Hacker News: ooopdddddd

New comment by ooopdddddd in "Eight Bits of Trust: eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds"

ooopdddddd — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 19:31:21 +0000

There are several very practical reasons (and not emotional) reasons to expect that "4" is the result of bad implementation.

I can think any number of programming mistakes that will result in a supposed (pseudo-)random number generator to be be biased to very small numbers. I have made such mistakes myself.

By any reasonable estimate, the probability of randomly picking a number below 256 is MUCH smaller than the probability of someone having made a mistake.

New comment by ooopdddddd in "Computers Cannot Make Decisions"

ooopdddddd — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:04:09 +0000

Computers can make decisions and they do it all the time.

The problem is entirely different. Sometimes they make decisions we don't like, but unlike with people we haven't found a way to punish them that satisfies our sense of justice or discourages other computers from making similar decisions.

New comment by ooopdddddd in "enclose.horse"

ooopdddddd — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:44:31 +0000

It's not quite that easy. For the simplest example, look at https://enclose.horse/play/dlctud, where the naive solution will waste two walls to fence in the large area. Obviously, you can construct puzzles that have lots of these "bait" areas.

Like the other comment suggested, running a loop where you keep adding constraints that eliminate invalid solutions will probably work for any puzzle that a human would want to solve.

New comment by ooopdddddd in "enclose.horse"

ooopdddddd — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 14:22:23 +0000

I don't believe this works in general. If you have a set of tiles that connect to neither the horse nor to an exit, they can still keep each other reachable in this formulation.

New comment by ooopdddddd in "How to rig elections [video]"

ooopdddddd — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 20:38:32 +0000

You are talking like this is the first time judges have been blocked for political reasons. See Horst Dreier in 2008 as a high-profile example.

New comment by ooopdddddd in "Test Results for AMD Zen 5"

ooopdddddd — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 19:41:35 +0000

The detailed results are in the links at the bottom of the post.

New comment by ooopdddddd in "Prolog Adventure Game"

ooopdddddd — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:44:41 +0000

That's only if you are using pure predicates. From a quick glance, the code makes liberal use of assert, retract, and the cut operator, so you can't write a query that solves the problem automatically.

New comment by ooopdddddd in "Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?"

ooopdddddd — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 11:56:58 +0000

Up and down quarks have names that make perfect sense, they are derived from the isospin which in turn derives from spin (spin-1/2 was the only other well-known object in physics that had the same symmetry properties). Which one is up and which one is down is the only arbitrary choice.

Using "positive" and "negative" would have been a disaster. What charge does a positive antiquark have?