Hacker News: dadrian

New comment by dadrian in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

dadrian — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:36:28 +0000

While the result is impressive, this blog post is extremely disappointing.

- It does not show an example of the new best solution, nor explain why they couldn't show an example (e.g. if the proof was not constructive)

- It does not even explain the previous best solution. The diagram of the rescaled unit grid doesn't indicate what the "points" are beyond the normal non-scaled unit grid. I have no idea what to take away from it.

- It's description of the new proof just cites some terms of art with no effort made to actually explain the result.

If this post were not on the OpenAI blog, I would assume it was slop. I understand advanced pure mathematics is complicated, but it is entirely possible to explain complicated topics to non-experts.

New comment by dadrian in "YC's Biggest Scandals"

dadrian — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:42:33 +0000

There's something ironic about vibe-coding an anti-YC site. They're why OpenAI exists!

New comment by dadrian in "Using the internet like it's 1999"

dadrian — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:57:27 +0000

The Internet in 1999 was not good at all. Browsers barely worked, computers crashed constantly, the ability to actually search for useful things was limited, and many things we take for granted as being online (news, people, documentation) were not.

The mid-to-late 2000s are perhaps closer to what the author is looking for.

New comment by dadrian in "OpenSSL 4.0.0"

dadrian — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:20:01 +0000

I dunno, they'll let anybody get on the Internet and start a podcast.

New comment by dadrian in "Cloudflare targets 2029 for full post-quantum security"

dadrian — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:07:17 +0000

I will bring this up at the next meeting of the secret cryptographer cabal where we decide what information to reveal to non-cryptographers.

New comment by dadrian in "The cult of vibe coding is insane"

dadrian — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:51:26 +0000

Except for the part where it's constantly having quality and reliability issues, even independent of the server-side infrastructure (OOMs on long running tasks, etc).

New comment by dadrian in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

dadrian — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:14:20 +0000

As opposed to Pip, which is obviously free and sustainable forever.

New comment by dadrian in "DJB's Cryptographic Odyssey: From Code Hero to Standards Gadfly"

dadrian — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 01:54:43 +0000

The person with the most HN karma of anyone on this site, currently thinks djb's actions are wrong.

New comment by dadrian in "Be wary of Bluesky"

dadrian — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:25:37 +0000

For someone to come in and buy Bluesky and then hold everyone’s data hostage, then Bluesky would actually have to have enough value that someone would want to buy it.

New comment by dadrian in "DJB's Cryptographic Odyssey: From Code Hero to Standards Gadfly"

dadrian — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 17:43:31 +0000

RMS has, at minimum, showed that he swayed by parrots, spider plants, and free plane tickets and guest lodgings.

New comment by dadrian in "What Is OAuth?"

dadrian — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 17:40:52 +0000

> SAML is arguably the worst cryptographic standard ever created

The PGP packet has entered the chat.

New comment by dadrian in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

dadrian — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:07:06 +0000

GOT ‘EM

New comment by dadrian in "The Startup Graveyard"

dadrian — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:45:51 +0000

Some of them also aren't really dead.

New comment by dadrian in "We found cryptography bugs in the elliptic library using Wycheproof"

dadrian — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:42:57 +0000

The 90-day disclosure window is an arbitrary courtesy, not a binding contract about the behavior of either party. They probably had other things to do.

New comment by dadrian in "Comparing AI agents to cybersecurity professionals in real-world pen testing"

dadrian — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 02:27:12 +0000

Taken both in name and role, more or less.

New comment by dadrian in "Private equity is killing private ownership: first it was housing, now it's PCs"

dadrian — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 01:58:38 +0000

PE didn’t kill housing. Private equity owns 2-3% of homes.

New comment by dadrian in "Ask HN: Why is Hacker News red? Christmas?"

dadrian — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:12:40 +0000

It's not red! You're just colorblind.

New comment by dadrian in "Stop Breaking TLS"

dadrian — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:28:50 +0000

Network DLP is also not bulletproof so I'm not sure what the argument is there. These things are all best effort.

> if you have DLP at work, open the integrated browser in VS Code and notice how you can send protected test strings without anything chirping you.

I recognize it's not instrumented, but how are protected strings getting there in the first place?

New comment by dadrian in "Stop Breaking TLS"

dadrian — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 17:55:12 +0000

That is not true, you can run DLP on an endpoint directly and inside a browser directly (e.g. via an extension or direct integration hooks).

You can also try to stop the situation where the CC numbers are in the clear anywhere in the first place, so that you can't copy/paste them around. What happens if someone writes the CC number down on a piece of paper?

New comment by dadrian in "Stop Hacklore – An Open Letter"

dadrian — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:31:33 +0000

This is good advice, and there's good people on the signature list, but why is this is an open letter? This feels navel-gazey and straight out of 2017.