Hacker News: me_again

New comment by me_again in ""Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says"

me_again — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:07:26 +0000

Was VMWare dying prior to the acquisition? I don't really know the financials but that wasn't the impression I had.

New comment by me_again in "Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer"

me_again — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:35:21 +0000

Amused by how many X's there are: https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#1100B

Did you mean Aegean Check Mark or Old North Arabian letter Teh?

New comment by me_again in "A lot of population numbers are fake"

me_again — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:57:02 +0000

That would be significantly less than one person, regardless of how off the population estimates are ;-)

New comment by me_again in "Readable code is unreadable: Arthur Whitney's J incunabulum"

me_again — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:59:56 +0000

I think there are 2 claims which this article conflates. I'll jokingly call them "Weak Whitney" and "Strong Whitney".

"Weak Whitney" is the claim that this very terse style is comprehensible given sufficient study. I find this plausible.

"Strong Whitney" is the claim that in many circumstances this style is _better_ than a more normal style, with full variable names, whitespace, etc. I am much less persuaded by that claim. When the article says things like "Note that d probably stands for “dimension” or perhaps “depth”; I’m unsure on this point." I'm like, yes, congratulations, that is exactly the point of using more descriptive names and/or comments.

New comment by me_again in "Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files"

me_again — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:46:44 +0000

I don't think we have enough information to conclude exactly what happened. But my read is the researcher was looking for demo.filevine.com and found margolis.filevine.com instead. The implication is that many other customers may have been vulnerable in the same way.

New comment by me_again in "Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files"

me_again — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:20:18 +0000

Lawyers can and will send cease and desist letters to people whether or not there is any legal basis for it. Often the threat of a lawsuit, even a meritless one, is enough to keep people quiet.

New comment by me_again in "Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category"

me_again — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 22:17:14 +0000

ArXiv has always had a moderation step. The moderators are unable to keep up with the volume of submissions. Accepting these reviews without moderation would be a change to current process, not "just like arXiv has always worked"

New comment by me_again in "Breaking "provably correct" Leftpad"

me_again — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 18:33:10 +0000

Hillel Wayne posted a followup https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/three-ways-formal... which may be interesting. Essentially the issue is "what does the Length of a string mean?"

New comment by me_again in "You are the scariest monster in the woods"

me_again — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 16:48:16 +0000

"As soon as profit can be made" is exactly what the article is warning about. This is exactly the "Human + AI" combination.

Within your lifetime (it's probably already happened) you will be denied something you care about (medical care, a job, citizenship, parole) by an AI which has been granted the agency to do so in order to make more profit.

New comment by me_again in "DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia"

me_again — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 06:16:07 +0000

As I understand it, they persuade their marks to transfer bitcoin to accounts they control.

New comment by me_again in "Three ways formally verified code can go wrong in practice"

me_again — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 05:47:52 +0000

But what do you do when the primary and backup disagree?

New comment by me_again in "Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?"

me_again — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 07:08:04 +0000

Actually no - there's a "please help fund us" but you can read without paying

New comment by me_again in "Giant, all-seeing telescope is set to revolutionize astronomy"

me_again — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:56:32 +0000

Not exactly the same, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome... is a technique used in radio astronomy which uses two receivers a long way apart and a very accurate clock to approximate having a radio telescope the size of the distance between them. By putting one receiver on a satellite, measurements have been made with a separation of 300,000km.

New comment by me_again in "Curl: We still have not seen a valid security report done with AI help"

me_again — Tue, 06 May 2025 20:49:54 +0000

Vulnerability reports are interesting from a trust point of view, because each party has a different financial incentive. You can't 100% trust the vendor to accurately assess the severity of an issue - they have a lot riding on downplaying an issue in some cases. The person reporting the bug is also likely looking for bounty and reputational benefit, both of which are enhanced if the issue is considered high severity. So a user of the supposedly-vulnerable program can't blindly trust either party.

New comment by me_again in "An end to all this prostate trouble?"

me_again — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:51:28 +0000

The grandmother hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis is reasonably well-established. The corresponding 'grandfather effect' has not really been demonstrated, as far as I know. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2007...

New comment by me_again in "US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU"

me_again — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:46:40 +0000

Donald Trump, champion of the locavore community. Now I've heard everything.

New comment by me_again in "GLP-1 drugs: An economic disruptor? (2024)"

me_again — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:21:31 +0000

There's an awful lot of "35% this, 27% the other" numbers in this article, and exactly 0 citations for any of them.

New comment by me_again in "A cryptocurrency scam that turned a small town against itself"

me_again — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 17:24:41 +0000

Seems to me private equity is often, though not always, a terrific way to run a previously-stable business into the ground in short order. See for example https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3423290 .

New comment by me_again in "The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is"

me_again — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 06:52:13 +0000

I don't believe there is really any interest in balancing the Federal budget or saving money. It's a flimsy pretext for purging every person and program not ideologically aligned with the incoming administration.

Would anyone like to bet whether the national debt will be lower in 2029?

New comment by me_again in "A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2021)"

me_again — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 22:05:12 +0000

Marco Pierre-White recommends grating onions, which ingeniously avoids the entire issue.

Grating the Gordian knot, if you will.

https://youtu.be/glIUUrh6qtQ?t=40