Hacker News: computerfriend

New comment by computerfriend in "Terence Tao Responds to the OpenAI Math Drop"

computerfriend — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 05:51:22 +0000

Oh, sorry, misinterpreted you! Although I am not sure I agree with your dismissal of nay-sayers. We can equally dismiss the opinions of early proponents. Perhaps maybe we should be hedging on all early opinions regardless.

New comment by computerfriend in "“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically"

computerfriend — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 05:45:21 +0000

Tao was not an early nay-sayer.

New comment by computerfriend in "Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates"

computerfriend — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:31:58 +0000

That was dismal. The LK-99 discourse was much more fun.

New comment by computerfriend in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

computerfriend — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 02:47:15 +0000

> congratulations on lack of ability to read with understanding

This seems weirdly aggressive and not nice.

New comment by computerfriend in "ArXiv's Updated Rate Limit Policy"

computerfriend — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 06:55:07 +0000

> There is also a marked increase in dense, AI-written papers. AI tools are making it easy for authors to flood arXiv and other repositories with these low-value papers.

arXiv should ban these submitters.

New comment by computerfriend in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

computerfriend — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 06:46:05 +0000

Yeah, I also don't believe it.

New comment by computerfriend in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

computerfriend — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 05:12:13 +0000

The hashing algorithm's security properties are a security property of Git. This is because:

* we pin to commit hashes and expect this to refer to immutable content,

* commit and tag signatures are over the hash.

The Linux quote about trusting the distribution doesn't make sense to me, as Git is content-addressable and decentralised, although possibly at the time it was a reasonable position to take for kernel development, but [1] could equivalently happen for Git and the hash algorithm being non-broken is required for it to be noticed. Not having to trust the forge is a very desirable property.

[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/57135/

New comment by computerfriend in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

computerfriend — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:50:27 +0000

Having a fetch break is better than having a fetch pull down malware.

New comment by computerfriend in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

computerfriend — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:45:15 +0000

Wireguard is secure against a quantum computer though, via an additional pre-shared key.

> If an additional layer of symmetric-key crypto is required (for, say, post-quantum resistance), WireGuard also supports an optional pre-shared key that is mixed into the public key cryptography.

(From https://www.wireguard.com/protocol/.)

New comment by computerfriend in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

computerfriend — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:30:49 +0000

That's per-repo. The claim is that user/repo/commit is flattened to just the commit. Your counterpoint (which I agree with and is well-known) is that it's flattened to repo/commit (dropping the user).

New comment by computerfriend in "What Zig felt like, coming from Rust"

computerfriend — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 05:15:45 +0000

> Zig, by comparison, offered little beyond syntax highlighting and basic autocompletion.

Zig has a language server and "The majority of LSP features are supported" (https://github.com/zigtools/zls#features).

New comment by computerfriend in "What Zig felt like, coming from Rust"

computerfriend — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 05:13:39 +0000

> the pre-LLM days when I used to love reading about programming languages.

The main thing to change this feeling for me is the large number of articles on programming languages written by an LLM.

New comment by computerfriend in "How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?"

computerfriend — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:06:09 +0000

> RenTech uses/used unpublished frontier mathematics to predict the market

No, more like, some differential geometry and gauge theory. The topics that Jim Simons worked on.

New comment by computerfriend in "Replacing Pull Requests with Delta"

computerfriend — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:24:54 +0000

I'd use some "DeltaDB"-like version control tool if it was lightweight and unopinionated about how it integrated into my workflow, since I think revisiting how some change came about at a more granular level could be enlightening. But I'm not interested in this agentic chat multiplayer stuff at all.

New comment by computerfriend in "How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?"

computerfriend — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:00:50 +0000

This is mostly true, but there are exceptions (e.g. Renaissance Technologies).

New comment by computerfriend in "How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?"

computerfriend — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 06:18:37 +0000

Or signals intelligence.

New comment by computerfriend in "HuggingFace: Security.txt"

computerfriend — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:47:19 +0000

Can't go stale if there's no expiration date.

New comment by computerfriend in "Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)"

computerfriend — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 20:10:32 +0000

man hier (https://man.archlinux.org/man/hier.7.en).

New comment by computerfriend in "Restroom Archive"

computerfriend — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:40:53 +0000

Does anyone have a recommendation for an open source photogrammetry application for Android?

New comment by computerfriend in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

computerfriend — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:09:35 +0000

You mean "smoking gun".