Hacker News: floxy

New comment by floxy in "Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers"

floxy — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 04:40:08 +0000

             1234567890 
           x     111111
           ------------
             1234567890
            12345678900
           123456789000
          1234567890000
         12345678900000
      + 123456789000000
      -----------------
    137,174,072,825,790

...looks like O(n^2).

New comment by floxy in "A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median"

floxy — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:30:09 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Rivest_algorithm

New comment by floxy in "Defeat air-gapped systems by exfiltrating data using Apple Find My network"

floxy — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:25:37 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_%28codename%29

New comment by floxy in "Bad Epoll Flaw Gives Attackers Root Access on Linux and Android"

floxy — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:54:30 +0000

Seems like:

https://github.com/J-jaeyoung/bad-epoll

...is the source material. I'm not a kernel guy; I'm not following how this works:

"With that control, the exploit gains an arbitrary read of kernel memory through /proc/self/fdinfo ."

New comment by floxy in "Gen Z is forgoing the institution of mariage"

floxy — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:38:02 +0000

Is there a source of average price per wedding over time, since say 1800? $12,000 still sounds over the top, even accounting for inflation.

New comment by floxy in "FSF Librephone update: Ensuring freedom, one blob at a time"

floxy — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:11:45 +0000

Decompiling binary blobs is a strong suit for LLM AI, right? Maybe progress on this will be faster than I expect? Does the FSF spend money on non-free AI services? That is, do they have ethical issues with that? Or do they only use AGPL licensed services (or similar)?

New comment by floxy in "An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time"

floxy — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:49:28 +0000

https://www.shutterstock.com/search/millstone

New comment by floxy in "A US military exercise to launch a satellite on short notice"

floxy — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:40:35 +0000

Roundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser-Pushed Lightsails

https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...

New comment by floxy in "An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time"

floxy — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:00:16 +0000

If you only care about the two surfaces matching each other, you don't even have to worry about your indicator. Just grind them against each other, or use some lapping compound to speed up the process. If you want to get the surfaces truly flat, then you use three surfaces that you successively grind against each other.

https://www.ericweinhoffer.com/blog/the-whitworth-three-plat...

New comment by floxy in "IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

floxy — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:14:39 +0000

>We have centimeter (10 mm) then decimeter (100mm)

Does anyone actually use those? I think I would throw up a little in my mouth if I saw either of those on a mechanical drawing.

New comment by floxy in "The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated"

floxy — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:31:31 +0000

They plow the mountain passes in the winter time in at least Montana and Idaho. I'd be very surprised if they don't in Colorado or Utah.

New comment by floxy in "Should People Avoid Whole-Body Screening Info?"

floxy — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 20:27:02 +0000

Couldn't you make most of these arguments about the early days of most medical interventions? You don't need an x-ray to determine that patient A has a broken arm; it hurts when you twist it in this manner. Anyway, this seems like a way for rich people to subsidize up and coming technology for the rest of us. Maybe in ten years it will be meh and we can ignore it. Or maybe it will become cheap enough that everyone gets it with a yearly checkup. And maybe in 20 years some Star-Trek like body scanner will be in almost every gym in the country. And the hypochondriacs can get a scan every day.

New comment by floxy in "Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV"

floxy — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:13:20 +0000

>but still not quite enough to go one way on my most frequent "long drive"

...without a charging stop.

New comment by floxy in "Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV"

floxy — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:00:49 +0000

The current Chevrolet Silverado EV has a 200 kWh battery option. Even with towing reducing the range to say 200 miles, you could do a lot of pickupy things with that.

New comment by floxy in "Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV"

floxy — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:48:54 +0000

Or you own more than vehicle. Plenty of families own multiple vehicles, and they don't all need to have tons of range.

New comment by floxy in "Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV"

floxy — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:46:18 +0000

>charge it every single day.

That's pretty much standard operating procedure for any EV. That's one of the perks of owning an EV. Plug it in when you get home from work, and have a full "tank" every morning. Plus you get the cabin preheating using the wall electricity.

New comment by floxy in "Five Eyes warns AI models capable of toppling governments are months away"

floxy — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:24:08 +0000

That's pretty much the plot for one of the latter Terminator movies, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_3:_Rise_of_the_Mach...

New comment by floxy in "Five Eyes warns AI models capable of toppling governments are months away"

floxy — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:21:35 +0000

Aren't there plenty of countries which aren't exactly super-stable anyway? Might not take much to have select countries pushed over the edge. Especially if you have territorial disputes with neighboring countries looking to take advantage. For the U.S., what if Social Security payments suddenly stopped for 6 months? What if the U.S. lost records of Treasury Bills, and they couldn't be redeemed for a while? What if electricity went out for 30% of the population for three months? I would think it pretty cold comfort that the government didn't topple, because the next election results were a mix of democrats and republicans.

New comment by floxy in "Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?"

floxy — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 23:14:49 +0000

Hopefully they'll be coming soonish. Seems like we are getting back on track with the popularization of drones.

https://alef.aero/

New comment by floxy in "Show HN: We built an 8-bit CPU as 2nd year EE students"

floxy — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:49:42 +0000

Raise your hand if you still have a UV eraser at the bottom of a cabinet somewhere.