Hacker News: andyhedges

New comment by andyhedges in "Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case"

andyhedges — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:24:14 +0000

I hate to break it to you, but the UK has had a military for some time now.

New comment by andyhedges in "Everyone should slow down AI development except for me"

andyhedges — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 10:53:37 +0000

With Y2K we fixed the issue, if a bunch of work hadn't had gone into that then there would have been wide scale impact. Critical systems were fixed hence no disaster, it wasn't people fussing about nothing.

New comment by andyhedges in "Strait of Hormuz Live Traffic Tracking"

andyhedges — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:02:04 +0000

Only if you have a Beowulf cluster of tiktoks

You Can't Count on a Key

andyhedges — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:38:30 +0000

Article URL: https://primecrunch.com/blog/7/you-can-t-count-on-a-key

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278216

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The prime your computer finds while you sleep

andyhedges — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:09:17 +0000

Article URL: https://primecrunch.com/blog/3/the-prime-your-computer-finds-while-you-sleep

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48701787

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by andyhedges in "The end of public frontier models"

andyhedges — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:38:17 +0000

It's interesting, the "discernment horizon" as Yegge puts it: the point where humans can't verify an answer because checking it is harder than producing it.

I'm not sure it's quite that simple.

I have a couple of problems I can't solve myself, although variants have been solved by others, so we know they're human-solvable. Verifying a candidate solution, however, is relatively easy.

For example, I've repeatedly asked frontier models (including Fable) to produce a fast squaring routine for arbitrary precision integers that beats GWNUM running under Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon. None have come remotely close to the best human-produced implementation. After hours of iteration, Fable's best attempt was still about 4x slower than the Rosetta-translated GWNUM, despite GWNUM not even running natively.

The point is that direct understanding isn't the only way to judge correctness. We often build tests, benchmarks, and oracles that let us validate artefacts produced by people or systems that are operating beyond our own cognitive abilities. Perhaps the real limit isn't a discernment horizon, but a horizon for constructing effective evaluators. Can we layer evaluators to get even more magnification; I'm betting we can.

Hunting Million-Digit Primes from My Loft

andyhedges — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 17:58:49 +0000

Article URL: https://primecrunch.com/blog/2/hunting-million-digit-primes-from-my-loft

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48621018

Points: 32

# Comments: 6

Show HN: A distributed computing project for finding primes of the form k·2^n−1

andyhedges — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:53:01 +0000

Article URL: https://primecrunch.com/blog/2/hunting-million-digit-primes-from-my-loft

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48575917

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by andyhedges in "GTFOBins"

andyhedges — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:08:40 +0000

For the LLM it's a probabilistic set of strings that achieves the outcome, the highest probability set didn't work, try the next one until success or threshold met. A human sees the implicit difference between the obvious thing not working indicating someone doesn't want you to do it, but an LLM unless guided doesn't seen that sub-text.

So chmod +x file didn't work, now try python -c "import os; os.chmod('file',744)"

New comment by andyhedges in "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner"

andyhedges — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:06:35 +0000

It's when they sniff the glue, then things get wild.

New comment by andyhedges in "Modifying FileZilla to Workaround Bambu 3D Printer's FTP Issue"

andyhedges — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:21:10 +0000

Isn't the what sftp is? sftp multiplexes commands and data, and is single port without all the old fashioned two port negotiation of FTP.

New comment by andyhedges in "Some things just take time"

andyhedges — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:27:01 +0000

Yes, I'm saying it's not a good analogy

New comment by andyhedges in "Some things just take time"

andyhedges — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:12:53 +0000

> We require age minimums for driving, voting, and drinking because we believe maturity only comes through lived experience.

Not true, we do this because the 99% of the time it's true, however there are people who would be perfectly competent and responsible to drive without living to the age of 16-18. Same with voting, there are humans who have a deep understanding and intelligence about politics at a younger age than suffrage. Equally there are people who will be reckless drivers at 40 and vote on whim at 60.

We have these rules not because sophistication only comes through lived experience, we have them because it's strongly correlated and covers of most error cases.

To take this to AI, run the model enough times with a higher enough temperature, then perhaps it can solve your challenges with a high enough quality - just a thought.

New comment by andyhedges in "Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love"

andyhedges — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:59:54 +0000

Nuance!? This is The Internet, we can't be having any of that here.

New comment by andyhedges in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"

andyhedges — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:15:53 +0000

I have it (claude, codex) summarise what we've discussed about a design, big change, put it in an MD file and then I correct it, have it re-read it and then do the change.

Then later if it goes off piste in another session tell it to re-read the ADDs for x, y and z.

If someone could make that process less clunky, that would be great. However it's very much not just funnel every turd uttered in the prompt onto a git branch and trying a chug the lot down every session.

New comment by andyhedges in "Tell HN: Uber has blocked my account for years, won't tell me why"

andyhedges — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 14:14:14 +0000

Can't you just reset the password on account without the dot it in? Lock them out.

New comment by andyhedges in "TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML"

andyhedges — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 16:31:32 +0000

Couldn't you play a WAV too? But they were too massive at the time for most peoples bandwidth.

An Explanation of Huffman Coding

andyhedges — Sun, 16 Jun 2019 10:53:53 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.hedges.net/2014/02/11/huffman-coding/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194888

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

How to attract great people (to work for your company)

andyhedges — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 21:45:23 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.hedges.net/2014/07/17/how-to-attract-great-people/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19447295

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by andyhedges in "Everything old is new again: Microservices"

andyhedges — Wed, 09 May 2018 11:34:56 +0000

Yes, but the concept existed in 'process servers' 'EAI hubs' and various other names. EBS caught on as the defacto term later.