Hacker News: dzdt

New comment by dzdt in "Everything you do is being recorded"

dzdt — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 04:05:48 +0000

If you are healthy and kid free, you can just not go to the doctor.

New comment by dzdt in "São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest"

dzdt — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:55:56 +0000

Better article with good pictures : https://thursd.com/articles/helio-da-silva-sao-paulo-tiquati...

Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

dzdt — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:03:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/a-civilian-plane-crashed-in-new-mexico-was-the-militarys-tech-to-blame/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181099

Points: 499

# Comments: 278

New comment by dzdt in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

dzdt — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:05:13 +0000

Make it a tinfoil hat :-)

New comment by dzdt in "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled"

dzdt — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:23:00 +0000

I suppose it will fall to AI as well to compose the mathematical equivalent of The Ballad of John Henry. Who will be the human champion, the last great hero who can deliver proofs "from the book" that a machine cannot outperform?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_from_THE_BOOK

New comment by dzdt in "AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region"

dzdt — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:59:08 +0000

Aee they trying to create snow crash for real??? [1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/184341/in-the-nove...

New comment by dzdt in "Never Give Them Your Face"

dzdt — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:02:06 +0000

I think you are right on the big picture : what has changed is Big Tech has recognized that comprehensive data on individuals is valuable. I think the biggest value category however is in the area of highly-targeted opinion manipulation. Build a model of what are the current beliefs of each individual, get paid by marketing or political candidates or whoever to generate an optimized media feed to manipulate that person's beliefs to match some target set of beliefs.

Guardian 100 best novels (stats and errors)

dzdt — Wed, 20 May 2026 10:44:53 +0000

Article URL: https://mpaldridge.github.io/blog/guardian-novels.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205684

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by dzdt in "The Physics–and Physicality–Of Extreme Juggling (2018)"

dzdt — Sat, 16 May 2026 14:47:46 +0000

It seems like Barron only ever managed to flash 14 beanbags that one time in 2017 and neither he nor anyone else has repeated or exceeded that since.

New comment by dzdt in ""Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage"

dzdt — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:56:16 +0000

Yes trying to read that article my brain refused to parse "EviCore" as anything but "EvilCorp". Every time.

New comment by dzdt in "'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet"

dzdt — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:11:34 +0000

This is small potatoes compared to the rain gauge tampering farmers were doing in Colorado. There was a recent conviction for $6.5 million dollars of fraud against the federal crop insurance program!

https://www.justice.gov/usao-co/pr/two-southeastern-colorado...

New comment by dzdt in "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove"

dzdt — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:12:07 +0000

I think the new model with music is they don't make a very serious attempt to keep a monopoly on the content. They only really care about a monopoly on convenience. If anyone would set up some convenient way to stream these concert recordings they would get sued to oblivion. But the recordings circulating as inconvenient downloads? Not a big target.

New comment by dzdt in "The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer"

dzdt — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:21:09 +0000

At least in the early 2000s, Bloomberg had strict requirements about this. Their financial terminal has a ton of math calculations. The requirement was that they always had live servers running with two different hardware platforms with different operating systems and different CPU architectures and different build chains. The math had to agree to the same bitwise results. They had to turn off almost all compiler optimisations to achieve this, and you had to handle lots of corner cases in code: can't trust NaN or Infinity or underflow to be portable.

They could transparently load balance a user from one different backend platform to the other with zero visible difference to the user.

New comment by dzdt in "What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential?"

dzdt — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:19:09 +0000

Guessing not knowledge but I expect it was called that from the accidental occurence of color on broadcast TV wben the image includes something with black-and-white stripes at the right spacing. So the name predates the intentional usage by the comphter system.

New comment by dzdt in "What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential?"

dzdt — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:24:35 +0000

I think in this alternate universe the Apple-II analog would be the first cheap computer that could run a spreadsheet. That really takes a 40 column display. So I think it would have waited for the 2mhz 6502 to handle the doubled line frequency.

New comment by dzdt in "New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike"

dzdt — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:21:46 +0000

I do think there is a strong possibility the people in charge in the US government believe an Iran state sponsored terrorism attack would be a political benefit to them. Such things boost support for the sitting President, and could also give political cover for additional authoritarian acts to help them retain power. Would they do the school attack on purpose? Maybe? But for sure they keep the war going until they generate the response they are looking for...

New comment by dzdt in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

dzdt — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:15:49 +0000

Is this something European style privacy laws would protect against? Though given the US political situation we are far from being able to enact any kind of anti-authoritarian protections...

New comment by dzdt in "Claude's Cycles [pdf]"

dzdt — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:09:39 +0000

I think it could be solved still pseudononymously: introduce a "vouch" button that allows a user to vouch that another user is human. This is consequential both for the vouched-for and vouching accounts. Run a page-rank style algorithm on the graph of vouches to generate a certainty score for the humanity of each account. For repeated posters this should converge to a correct answer fairly quickly. There is still a challenge for green accounts, but having degraded experience for new users is not a doom scenario for the site.

New comment by dzdt in "Allocating on the Stack"

dzdt — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:23:34 +0000

For purely historical reasons the C/C++ stack is "small" with exactly how small being outside of programmer control. So you have to avoid using the stack even if it would be the better solution. Otherwise you risk your program crashing/failing with stack overflow errors.

New comment by dzdt in "You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account"

dzdt — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:19:45 +0000

A related thing that bugs me is how many scam search results come up and are prioritised if you search for "uk eta" or similar. On google for me the real site is sandwiched in positon 4 after 3 and before 2 additional paid sponsored scam sites each with large block sections in the search results.