Hacker News: dmazin

New comment by dmazin in "StepFun 3.5 Flash is #1 cost-effective model for OpenClaw tasks (300 battles)"

dmazin — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:43:18 +0000

why do half the comments here read like ai trying to boost some sort of scam?

New comment by dmazin in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

dmazin — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:09:52 +0000

Maciej now has a Mars newsletter, which I obviously subscribed to immediately: https://mceglowski.substack.com/

I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.

New comment by dmazin in "Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer"

dmazin — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:44:15 +0000

Well, it should only update what it says: security updates (from official Ubuntu sources) unless you change the configuration.

New comment by dmazin in "A rogue AI led to a serious security incident at Meta"

dmazin — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:09:58 +0000

This is a lot less of a story than it seems.

It makes it sound like a rogue AI hacked Meta.

Instead, the "wild" thing here is that someone let an agent speak on their behalf with no review. The agent posted inaccurate instructions which someone else followed.

Those instructions lead to a brief gap in internal ACL controls, sounds like. I'm sorry, but given that the US government gave 14 year olds off incel Discords full access to Social Security data, this is not shocking by comparison.

To be clear, it is dumb and rude to let an agent speak on your behalf _without even reviewing it_.

This will eventually lead to a bigger snafu, of course. Security teams should control or at least review the agent permissions of every installation. Everyone is adopting this stuff, and a whole lot of people are going to set it up lazily/wrong (yolo mode at work).

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

dmazin — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:41:02 +0000

Me: “I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?” Opus 4.6, without searching the web: “Drive. You’re going to a car wash. ”

In the Age of AI, Don't Let Your Skills Atrophy

dmazin — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 05:08:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/03/29/age-of-ai-skill-atrophy.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031116

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by dmazin in "A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024)"

dmazin — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:00:24 +0000

If you can get your hands on it, I recommend Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook by the same author. She covers barbed wire as well as many other ways to communicate. The book itself is gorgeous.

Medieval Widowhood

dmazin — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:57:48 +0000

Article URL: https://medievalmarginalia.substack.com/p/on-medieval-widowhood

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946645

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dmazin in "Best Gas Masks"

dmazin — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:50:14 +0000

While NYT etc mostly stand back as the U.S. crosses the rubicon, what started as a freaking gadget review site seems to employ nearly all the journalists with actual gusto left in America.

New comment by dmazin in "New YC homepage"

dmazin — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 22:00:28 +0000

Wow – thank you for that.

Illuminating Data: From Medieval Scriptoria to the Cyber-Saint

dmazin — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:41:21 +0000

Article URL: https://substack.com/inbox/post/184644294

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649265

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

So You've Decided to Become Dead to the World: On Becoming an Anchoress

dmazin — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:39:08 +0000

Article URL: https://medievalmarginalia.substack.com/p/so-youve-decided-to-become-dead-to

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645072

Points: 16

# Comments: 5

New comment by dmazin in "Stewart Cheifet, creator of The Computer Chronicles, has died"

dmazin — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:45:23 +0000

Ah, rest in peace. I recommend you watch Computer Chronicles. It’s a treasure. If nothing else, it’s a solid trip down memory lane.

New comment by dmazin in "Clock synchronization is a nightmare"

dmazin — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 03:46:35 +0000

Yeah, the audio engineer then talked my ear off about networking!

New comment by dmazin in "Clock synchronization is a nightmare"

dmazin — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:16:59 +0000

I highly recommend anyone to look up how PTP works and how it compares to NTP. Clock sync is very interesting. When I joined an HFT company, first thing I did was understand this stuff. We care about it a lot[1].

If you want a specific question to answer, answer this: why does PTP need hardware timestamping to achieve high precision (where the network card itself assigns timestamps to packets, rather than having the kernel do it as part of TCP/IP processing)? If we use software timestamps, why can we do microsecond precision at best? If you understand this, it goes a very long way to understanding the core ideas behind precise clock sync.

Once you have a solid understanding of PTP, look into White Rabbit. They’re able to sync two clocks with sub-ns precision. In case that isn’t obvious, that is absolutely insane.

[1] So do a lot of people. For example audio engineers. Once, an audio engineer absolutely talked my ear off about ptp. I had no idea that audio people understood clock sync so well but they do!

New comment by dmazin in "Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker"

dmazin — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 20:48:12 +0000

Ask ChatGPT to generate product or business names for you. A lot of them contain the word “loom”. I know someone who recently vibe coded a thing and had an AI name it and it also has “loom” in it.

I’m not suggesting that that’s what happened with this project. I have no idea how much AI they used for any of it. But “loom” seems to appear in a lot of ChatGPT generated product names lately.

New comment by dmazin in "Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker"

dmazin — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 06:51:06 +0000

Don’t use “loom” in your product/company name. ChatGPT LOVES to suggest it, and it makes it obvious you used it.

Pink Lexical Slime: The Dark Side of Autocorrect (2017)

dmazin — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:24:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cyberdemon.org/2017/12/12/pink-lexical-slime.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080027

Points: 25

# Comments: 11

New comment by dmazin in "Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall"

dmazin — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 13:15:36 +0000

One more strange place: the barbershop in Leadenhall Market. You can see the wall right in the barbershop.

In fact, this wall drove their rent higher and eventually they closed.

(Forgive the sob story, but the barber was amazing, and they closed down + fired everyone with no notice to customers. I have not been able to track him down since!)

New comment by dmazin in "Lee Felsenstein"

dmazin — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:26:00 +0000

If this guy is interesting to you, I recommend "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry"[1]. Really good computing history book, and I've read a lot of them. Lee is a major character in the book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said