Hacker News: ThreeFx

New comment by ThreeFx in "Why I Write (1946)"

ThreeFx — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:08:51 +0000

That chart implies it is possible for somebody to write a work that wins the Hugo awards for best novelette and best novella, which I’d really like to see happen!

New comment by ThreeFx in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

ThreeFx — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:31:01 +0000

Wow, that's incredible. Even though I'm from Hessen, I never thought of making that connection!

New comment by ThreeFx in "Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice"

ThreeFx — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 09:07:40 +0000

Now you’ve just shifted the problem to a much harder statement: proving the things the NN recognizes as a rose is actually a rose.

You cannot get rid of the enviroment, and the best thing you can do is be explicit in what you rely on. For example, formally verified operating systems often rely on hardware correctness, even though the errata sheets for modern CPUs are hundreds of pages long.

New comment by ThreeFx in "Putting out the hardware dumpster fire"

ThreeFx — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 20:04:01 +0000

I think there’s potential for a second-order effect here: generate enough vulnerabilities and SoC designers will start to put it out themselves.

New comment by ThreeFx in "[dead]"

ThreeFx — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:11:41 +0000

Looks like a trivial outage, but this is apparently the only region that runs, among others, the US visa application service...

New comment by ThreeFx in "Digitec Galaxus now displays warranty score and return rate"

ThreeFx — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 07:59:34 +0000

Why is that terrible?

Presumably it is much harder to sell now. If you didn’t want it, why buy it in the first place?

New comment by ThreeFx in "TIL the assumption that string length does not change when upper-cased is false"

ThreeFx — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 13:29:56 +0000

There are even cases where it is context-depedent: Maße (measurements) and Masse (mass). Both are written MASSE uppercased, but how do you know which one's which?

For additional fun: Swiss German doesn't use ß at all, so there is no difference between "in Maßen genießen" (to enjoy in moderation) and "in Massen genießen" (to enjoy in large amounts).

New comment by ThreeFx in "TIL the assumption that string length does not change when upper-cased is false"

ThreeFx — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 13:27:15 +0000

Except that it isn't used widely yet, if at all.

New comment by ThreeFx in "Compiling Rust is NP-hard"

ThreeFx — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 16:13:34 +0000

Not really, because for undecidable problems semidecidability can only hold one-way. If it held in both ways then the language would be decidable.

Take the Halting program for example: For a program p which halts, you can determine whether it will halt in finite time (because by definition it halts). However, there is no semidecidable algorithm for "this program runs infinitely long".

New comment by ThreeFx in "How Rainbow Tables Work"

ThreeFx — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 07:26:17 +0000

Nitpick: the reduction function is not one way, since an important property of hashes is that they are easy to compute.

New comment by ThreeFx in "Don't use third party auth to sign in"

ThreeFx — Sat, 14 Nov 2020 13:09:01 +0000

Because there is no clear jurisdiction for the web. That's it.

New comment by ThreeFx in "'changeme' is valid base64"

ThreeFx — Sat, 24 Oct 2020 21:37:42 +0000

I must say I never dove into the internals of base64 encoding, but this does indeed make a lot of sense :)

Thanks!

New comment by ThreeFx in "Storks Deliver Babies (p= 0.008)"

ThreeFx — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 18:23:24 +0000

A very very good example of correlation != causation.

New comment by ThreeFx in "Identifying Airtel middleboxes that censor HTTPS traffic"

ThreeFx — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 12:01:36 +0000

The TTL field isn't cryptographically protected though, so it should be very possible that there's an actor after Airtel which does the censoring, no?

New comment by ThreeFx in "A Tale of Two Libcs"

ThreeFx — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 12:04:56 +0000

99% of the time the answer is speed. It's just way faster to evaluate and build all of this at compile time than at runtime.

I understand both sides of the argument here - on one hand you have fast and unreadable code and on the other hand slower and more readable code. The problem here is 1. the leaky abstraction of characters and code points and 2. loss of type safety due to C's weak typing rules, which is a bit lost in the "hurr durr messy code."

New comment by ThreeFx in "Croc: Easily and securely send things from one computer to another"

ThreeFx — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 10:09:38 +0000

4 billion is about 32 bits of security, which is most definitely not enough.

New comment by ThreeFx in "I accidentally built a nudity/porn platform"

ThreeFx — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 12:42:34 +0000

The measure law is also known as Goodhart's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

New comment by ThreeFx in "Typing Is Hard"

ThreeFx — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 13:05:39 +0000

Thanks, fixed!

New comment by ThreeFx in "Typing Is Hard"

ThreeFx — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 13:01:54 +0000

Since you can pass types to compile-time functions, yes that is correct. Take the example [from the 0.6.0 documentation](https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.6.0/#comptime) for example: At compile time the compiler has to figure out whether to type the `max` function using `u32` or `f64`. Since you can make the boolean condition arbitrarily complex the _type_ of max function called is undecidable in general.

I'm not arguing for or against undecidability in type systems, the page aims to be present the information neutrally.

New comment by ThreeFx in "Typing Is Hard"

ThreeFx — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:36:38 +0000

If you have resources for dart I'd be happy to include it :)