Hacker News: barathr

Prompt Injection at the Drive-Through

barathr — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:28:26 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/prompt-injection-attack

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709510

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by barathr in "The future of solar doesn't track the sun"

barathr — Sat, 03 May 2025 22:57:50 +0000

Tom Murphy shows in his excellent book on energy that over-tilting your solar panels by 15 degrees is a good idea (Table 13.2):

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#section.13.4

Basically take your latitude and add 15 degrees and that'll get you good annual coverage.

New comment by barathr in "A Passion for Fruit"

barathr — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:03:05 +0000

People have also been building ingenious systems for growing fruit for a long time:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/fruit-walls-urban-...

New comment by barathr in "Trust, 2-Party Relays, and QUIC"

barathr — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 19:08:36 +0000

We've found that this decoupling (multi-party) approach is a good way to improve privacy in a bunch of networking contexts -- here's a paper we wrote a few years ago with colleagues at Fastly and Cloudflare on the topic:

https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2022/papers/hotnets2...

New comment by barathr in "PeerAuth, TOTP-based peer authentication in the post-truth world"

barathr — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 04:29:04 +0000

This is really clever and elegant. Thanks for building it.

New comment by barathr in "Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for Exploring Scenarios"

barathr — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 02:18:46 +0000

Sure, here's what Claude generated (all the usual caveats apply): https://pastebin.com/Xbs2qasH

New comment by barathr in "Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for Exploring Scenarios"

barathr — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 01:07:50 +0000

This is a neat idea, and one that I frequently find a need for. (I was curious how it'd work, so I copied and pasted the description and screenshot of the UI into Claude and in two prompts it built a working React app prototype.)

New comment by barathr in "Libraries and Well-Being: A Case Study from The New York Public Library"

barathr — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 02:14:07 +0000

I highly recommend Klinenberg's Palaces for the People, which he named after Carnegie's phrase for libraries. Here's an interview he did on 99% Invisible:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/palaces-for-the-peopl...

New comment by barathr in "Threlte 8"

barathr — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 01:26:31 +0000

Any chance that Threlte makes it easy to do view-independent rendering / ray tracing? Basically if you have many surfaces in your scene and you want to not just visualize the scene but find out how much light is arriving at any surface (even ones the camera currently can't see), is that something Threlte enables?

I'm interested in computing light that trees receive and want to be able to visualize it but also have even leaves that aren't in view to continue to receive light during the simulation.

New comment by barathr in "NSA releases 1982 Grace Hopper lecture"

barathr — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 16:01:14 +0000

Amazing how prescient her talk is on so many levels -- things that in 1982 there were likely few folks really thinking about deeply and holistically.

New comment by barathr in "Seeing Like a Data Structure"

barathr — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 22:45:44 +0000

What we're hoping for (and is the theme of the piece) is that we are and can and should be both and more -- taxable citizens, members of illegible communities, and many more things. It's a both-and perspective -- life is and should be composed of many overlapping systems.

New comment by barathr in "Seeing Like a Data Structure"

barathr — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 13:30:43 +0000

It's a general-audience essay, not one targeted towards the HN community. So unfortunately there's little opportunity to delve any deeper into what specific data structures are involved in holding the data and the difference that might make. There are data structures underneath in the excerpt you pulled out and they're so common in code that we don't even notice it. (Even something as simple as this: certain data structures are better for finding recent / first items and others are better for finding "top" / largest items. That has implications that ripple upward and can skew what users are shown.) It would be nice to consider the differences in how different data structures store data and their broader implications.

New comment by barathr in "Seeing Like a Data Structure"

barathr — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 03:22:03 +0000

We started writing this essay about 3 years ago (and first read Seeing Like a State about 15 years ago -- it's a book that should be read and re-read many times). It takes time to write something this long, and if I could have I would have kept editing it for another year.

New comment by barathr in "Seeing Like a Data Structure"

barathr — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 01:34:22 +0000

I like the idea -- I hope someone gives it a try. Like combining our essay with "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" and CLRS.

Seeing Like a Data Structure

barathr — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 19:53:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structure

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40548571

Points: 154

# Comments: 33

How AI Will Change Democracy

barathr — Fri, 31 May 2024 13:37:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/how-ai-will-change-democracy.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40534971

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by barathr in "The United States of Avocado"

barathr — Sat, 18 May 2024 15:55:18 +0000

Yeah, desalination is perfectly aligned with solar energy availability both on a daily and annual cycle: More water needs during the day, more sun during the day. More water needs during the summer, more sun during the summer.

New comment by barathr in "The United States of Avocado"

barathr — Fri, 17 May 2024 13:29:53 +0000

GEM isn't worth growing -- it's not that good of a fruit. Hass does just fine even in high heat. Just plant the tree in a spot that gets some afternoon shade.

New comment by barathr in "The United States of Avocado"

barathr — Fri, 17 May 2024 13:29:11 +0000

Easy to water a backyard tree with a laundry to landscape greywater setup.

New comment by barathr in "The United States of Avocado"

barathr — Fri, 17 May 2024 02:59:29 +0000

They usually flower in Spring, whenever that is for you. It's cultivar and temperature dependent. Some varieties like Carmen will even flower multiple times a year (though Carmen isn't one of the more cold hardy types). Bonny Doon is a good cultivar to consider if you get some mild frost each year. If you go below 20 degrees, though, you'd need to protect the tree during the cold snap.