Hacker News: Sniffnoy

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

Sniffnoy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:57:16 +0000

  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com

Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/ConsenSys-archive/truffle/tree/develop/pa...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.

I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)

I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).

I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects, including old ones I've been shepherding through publication. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The sigmoids won't save you"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:34:08 +0000

I don't understand what you're trying to imply here. Yes, he co-authored a report. What is supposed to be dangerous or suspicious about this? What does your statement about "reputational consequences" have to do with your original comment, which implies that this some indicates a bias on his part?

It seems to me like you're trying to somehow imply that writing things to convince people of what you believe is somehow nefarious? It isn't! It's what we're all doing here right now! Putting it in a format that certain people will take more seriously doesn't make it nefarious either. I am quite confused by your point of view here.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The sigmoids won't save you"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:36:36 +0000

Yes, I was surprised he never discussed the idea that such exponentials are typically made of stacked sigmoids.

That said... if the exponential is made of stacked sigmoids, it's still an exponential on the whole! The fact that it's made of stacked sigmoids is relevant to the engineers making it, but not so relevant to the users or those otherwise affected by it.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The sigmoids won't save you"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:34:48 +0000

> He's taken a side.

Yes, that's called "having an opinion". Typically people writing argumentative pieces are doing so because they have a belief about the matter. I'm not sure what exactly you expect here.

> if he's wrong I would hope he owns up to it

I think Scott Alexander is pretty good about that.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The sigmoids won't save you"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:07:04 +0000

> FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.

I mean, that's called "having an opinion".

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Low Frequencies"

Sniffnoy — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:45:18 +0000

Oy, the title mangler mangled the title. Any chance the title could be fixed here? It's supposed to be "Extremely Low Frequencies".

Low Frequencies

Sniffnoy — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:44:36 +0000

Article URL: https://computer.rip/2026-05-09-extremely-low-frequencies.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087798

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

New comment by Sniffnoy in "I’ve banned query strings"

Sniffnoy — Sun, 10 May 2026 07:58:39 +0000

Facebook does, I'm not sure why it didn't in your case. It adds an "fbclid" parameter that is quite long. I just tried it to confirm.

Edit: Perhaps it only mangles links for logged-in users? That raises the possibility that some of the others may also only affect logged-in users.

(Trying with other ones I'm logged in on: Reddit doesn't mangle (obviously), Twitter doesn't mangle.)

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test"

Sniffnoy — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:25:58 +0000

I mean there are modified gravity candidates other than MOND. I think those are worth more consideration. MOND seems pretty well disproven at this point, yet somehow it's still what people focus on in terms of modified gravity! Where are the tests of other modified gravity theories?

Indeed, in terms of the negatives of MOND, I'll go further than you -- MOND barely explains galaxy rotation curves at all. When you look at the actual rotation curves compared to MOND's predictions, well, yes MOND does better than Newton w/o dark matter, but it's still pretty heavily fudged. If you have to fudge it that much, it seems to me there's no point. So I'd say that really MOND doesn't explain any of the three.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test"

Sniffnoy — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:23:20 +0000

I mean, there are modified gravity candidates other than MOND. I think people should perhaps give more consideration to those and not focus on MOND as their idea of modified gravity. I feel like the evidence is pretty well against MOND at this point. But other ideas of modified gravity, that aren't MOND-like, may still be worth considering. Framing it as "dark matter vs MOND" implicitly excludes these and I think that's a mistake.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)"

Sniffnoy — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:32:19 +0000

You appear to have commented on the wrong post.

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

Sniffnoy — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:40:11 +0000

  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)"

Sniffnoy — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:35:15 +0000

(2017)

IrDA

Sniffnoy — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:55:28 +0000

Article URL: https://computer.rip/2026-04-11-IrDA.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47742461

Points: 39

# Comments: 7

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

Sniffnoy — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:32:10 +0000

  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com

New comment by Sniffnoy in ""Disregard That" Attacks"

Sniffnoy — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 02:42:38 +0000

Also, the form that appears in the article isn't really a joke. A big part of what makes the original funny isn't just the form of the "attack" but the content itself, in particular the contrast between the formality of "disregard that" and the vulgarity of "I suck cocks". If it hadn't been so vulgar, or if it had said "ignore" instead of "disregard", it wouldn't be so funny.

Edit: Also part of what makes it funny how succinct and sudden it is. I think actually it would still be funny with "ignore" instead of "disregard", but it would be lessened a bit.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

Sniffnoy — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:33:28 +0000

> Right off the bat this guy is wrong. Nobody in their right mind would bet that the regime would collapse swiftly.

That "nobody in their right mind" would bet this does not, in fact, contradict his assertion that somebody did!

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The Shape of Inequalities"

Sniffnoy — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:40:40 +0000

In case people aren't aware, the inequality of these specific four means is a special case of the more general power mean inequality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_mean#Generalized_m...

New comment by Sniffnoy in "It Took Me 30 Years to Solve This VFX Problem – Green Screen Problem [video]"

Sniffnoy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 06:00:48 +0000

Summary: He created 4 hard-to-key shots, and on each of them tried KeyLight, IBK, and Corridor Key. Overall on 3 of them he judged that Corridor Key had done the best job, on one of them he judged that IBK had done the best job. I think on all of them he judged that more work was still necessary, none of them was fully usable as-is.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure"

Sniffnoy — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:54:40 +0000

The FDA didn't approve thalidomide, though! That was Europe!