Hacker News: dodobirdlord

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

dodobirdlord — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 04:20:52 +0000

The signature scheme used by bitcoin is far from the best encryption we have today, and more resistant to being updated than most more important things. So it’s an interesting novelty.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

dodobirdlord — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 04:03:32 +0000

If you don’t also drop wallets with compromised signatures at some point after introducing secure signatures (effectively editing the ledger) they will be up for grabs.

Absent a functional ledger rewrite I expect there would be some window where miners with access to CRQCs switch their focus over to exclusively mining blocks of transactions transferring coins from insecure wallets to secure wallets under their own control. Is there actually interest in living in the world where the first person with both a CRQC and a mining farm gets to claim all of the stranded bitcoins for themselves?

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

dodobirdlord — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:51:59 +0000

Doesn’t this effectively still destroy all legacy wallets? Once the throttling limit goes into effect, it will be impossible for holders of legacy wallets to transfer their bitcoin without paying ~1 bitcoin per bitcoin they want to move. Doesn’t this amount to the same thing as abolishing all legacy wallets plus increasing the mining reward with extra steps?

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

dodobirdlord — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:45:05 +0000

In the absolute disaster scenario where the ecosystem is taken by surprise by an adversary with a CRQC, regulated custodians could form a consortium to reconstitute a new quantum-resistant version of bitcoin, pooling their ownership ledgers from before the disaster to reinitialize the blockchain and consigning to oblivion all coins not held in custody.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

dodobirdlord — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:34:04 +0000

Does anyone happen to know if it is settled law in the United States that transferring bitcoins using a cracked key is a criminal act? It’s not immediately obvious to me that it would be covered by the CFAA.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

dodobirdlord — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:19:38 +0000

What risk are you envisioning in #1?

New comment by dodobirdlord in "The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE"

dodobirdlord — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:37:30 +0000

Prosecutors don't have to "prove" things, they have to convince a jury. If your defense seems implausible a jury probably won't buy it.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Antimatter has been transported for the first time"

dodobirdlord — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:05:23 +0000

Mass in the universe appears to be (very) roughly uniformly distributed, so even if there are large bodies of antimatter far away in the universe there would have to be a transition boundary somewhere between here and there where the universe goes from being mostly matter to being mostly antimatter. The universe is big and stuff would sometimes cross this boundary and get annihilated, and if this happened it would be the brightest thing in the sky, briefly outshining entire galaxies. We’ve been watching the sky for a while now and have never observed a bright visual event with the spectral signature of a matter/antimatter annihilation, so we assume there is not such a transition boundary, and by extension that the universe is made up of mostly matter out to the edge of the observable universe.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

dodobirdlord — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:27:39 +0000

I suppose they could also put the points on the car and impound it after it accrues enough points to have a drivers license suspended. Hard to drive if you don’t have a car.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

dodobirdlord — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:24:07 +0000

Assuming we’re talking about RFC 2119, it’s important not to collapse the distinction between SHOULD and MAY, which is there for a reason. MAY elements are legitimately optional, SHOULD elements are there for a reason and are disregarded at one’s own risk.

> SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

To validly disregard a SHOULD, you need to (a) fully understand the implications, and (b) accept them.

Any time someone disregards a SHOULD and then complains about the result, they are necessarily in the wrong. Either they didn’t fully understand the implications, or they don’t actually accept them.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

dodobirdlord — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:13:30 +0000

Google probably did parse these messages as well-formed before inspecting them and deciding to drop them based on the lack of this field. The RFC imposes no mandatory obligation to deliver messages just because they are well-formed.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"

dodobirdlord — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:10:26 +0000

Amazon’s hiring bar has historically been very low, with a philosophy that if it doesn’t work out you can always just fire the person later. A similar philosophy exists for staffing up teams for speculative projects. If it doesn’t work out you can just axe the whole division after a couple of years. Periodic large layoffs are a natural consequence of operating like this.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable"

dodobirdlord — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 03:06:06 +0000

There are relatively few cases of true synonyms in English (or any language). There are subtle differences in meaning, register, etc that are recognized by native speakers.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs"

dodobirdlord — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 05:24:24 +0000

The codec can be triggered to run automatically by adversarial input. The irrelevance of the format is itself irrelevant when ffmpeg has it on by default.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Death rates rose in hospital ERs after private equity firms took over"

dodobirdlord — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 19:29:05 +0000

I think you misread the original post. It is about overregulation fostering the spread of PE operated hospitals. Not about overregulation causing PE operated hospitals to have worse outcomes.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Death rates rose in hospital ERs after private equity firms took over"

dodobirdlord — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:21:41 +0000

How does this relate to the original post? The original post posits that overregulation contributes to the dysfunction of the US healthcare system. The next response calls for specifics. The comment you responded to provides a specific regulation that may be contributing.

You respond questioning how that could explain why PE operated hospitals have worse outcomes. I agree, this doesn’t seem to have an explanatory power for why PE operated hospitals have worse outcomes, but how does that relate?

New comment by dodobirdlord in "ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes"

dodobirdlord — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 03:52:07 +0000

Only if you myopically assume all drugs have equal abuse potential, addiction potential, and negative consequences of abuse. The US federal drug schedule is a clown show.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes"

dodobirdlord — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 03:48:56 +0000

Health insurance prior authorization policy, approved medication lists, and network pharmacy policies complicate maintaining continuous access during the DEA-imposed artificial shortage by complicating transferring prescriptions to pharmacies that have supply available and transferring prescriptions to substantially-equivalent drugs sold by different manufacturers.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "Inter-Planetary Network Special Interest Group"

dodobirdlord — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 03:12:56 +0000

People are fairly attached to causality.

New comment by dodobirdlord in "There is no memory safety without thread safety"

dodobirdlord — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 17:00:50 +0000

If the variables are word-sized, sure. But what if they are larger? Now a race condition between one thread writing and another thread reading or writing a variable is a memory safety issue.