<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: benlivengood</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=benlivengood</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:33:10 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=benlivengood" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think what actually happened is that the Enlightenment comprehensively developed the concept of natural rights and the Christians were like "well, we're not beating that with divine right of kings, better adopt it as the thing God did all along".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:48:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707939</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707939</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707939</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "EFF is leaving X"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The EFF has always been against a large political segment, namely the status quo of "long-term intellectual property good, DRM good, businesses have the right to do whatever they want with data they collect, businesses have the right to arbitrarily use de-facto monopolies on computing platforms" which make no mistake were never neutral positions about rights.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:19:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707413</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707413</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707413</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Truly, we can eliminate the null hypothesis because only ~93% of humans who have ever lived have died. [0] [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/" rel="nofollow">https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-...</a>
[1] <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:00:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698501</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698501</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698501</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The problem is that mcdonalds workers are treated as disposable.<p>Countries with proper human rights and labor laws don't do that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:31:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47657016</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47657016</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47657016</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Solar and batteries can power the world"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Heat recovery ventilation systems exchange inside air for outside air through an air to air heat exchanger (modern energy-efficient houses are built too tight for natural air exchange). If you make the incoming outdoor air an even 50°F (except when the outdoor temperature is between about 50° and 70°) then you spend less on heating and cooling.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:28:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631031</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631031</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631031</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Vulnerability research is cooked"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The economics favor attackers.  Who sells 0-days for quite a lot of money (or directly exploits them for ransomware), vs. who has to pay engineers quite a lot of money to review bug reports and patch code and publish new releases?<p>The validation/verification balance also favors attackers.  "Yes, I now have a remote root shell on this VM with a default install of X" vs. "My test suite is not dependable enough to turn an agent loose fixing security bug reports, not to mention the extra QA work that live humans would have to do where there isn't coverage".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:55:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47605717</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47605717</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47605717</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can literally | together every street address or other string you want to match in a giant disjunction, and then run a DFA/NFA minimization over that to get it down to a reasonable size.  Maybe there are some fast regex simplification algorithms as well, but working directly with the finite automata has decades of research and probably can be more fully optimized.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:09:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47588498</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47588498</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47588498</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "How to turn anything into a router"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You need more careful firewall rules on any device with IP forwarding enabled, and it can be hard to remember exactly when forwarding, NATint, etc. happen with relation to the incoming/outgoing firewall rules.<p>E.g. is your pf-based load balancer running its rules before or after the global filtering rules?  And if they're running first are they SNATing incoming traffic so the LAN rules allow the traffic through or does it need explicit exceptions for external IPs to traverse to a LAN endpoint?<p>If you're comfortable with more advanced networking then it's fine to run it all on one box.  If you just want to open ports for internal LAN services then that is a very canned and well-supported feature for a gateway firewall.<p>E.g. see AirSnitch which resulted in large part from mixing too many complex networking rules in single devices.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:59:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47578311</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47578311</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47578311</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Waymo Safety Impact"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Autonomous vehicles following proper signalling before lane changes can be safe at arbitrary speeds (see Autobahns working at all).  Humans, we should limit passing speed to roughly ~5 mph delta between adjacent lanes and leave it at that.<p>Humans with adequate following distance in the entire lane can probably manage 10 mph delta.  I routinely travel dozens of miles very safely at ~80 with the flow of traffic (including the cops), and been stressed out at 55 in the carpool lane through stop and go traffic in the right-hand lanes due to on ramps/offramps.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:38:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448056</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448056</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448056</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is called baseline reality, unfortunately.<p>We haven't started watering crops with salt-water but it's only a matter of time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:36:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445662</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445662</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445662</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Six-Day and IP Address Certificates Available in Certbot"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think we're almost at the point where public TLS endpoints never have to move their ephemeral private keys out of RAM.  6 days is pretty long in even modern cloud infrastructure lifecycles and it's unlikely that an endpoint will go long without TLS certificates on restart (2-3 minutes seems to be average for Let's Encrypt) which is fine for rolling restarts, and acceptable for a lot of DR scenarios.<p>This dramatically simplifies a lot of security assumptions because you can run stateless endpoints and not worry about encryption at rest or some of the bootstrapping issues.  For example, only give an init container temporary credentials to modify DNS for ACME, or rely on HTTP01 or 
