Hacker News: lambdaone

New comment by lambdaone in "Is Germany's gold safe in New York ?"

lambdaone — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:07:25 +0000

At today's prices, that's around 1400 tons of gold. It's made out of lots of individual gold bars, and they can certainly move it in increments, by road then air or sea, unless the American government stops them doing it.

People ship million-dollar assets all the time. It would be a huge task to make 160,000 such trips, though.

New comment by lambdaone in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

lambdaone — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:08:53 +0000

Very insightful. One key sentence sums it up: "He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade."

This is going to get worse, and eventually cause disastrous damage unless we do something about it, as we risk losing human institutional memory across just about every domain, and end up as child-like supplicants to the machines.

But as the article says, this is a people problem, not a machine problem.

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

lambdaone — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:51:45 +0000

False positives can be eliminated mechanistically by testing if they actually work, in a sufficiently isolated automated test apparatus.

The hard thing is reducing detected crashes to well-formulated test cases that help rather than hinder maintainers.

New comment by lambdaone in "HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)"

lambdaone — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:58:39 +0000

What a fantastic company HP used to be, back in the day. They led the way in scientific equipment and calculators, and even desktop computers for a brief moment.

They even made PostScript laser printers that were built like tanks and were a by-word for reliability.

Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates, and this is just scraping the bottom out of an already empty barrel.

New comment by lambdaone in "The 49MB web page"

lambdaone — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:46:41 +0000

The article says "I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from."

The answer is really simple and follows on from this article; the purpose of the app is even more privacy violation and tracking.

New comment by lambdaone in "Show HN: Context Gateway – Compress agent context before it hits the LLM"

lambdaone — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:44:44 +0000

This company sounds like it has months to live, or until the VC money runs out at most. If this idea is good, Anthropic et. al. will roll it into their own product, eliminating any purpose for it to exist as an independent product. And if it isn't any good, the company won't get traction.

New comment by lambdaone in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

lambdaone — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:00:49 +0000

Of course, the trained model they use to do the code generation may itself have been trained on the very open source code they are trying to replicate 'cleanly'.

New comment by lambdaone in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

lambdaone — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:42:08 +0000

Amazing hyperbole, and a deflection from the real issues. You can fight against wrongdoing without actually advocating people being killed.

Right now, climate change is an undeniable fact, its causes well-known, and the evidence for it now part of everyday life. If anything, its effects have been underestimated to date, and 'non-believers' in it are either fools or acting based on morally repugnant principles.

New comment by lambdaone in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

lambdaone — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:38:11 +0000

Yes. The obsession with demonizing AI/data centre loads seems to be a deliberate distraction from the much, much larger carbon loads of the economy at large relative to which IT power consumption is a tiny proportion.

New comment by lambdaone in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

lambdaone — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:34:35 +0000

This is terrifying, and those fighting against stopping or reducing global warming should at this point be regarded as hostis humani generis

New comment by lambdaone in "Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation"

lambdaone — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:00:42 +0000

This is a great description of something I've been thinking about in terms of concepts like regression to the mean, clustering and median filtering - the space of LLM output is much smaller than that of the input, precisely because the LLM works so hard to extract minimal-information patterns from its input.

New comment by lambdaone in "GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple"

lambdaone — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:22:21 +0000

It's a sign of how far we've come that this article says "Break Free from Google and Apple", not "Break Free from Google, Apple and Microsoft".

New comment by lambdaone in "Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse"

lambdaone — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:11:59 +0000

None of this required a police state. Just people working together to cross-correlate information in the way that you would expect to be able to do in an open society.

What wrong do you think was done here? What would you prefer to be different?

New comment by lambdaone in "Reports of Telnet's death have been greatly exaggerated"

lambdaone — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:52:38 +0000

A large industrial robot running an insecure protocol - what could possibly go wrong?

New comment by lambdaone in "The Day the Telnet Died"

lambdaone — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 08:58:50 +0000

You can use ssh with the None cipher, thus disabling encryption entirely while still using the rest of the protocol.

New comment by lambdaone in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

lambdaone — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:27:58 +0000

It's certainly one way to do arena-based garbage collection.

New comment by lambdaone in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

lambdaone — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:52:35 +0000

Multistory DCs are commonplace in major cities.

New comment by lambdaone in "I miss thinking hard"

lambdaone — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:30:30 +0000

Right now vibe coding is more like training cats. You are constantly pushing against the model's tendency to produce its default outputs regardless of your directions. When those default outputs are what you want - which they are in many simple cases of effectively English-to-code translation with memorized lookup - it's great. When they are not, you might as well write the code yourself and at least be able to understand the code you've generated.

New comment by lambdaone in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

lambdaone — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:20:36 +0000

The thing I find most notable is the lack of any concrete information on how these things are to be cooled, other than quotes like "space cooling is free".

If you want to radiate away the heat, you are either limited by the Stefan-Boltzmann equation which requires extraordinarily large radiators at any reasonable operating temperature, or have to develop a "super-Planckian" radiator technology, something which while it may be theoretically possible doesn't seem to actually exist yet as a practical technology.

The only other plausible technology I can think of would be to use evaporative or sublimation-based cooling, but that would consume vast quantities of mass in the process, every bit of which would have to be delivered to space first.

Has anyone seen any published work that suggests it is actually anywhere near economically feasible to dissipate megawatts of power in space, using either these or any other technology?

New comment by lambdaone in "We Do Not Support Opt-Out Forms (2025)"

lambdaone — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:31:16 +0000

I'd say that figure was more like 99.99% or higher. Email is very, very complex these days, and SMTP is just the beginning.