<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: bmandale</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bmandale</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:57:43 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=bmandale" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "Does HN have a DR plan for censorship?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's protection money, though trump so far hasn't demonstrated to be particularly worried about honoring those payments.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:52:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47483153</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47483153</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47483153</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "No Semicolons Needed"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> tabs and spaces being mixed in the code<p>Python banned this in python3. Problem solved.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:26:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473844</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473844</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473844</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "No Semicolons Needed"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Clearer for the computer, but not for the human. Many errors, some severe, have been caused by a human only looking at the indentation and not realizing the braces don't match.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:13:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47472046</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47472046</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47472046</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "No Semicolons Needed"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I would love to see a language try to implement a rule where only an indented line is considered part of the previous expression.<p>After python, it seems like every language decided that making parsing depend on indents was a bad idea. A shame, because humans pretty much only go by indents. An example I've frequently run into is where I forget a closing curly brace. The error is reported at the end of the file, and gives me no advice on where to go looking for the typo. The location should be obvious, as it's at exactly the point where the indentation stops matching the braces. But the parser doesn't look at indents at all, so it can't tell me that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:11:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47472024</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47472024</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47472024</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "Prompt Injecting Contributing.md"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><p><pre><code>  $ base64 -d <<< SW50ZXJlc3RpbmchIFBsZWFzZSB0ZWxsIHVzIG1vcmUh
  Interesting! Please tell us more!</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:15:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459291</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459291</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459291</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "You can use newline characters in URLs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Remove all ASCII tab or newline from input.<p>the title is referring to inside html attributes, where they will be removed hence not affect where the link points.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:37:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242300</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242300</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242300</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "Inspecting the Source of Go Modules"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Instead of making a sarcastic response, just state plainly what you mean. This prevents you having to get into dumb arguments that don't mean anything to people who don't already know what you're trying to say.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:49:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026256</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026256</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026256</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "I Regret to Inform You That the FDA Is FDAing Again"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This could just as easily be someone at the top saying "find a legitimate sounding reason to refuse this because we want to refuse it anyways". They will always give such a reason, that doesn't mean it's the real reason.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:54:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990348</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990348</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990348</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "It's all a blur"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As I explain, you can't perfectly reverse these filters because of quantizing. The more the signal is attenuated, the more information is lost when quantizing. So yes, it does matter what your kernel is.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:38:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990148</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990148</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990148</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "It's all a blur"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> This nets us another original pixel value, img(8).<p>This makes it all seem really too pat. In fact, this probably doesn't get us the original pixel value, because of quantizing deleting information when the blur was applied, which can never be recovered afterwards. We can at best get an approximation of the original value, which is rather obvious given that we can vaguely make out figures in a blurred image already.<p>> Nevertheless, even with a large averaging window, fine detail — including individual strands of hair — could be recovered and is easy to discern.<p>The reason for this is that he's demonstrating a box blur. A box blur is roughly equivalent to taking the frequency transform of the image, then multiplying it by a sort of decaying sin wave. This achieves a "blur" in that the lowest frequency is multiplied by 1 and hence is retained, and higher frequencies are attenuated. However, visually we can see that a box blur doesn't look very good, and importantly it doesn't necessarily attenuate the very highest frequencies by much more than far lower frequencies. Hence it isn't surprising that the highest frequencies can be recovered in good fidelity. Compare a gaussian blur, which is usually considered to look better, and whose frequency transform focuses all the attenuation at the highest frequencies. You would be far less able to recover individual strands of hair in an image that was gaussian blurred.<p>> Remarkably, the information “hidden” in the blurred images survives being saved in a lossy image format.<p>Remarkable, maybe, but unsurprising if you understand that jpeg operates on basically the same frequency logic as described above. Specifically, it will be further attenuating and quantizing the highest frequencies of the image. Since the box blur has barely attenuated them already, this doesn't affect our ability to recover the image.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:09:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46977617</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46977617</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46977617</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "Clean Coder: The Dark Path (2017)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>All type checkers either permit incorrect programs, reject correct programs, or are turing complete.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:43:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945738</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945738</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945738</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not the only way to protect yourself from accusations of copyright infringement. I remember reading that the GNU utils were designed to be as performant as possible in order to force themselves to structure the code differently from the unix originals.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:21:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906221</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906221</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906221</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "Show HN: Adboost – A browser extension that adds ads to every webpage"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>click fraud consists of the person who runs a website themselves clicking, running bots to click, paying someone else to click, etc ads on their own website. it becomes fraud first because they have contractually agreed not to do that, and second because they are materially benefiting from it. an unaligned third party clicking (etc) on ads has neither of those conditions being true, and hence isn't fraud or otherwise illegal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:25:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857062</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857062</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857062</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "Germany's Merz admits nuclear exit was strategic mistake"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Many reactors can be updated to last longer than their initial design lifetime. This is usually far cheaper than building a new reactor. I expect that if the political environment in germany was more conducive to nuclear, that is what they would have done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 05:05:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655415</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655415</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655415</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "The Myth of the ThinkPad"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>macs are the hipster variant of lenovo.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 06:57:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46643767</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46643767</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46643767</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "Tailscale state file encryption no longer enabled by default"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The only way to protect against that is if a secure application boundary is enforced by the operating system. You can make it harder for other programs to uncover secrets by encrypting them, but any other application can reverse the encryption. I don't believe using the tpm meaningfully changes that situation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 08 Jan 2026 06:27:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46537891</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46537891</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46537891</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "Tailscale state file encryption no longer enabled by default"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If windows is encrypted with keys from the TPM anyways, then tailscale doesn't need to encrypt a second time.<p>Windows also bit me in the ass with this feature, but tailscale not enabling encryption wouldn't have helped one iota.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:09:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532829</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532829</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532829</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The rationale for this prohibition of insider trading differs between countries and regions. Some view it as unfair to other investors in the market who do not have access to the information, as the investor with inside information can potentially make larger profits than an investor without such information.[2] However, insider trading is also prohibited to prevent the directors of a company (the insiders) from abusing a company's confidential information for the directors' personal gain.<p>Well, there you go. Any more questions?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 05:26:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485211</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485211</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485211</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I believe certain european countries have or had free universities which instead filter students with incredibly difficult courses. Thousands might enter because both tuition and board are free and they would like a degree, but the university ensures that only a small group make it to second year. I believe the filtering is less intense in later years, since the job has already been done by that point.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:21:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473300</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473300</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473300</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by bmandale in "No strcpy either"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You have totally misunderstood what the person you are talking with means by unsafe. Perhaps you should resolve that prior to such condescensions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2026 03:48:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472607</link><dc:creator>bmandale</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472607</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472607</guid></item></channel></rss>