Hacker News: nickdothutton

New comment by nickdothutton in "Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now"

nickdothutton — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:09:13 +0000

Although not an escape from the "who can spend the most on tokens" arms race, there is also the possibility to make reverse engineering and executable analysis more difficult. This increases the attacker's token spend if nothing else. I wonder if dev teams will take an interest.

Better to write good, high-quality, properly architected and tested software in the first place of course.

Edited for typo.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

nickdothutton — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:12:40 +0000

Never heard of this game so had to look it up. Well, that was quite. rabbit hole!

New comment by nickdothutton in "The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet"

nickdothutton — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:52:29 +0000

Better to have smart bombs than dumb ones. Or rather, better to have 1 smart bomb than 1000 dumb ones spread across an entire city in order to pick off the particular building, vehicle, or person you want.

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

nickdothutton — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:48:07 +0000

POC of GTFO should apply to AI models too, or the false positive rate will overwhelm.

New comment by nickdothutton in "The Vasa"

nickdothutton — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:03:09 +0000

What a great article. Several years ago I wrote a (far inferior) post along similar lines, using a famous railway/bridge disaster[1]. Study of these kinds of engineering failures, even those from hundreds of years ago, are so revealing. I'd lay money on similar reports from the days of the ancient Egyptians as being just as valuable.

[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/the-age-of-invisible-disasters/

New comment by nickdothutton in "Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989"

nickdothutton — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:04:18 +0000

Hard to imagine now, but this was a huge turning point. A genuinely powerful CPU in a "Pee-Cee" available for less than RISC workstation money. I had to wait a while, mine was an AMD DX2-66 since I didn't have a budget for Intel... add Slackware... and countess hours messing with XF86config and I had a poor-mans Sun workstation.

New comment by nickdothutton in "EFF is leaving X"

nickdothutton — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:04:43 +0000

These are interesting numbers for engagement but don't mean as much without equivalent stats for the other platforms. It's a little like when a news story quotes only a percentage (but not the absolute figure in $) or vice versa.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Slightly safer vibecoding by adopting old hacker habits"

nickdothutton — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:41:04 +0000

I use a separate user account per project on my local machine (not in sudoers), which I ssh to, and also runs tmux. If I need claude code in windows, then I run a VM. The performance and (in)convenience cost of this to me is minimal. I started working this way in order to limit the "blast radius" when claude went on a dependency binge within a project.

New comment by nickdothutton in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

nickdothutton — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:02:52 +0000

"Gradually, then suddenly", as someone once said.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

nickdothutton — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:08:45 +0000

Title is wrong, should be "New form of cancer discovered".

New comment by nickdothutton in "How to turn anything into a router"

nickdothutton — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:07:45 +0000

When I got started, the NSFnet backbone was a bunch of IBM RS/6000 systems with comms cards. There were no routers.[1]

[1] https://www.rcsri.org/collection/nsfnet-t3/

New comment by nickdothutton in "Ask HN: Where have you found the coding limits of current models?"

nickdothutton — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:21:05 +0000

Recently working on implementing a "MS Teams for the terminal" (video conf, audio, chat, file sharing, recording, etc, the usual things you would expect). Linux and Mac, FBSD and others to follow. Prior to the 1M context window I found I had to restrict myself to specific functionality/areas of the codebase. I'd gotten lazy anyway so this was no bad thing. Reduced the "vibe" quotient of the AI coding.

New comment by nickdothutton in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

nickdothutton — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:58:55 +0000

I wish someone would build a LinkedIn that was actually good. That you could actually do business over, and no I don't mean spam people with you BS cold emails which must have a 10000:1 success rate. I wrote a bit about this almost a decade ago and there is nothing.[1]

[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/

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

nickdothutton — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:38:12 +0000

xv was fast, stable, had a good interface, and useful far beyond the normal lifespan of such a piece of software. Used it all the time in the early 90s.

New comment by nickdothutton in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

nickdothutton — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:29:31 +0000

Obligatory: The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed, beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the development of online prediction markets. PAM was shut down in August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market, a characterization criticized in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason University, and several journalists.[1]

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market

New comment by nickdothutton in "Show HN: Termcraft – Terminal-first 2D sandbox survival in Rust"

nickdothutton — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:26:17 +0000

I wonder if you could do a good Atari Gauntlet clone as a terminal only game.

New comment by nickdothutton in "Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland"

nickdothutton — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:46:51 +0000

I occasionally "joke" that it was 9-11 where we shifted timelines to the alternate universe. 1 minute Fukuyama announces the end of history and our future will consist of abundance and TV and shopping, the next...

New comment by nickdothutton in "macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal"

nickdothutton — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:25:13 +0000

Ah great another reason to add to the many reasons not to use this OS. Semi serious question, is Apple looking to dump its existing customer base for a new, perhaps consumer not pro-sumer one?

New comment by nickdothutton in "Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland"

nickdothutton — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:21:55 +0000

This is what specifically caused me to make the late stage empire comment. When the flip comes, you know you are in that phase. Speaking as a Brit. Other indicators are loss of reserve currency status, inward looking elite factions (can be of any party, it is not a partisan matter), and a few other things. One might have said “changed from creditor to debtor” but almost everyone is these days!

New comment by nickdothutton in "Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland"

nickdothutton — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:53:59 +0000

The Iran war has demonstrated the US cannot adequately defend its allies in the region, regardless of bases, whose existence was predicated on them having that capability. No?

All the current conflict has done is make obvious that reality.