter: mostly useless.

I remember when I first used Twitter in 2006 or 2007 it actually had that as a feature. It was useless, but still fun as you mention.