Hacker News: ahazred8ta

New comment by ahazred8ta in "AI-assisted off-site backup guide take ~25 minutes"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:37:23 +0000

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Show HN: Capacitor Alarm Clock"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 05:07:38 +0000

Byte Magazine had an April ad for a Noise Emitting Diode. The symbol was a diode wearing a pair of earmuffs.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:04:55 +0000

There are egyptian paintings showing colossal statues being dragged on sledges by crews of men with ropes. -- https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-ancient-...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:31:33 +0000

The Freefall webcomic can sympathize. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1500/fc01415.htm

New comment by ahazred8ta in "The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 02:13:23 +0000

[wasn’t aware of this] That's odd. Anyone familiar with the history of anonymous email services and remailers would know about the penet, cotse, and cypherpunk communities in the 1990s. It was a fertile field. Odd that you haven't bumped into anyone from that space.

https://codamail.com/aboutus.html -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion -- https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl?printpage=faq.html

New comment by ahazred8ta in "91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:36:52 +0000

Japan incinerates its plastic.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Yellow spaceship machines used to prevent algae"

ahazred8ta — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:18:23 +0000

It supposedly has something to do with de-aligning water molecules via microwave RF and affecting surface tension and gas exchange. Sounds like fringe woo. They partnered with Themo Fisher at one point, but TF has taken that page down.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264640617_Influence...

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

ahazred8ta — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:44:23 +0000

Our neighbors put a tv in their little girl's room, but it was rigged to only show the local PBS station. Worked out well.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:25:42 +0000

SSSS is not the official canonical file format for SSS. Shamir did not specify an official file format when he described his technique. Each implementation knows how to recombine its own shares. The web apps can be saved and used on any device.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Expected IQ Spread on a Jury"

ahazred8ta — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:43:26 +0000

In a group of 12 people, the expected high-low range is about 15×3.26 = 49 points. (75 to 125)

New comment by ahazred8ta in "How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works"

ahazred8ta — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:08:04 +0000

There's a related 2-man sudo login system here, not sure how finegrained it is.

https://github.com/Argonne-National-Laboratory/Pam-2man-Auth

New comment by ahazred8ta in "How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works"

ahazred8ta — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:37:53 +0000

There are several browser-based versions which can be used online or downloaded to use offline.

https://bs.parity.io/ -- http://passguardian.com/ -- https://iancoleman.io/shamir/

New comment by ahazred8ta in "How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works"

ahazred8ta — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:31:22 +0000

Plain vanilla Shamir is information-theoretic secure and is completely impervious to QC. I can take a 1-byte secret, make 'threshold of 10' Shamir shares from it, give you 9 of the 1-byte shares, and no computer in the universe can determine the secret. (In practice, Shamir systems need to add a MAC or checksum as an integrity check, so IRL they're a few bytes larger.)

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Citing Gandalf, Pope Leo says we must "disarm" AI"

ahazred8ta — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:03:47 +0000

"uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till"

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens"

ahazred8ta — Mon, 25 May 2026 02:59:01 +0000

Julian invented the tinfoil hat.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 14 May 2026 23:23:43 +0000

Khipu researchers don't have it easy. It's rough when your only Rosetta stone is a Gordian knot.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "What the Hell Was Going on with Cigarette Ads in the 70s? (2024)"

ahazred8ta — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:39:57 +0000

With the decline of cigarettes, there are homo sapiens children growing up today who have never seen fire. First time in two million years.

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Connections – James Burke"

ahazred8ta — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:10:54 +0000

Ditto Dr. Eugen Weber's 'The Western Tradition' - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=eugen+weber&ia=videos&iax=videos

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered"

ahazred8ta — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:30:27 +0000

There's a gallery of variant versions of Cinderella from different countries, even China. In many of them she has an enchanted cow. http://www.365cinderellas.com/

New comment by ahazred8ta in "Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)"

ahazred8ta — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:09:55 +0000

You can make a wooden basin or waterproof pit. Fill it with water, drop in hot stones from a fire. This is common in preceramic cultures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_boiler -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_boiling