Hacker News: patrickthebold

New comment by patrickthebold in "That's a Lot of YAML"

patrickthebold — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:47:55 +0000

What do you mean that JSON is not "streamable"?

There are things like https://www.baeldung.com/jackson-streaming-api but maybe there's more in you definition of "streamable" that JSON doesn't satisfy.

New comment by patrickthebold in "Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M"

patrickthebold — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:23:01 +0000

Unlikely. The digital signatures bitcoin uses are regarded as secure, (there could be attacks if we get quantum computers.) The issue here was the software didn't put in enough randomness when generating the keys, and so it was straight forward to search the small space of keys the wallet would generate.

It's not so different if you encrypted a file with a weak password and someone guessed it—you don't need stronger encryption, you need to pick a better password.

The proof of work part of bitcoin is really for "consensus", so everyone agrees which transactions happened in which order, this attack didn't affect that part at all.

New comment by patrickthebold in "Casio Moflin"

patrickthebold — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 02:07:02 +0000

Is that a reference to https://www.kohlerhealth.com/dekoda/?

New comment by patrickthebold in "JEP 540: Simple JSON API (Now in Incubator)"

patrickthebold — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:15:21 +0000

JSON String requires escaping of control characters. .toString() on a String is (hopefully) the identity.

New comment by patrickthebold in "Instructure pays ransom to Canvas hackers"

patrickthebold — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:01:18 +0000

So, maybe we could consider a "White Hat" ransomware group that takes the money and also leaks the data, so that long term no one bothers to pay which ultimately disincentivizes ransomware attacks?

New comment by patrickthebold in "Where did my taxes go?"

patrickthebold — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:25:59 +0000

Somewhat off topic, but I've always wanted to know _who_ gets my tax dollars more than what they were spent on. For example, a middle class salary to someone building bombs in Ohio is different than a wealthy investor who owns shares in some educational company that provides standardized tests to local public schools.

New comment by patrickthebold in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

patrickthebold — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:10:48 +0000

I'm not sure I follow your workflow exactly. If PR B is merged, then I'd expect PR A to already be merged (I'd normally branch off of A to make B.)

That said, after the squash merge of A and git fetch origin, you want something like git rebase --update-refs --onto origin/main A C (or whatever the tip of the chain of branches is)

The --update-refs will make sure pr B is in the right spot. Of course, you need to (force) push the updated branches. AFAICT the gh command line tool makes this a bit smoother.

New comment by patrickthebold in "Combinators"

patrickthebold — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:23:49 +0000

It helps if you click the link of the operator(s) under TinyAPL. For example Blackbird goes to https://tinyapl.rubenverg.com/docs/primitive/atop

Which seems to be function composition and some extra rules about if there's 1 or 2 arguments, so the 2 arguments go to G and F is applied as a single argument function. Anyway if you click on a few of these an look at the red text in the upper right it's fairly clear what it's doing.

New comment by patrickthebold in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

patrickthebold — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:18:41 +0000

Reminds me of this quote which I recently found and like:

> look, I'm sorry, but the rule is simple: if you made something 2x faster, you might have done something smart if you made something 100x faster, you definitely just stopped doing something stupid

https://x.com/rygorous/status/1271296834439282690

New comment by patrickthebold in "A case for Go as the best language for AI agents"

patrickthebold — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:03:03 +0000

Yes, I really wanted to post the comment and I (wrongly) thought this post got blocked by my procrastination setting. Apologies for the noise.

New comment by patrickthebold in "A case for Go as the best language for AI agents"

patrickthebold — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:16:34 +0000

I happen to just stumble across this article https://felixbarbalet.com/simple-made-inevitable-the-economi... extolling the virtues of Clojure. It specifically calls out Go for not being simple in the ways that matter for LLMs.

I've no idea myself, I just thought it was interesting for comparison.

New comment by patrickthebold in "Sabotaging Bitcoin"

patrickthebold — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 05:10:32 +0000

This is interesting to think about: For gold I'd say the demand is coming from both industries and from people who want it as a store of value. If it was only used as an industrial chemical, then surely the price would drop because there would be less demand.

Some bitcoin advocates will talk about how useful it is as a currency, and I wonder how much bitcoin is actually used for purposes other then to hope you can sell it to someone else for more than you paid.

New comment by patrickthebold in "When 1+1+1 Equals 1"

patrickthebold — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 21:34:03 +0000

I'd be good to give an example of where the 'only if' doesn't apply. If only to clear up the confusion.

New comment by patrickthebold in "The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia"

patrickthebold — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:12:21 +0000

of course 9.99...(repeating) is mathematically 10, so I have a hard time being against allowing that.

New comment by patrickthebold in "The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia"

patrickthebold — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:09:09 +0000

Half a quarter.

New comment by patrickthebold in "The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia"

patrickthebold — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:56:53 +0000

Is gas sold as a whole penny amounts in those locations? Where I am it's always something and 9/10ths of a cent.

New comment by patrickthebold in "How the cochlea computes (2024)"

patrickthebold — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:57:42 +0000

I think I might be missing something basic, but if you actually wanted to do a Fourier transform on the sound hitting your ear, wouldn't you need to wait your entire lifetime to compute it? It seems pretty clear that's not what is happening, since you can actually hear things as they happen.

New comment by patrickthebold in "New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care"

patrickthebold — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 15:22:39 +0000

I agree.

Ideally we could just increase the tax credits so it's large enough to cover the childcare expenses (and other necessities), and let the families decide what is best. And yes, some people are going to do a bad job taking care of their kids and spend the money on something else. But my understanding is that it generally works well to just give people money, rather than pay for specific things.

New comment by patrickthebold in "Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war"

patrickthebold — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 23:22:24 +0000

One thought I had recently: Their shareholders are probably mostly the same people. So why even compete?

New comment by patrickthebold in "Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization"

patrickthebold — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 18:20:53 +0000

Just a thought: Make the velocity of the path constant. There should be some way to take a derivative an set it to a constant and solve for z. ( or really reparameterize the curve t' = f(t)) so the velocity is constant.

Actually, now that I think about it, choosing z = c * t is kind of both influencing how the path is parameterized as well as the path carved out on the sphere.