Hacker News: eichin

New comment by eichin in "Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found"

eichin — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 02:34:52 +0000

That was the scaffolding for the Claude 4.6 run discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633855 - if that's all it takes, dealing with Mythos is way too late :-)

New comment by eichin in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

eichin — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:25:30 +0000

Looking online it looks like the newsstand price of an issue is around $10 (which I'd assume is heavily ad subsidized, if anyone is still buying print ads?) which is an interesting data point for a pricing model. (Of course, I looked online because I have no idea where I'd find a newsstand around here - the nearest newsstand that show up on google maps has reviews that say "It's just snacks and scratch tickets." and "three newspapers and no magazines" - I may have to stop by just to see what three newspapers they have :-)

New comment by eichin in "GabeN Is Shitting Yacht Money into Flatpak and You're Still Arguing Init Systems"

eichin — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:34:43 +0000

I'd love to see snap go the way of upstart...

New comment by eichin in "Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years"

eichin — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:29:36 +0000

Also, he did compare with earlier versions that, before 4.5, were dramatically worse at finding the same problems. There's even a graph. That seems to pretty solidly support the idea that this is "gain of function" as it were...

New comment by eichin in "Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years"

eichin — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:50:27 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg is the presentation itself. The prompts are trivial; the bug (and others) looks real and well-explained - I'm still skeptical but this looks a lot more real/useful than anything a year ago even suggested was possible...

New comment by eichin in "Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years"

eichin — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:46:51 +0000

An explanation of the Claude Opus 4.6 linux kernel security findings as presented by Nicholas Carlini at unpromptedcon.

Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years

eichin — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:46:51 +0000

Article URL: https://mtlynch.io/claude-code-found-linux-vulnerability/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633855

Points: 432

# Comments: 268

New comment by eichin in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

eichin — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:38:49 +0000

I was just disappointed that they didn't include a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#/media/File:... joke (or maybe that's also a tell...)

New comment by eichin in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

eichin — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:29:08 +0000

if they're the ones I'm thinking of (wide, but not very tall, good for large flat things - basically map drawers but not quite that big) just be forewarned that the drawers don't fully extend. (There are mods to fix that which involve doing some drilling and grinding on the drawer slides...)

New comment by eichin in "Random numbers, Persian code: A mysterious signal transfixes radio sleuths"

eichin — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:19:34 +0000

ooh, new fodder for conspiracies about electric cars not having AM radios :-)

New comment by eichin in "John Bradley, author of xv, has died"

eichin — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 04:02:47 +0000

Matthias Wandel - I'd used jhead for years, and I've watched "that experimental woodworking guy on youtube" for years - it was a bit of a mental "record scratch" when I realized they were actually the same guy.

New comment by eichin in "Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised"

eichin — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 02:57:17 +0000

If the whole point of sandboxing is to not trust the software, it doesn't make sense for the software to do the sandboxing. (At most it should have a standard way to suggest what access it needs, and then your outside tooling should work with what's reasonable and alert on what isn't.) The android-like approach of sandboxing literally everything works because you are forced to solve these problems generically and at scale - things like "run this as a distinct uid" are a lot less hassle if you're amortizing it across everything.

(And no, most linux namespace stuff does not require root, the few things that do can be provided in more-controlled ways. For examples, look at podman, not docker.)

New comment by eichin in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

eichin — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:30:12 +0000

Got flashbacks to 1999 from some of those charts - I had a pair of design charts (partly for arguments, partly for onboarding) that were 17 nodes each and a lot of lines. (A coworker snuck in some extra nodes and an arrow labeled "troops move through Austria" and it was a while before anyone other than me noticed - yeah, that kind of chart.) This is not a lesson in design complexity - the design was pretty tight for what it did, even if you go back and read the patents - it's a lesson in the use of abstraction for explanation complexity and that you can break up the presentation more sanely than the code-on-disk actually is, you just have to stop and think about it (and have a bit more empathy for the people you're presenting to than, well, anyone in 1999 actually had :-)

New comment by eichin in "Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts"

eichin — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:12:58 +0000

that's why you set &udm=14 in the search URL config...

New comment by eichin in "25 Years of Eggs"

eichin — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:10:48 +0000

Not convinced of that edit - or at least, my read was "revisit this 5 years from now", not 30...

New comment by eichin in "25 Years of Eggs"

eichin — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:08:28 +0000

I was surprised to learn (from this article) that there are local models that can do this (not sure if there are any that run on hardware I actually have though, unlike Tesseract which works fine on the scanning hardware I set up for it ~5 years ago.) For privacy reasons, cloud-based OCR is a non-starter...

New comment by eichin in "Waymo Safety Impact"

eichin — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:32:08 +0000

Ooh, that's a worthy challenge. Of course, I can imagine getting enough data on all of those cities and deciding to launch everywhere else but not Boston "because your roads are garbage and you all drive like you're impaired 24/7" :-)

New comment by eichin in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

eichin — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:40:20 +0000

Heh, in the early days of C++ (1990ish) I had a notable application of 3+4 involving a doubly linked list with cache pointers (time-sequence data browser so references were likely "nearby" as the user zoomed in; spec was to handle streaming data eventually.) Had problems with it crashing in pointer-related ways (in 1990, nobody had a lot of C++ experience) so I cooked up a really dumb "just realloc an array" version so I could figure out if the problem was above or below data structure... and not only didn't the "dumb" version crash, it was also much faster (and of faster order!) due to amortized realloc - doing a more expensive operation much less often turns out to be a really good trick :-)

New comment by eichin in "Electron microscopy shows ‘mouse bite’ defects in semiconductors"

eichin — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:26:12 +0000

Listing alumni degree year is generally an "insider" thing (noone who isn't also a Cornell alum really cares which year, especially for a bachelor's degree; likewise Cornell doesn't mention the Harvard '95 PhD in Applied Physics, even if it's probably more relevant to the work...)

New comment by eichin in "Honda is killing its EVs"

eichin — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 03:43:30 +0000

On my Polestar 2, I was surprised how in actual use, friction braking was basically zero - to the point where when you start a trip the brakes are used for a few seconds to make sure they're still working (and scrub them a bit.) In actual driving - without trying particularly on my part - it's just always regen.