TLS-ALPN-01.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:58:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357814</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357814</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357814</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Lf-lean: The frontier of verified software engineering"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Impressive if for no other reason than there are various disparate formally verified projects (seL4, compcert, certikos) that could potentially be unified under a single proof system.  Additionally it may be possible to quickly extend existing proofs (e.g. seL4's proofs) to other architectures.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:15:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354981</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354981</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354981</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Intel Demos Chip to Compute with Encrypted Data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>1. The private key is required to see <i>anything</i> computed under FHE, so DRM is pretty unlikely.<p>2. No, anyone can run the FHE computations anywhere on any hardware if they have the evaluation key (which would also have to be present in any FHE hardware).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:12:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326834</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326834</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326834</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The world labor market is ~35T USD yearly, and so that is roughly the order of magnitude to balance against frontier model training cost.  E.g. Dario Amodei has his "data center of PhDs" level where he assumes that's "good enough" to stop training frontier models; so if that can take even 5% of global labor market that's ~1.5T a year revenue, balanced against current model training costs of ~1B.  3 orders of magnitude might get us to PhD level?  I think that is ultimately the bet the big AI companies are making.  Even if 1T is the cost of PhD level AI then three/four companies could depreciate that over 4-5 years sharing that 5% of global market.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:26:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325406</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325406</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325406</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_laboratorium</a> describes the closest we've gotten; synthesizing the DNA and swapping it into an existing cell which then propagates the synthetic gene line.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:38:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47313413</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47313413</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47313413</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "My Homelab Setup"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So far everything is under 15ms apart, but it is a small number of nodes so far.  Did you mostly have trouble with etcd?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:58:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303518</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303518</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303518</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "My Homelab Setup"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've started building a kubernetes cluster (Talos Linux) across town with wireguard between various houses.  ZFS boxes for persistent volumes (democratic-csi) in each "zone" with cross-site snapshot replication and Gateway (Traefik) running at each site behind the ISP.  CrunchyPGO allows separate StorageClasses to easily split the leader/followers up.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:32:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301101</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301101</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301101</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "OpenTitan Shipping in Production"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Take a look at how Matter handles this; manufacturer certificate to vouch for hardware integrity which gets superceded by the fabric's root CA on commissioning (enrollment in the fabric).<p>This is basically the best we can hope for until we get nanofabs at home and can build our own secure enclaves in our garages.<p>Trust decision theory goes like this; it it were possible for the manufacturer to fully control the device then competitors would not use it, so e.g. wide industry adoption of OpenTitan would be evidence of its security in that aspect.  Finally, if devices had flaws that allowed them to be directly hacked or their keys stolen then demonstrating it would be straightforward and egg on the face of the manufacturer who baked their certificate on the device.<p>Final subject; 802.1x and other port-level security is mostly unnecessary if you can use mTLS everywhere which is what ubiquitous  hardware roots of trust allows.  Clearly it will take a while for the protocol side to catch up; but I hope that eventually we'll be running SPIFFE or something like it at home.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:03:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47268476</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47268476</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47268476</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "GPT-5.4"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Government pricing :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:44:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47265524</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47265524</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47265524</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by benlivengood in "Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We have traditional autonomous weapons (and counter-defense).  They operate on millisecond or faster timescales with existing RF sensors.  They are not and will not be using LLMs or other transformers.  Maybe ChatGPT will update some realtime Ada code; they formally verify some of that stuff so maybe that won't be terrifyingly dangerous.<p>Where autonomous transformer-based munitions will be used are basically "here is a photo of a face, find and kill this human" and loitering munitions will take their time analyzing video and then decide to identify and attack a target on their own.<p>EDIT: Or worse: "identify suspicious humans and kill them"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:01:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256555</link><dc:creator>benlivengood</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256555</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47256555</guid></item></channel></rss>