Hacker News: pseudohadamard

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Ask HN: When will the stock market crash?"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:37:19 +0000

That's like asking, in Australia, "when do these flies go away"?

New comment by pseudohadamard in "America is destroying itself. It's no surprise"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:21:46 +0000

There was one other major difference as well between the US and USSR: Russian fatalism. "Life is shit and we're all going to die, may as well get on with it", you just accepted that things sucked and moved on. With the US it's more likely to be "it's all the fault of the libtards / immigrants / Mexicans / trans athletes / whatever, I'm gonna grab muh guns and go sort it out". That's not going to be pretty.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Egg consumption inversely correlated with Alzheimer's"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:45:31 +0000

I'm surprised no-one's linked to https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations yet.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Delta flight hit by firework while landing at Midway Airport on Fourth of July"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:41:36 +0000

I don't know what it's like now but that sounds like Europe in the 1980s. I remember going there from a country that restricted anything fancier than a sparkler and being amazed at all the cool things you could get. Blowing holes in snow forts with the larger Chinabölller was particularly fun.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Soatok's Informal Guide to Threat Models"

pseudohadamard — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 06:55:08 +0000

My main gripe with Signal is that they force-push out multi-hundred MB updates to a multi-hundred MB app, disabling it if you don't keep updating, that sends texts and makes calls. Five gigabytes worth of forced updates earlier, it sent texts and made calls. Five gigabytes worth of forced updates later it'll also send texts and make calls. And every time there's yet another completely unnecessary update that changes nothing in the app I have to go around various older family members and update their phones with it.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "New serious vulnerabilities spiked around release of Claude Mythos Preview"

pseudohadamard — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 06:00:29 +0000

It's also unclear what's cause and what's effect. Given the massive amount of overhyped scaremongering around Mythos, it could just mean that people ran their code through some other AI, or even just panicked and started taking security a bit more seriously without any AI involved. That was certainly the case at one company I know of, the mgt. suddenly pushed some resources towards identifying security issues.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Gun Mistakes in Fiction Writing: Handgun Edition"

pseudohadamard — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:30:14 +0000

If I was doing this, I'd take it to extremes: "He heard the 'snick' of the revolver's safety as the baddie slid a fresh magazine into the handle, followed moments later by the click-click as the bolt shot home. He knew he still had a few moments while the baddie nestled the stock against his cheek, taking care not to catch his fingers on the bayonet lugs".

There, that should do it.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Gun Mistakes in Fiction Writing: Handgun Edition"

pseudohadamard — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:23:58 +0000

This is why you don't have a gun, you have a boomstick. It's some sort of shotgun and that's all you need to know. Go boom, splatter deadites.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access"

pseudohadamard — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:00:09 +0000

I agree, content limits are a royal PITA. Do you know how long I had to search to find a password manager that would accept my password with its doodles, sign language, and squirrel noises?

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Half-Baked Product"

pseudohadamard — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 08:22:14 +0000

> The founder’s motivation. To become wealthy.

Or, if they're an engineer, to design cool products while not having the faintest idea of how to run a business and manage people. Ran into far more of those than get-rich-quick types.

Having said that, I was also lucky enough to work for a company where the founder had a science degree but not in the field he was currently working in, was really good at sales, and recognised that others knew a lot more about the field than he did and was willing to listen to them. One of the lead tech guys could literally say to him "this is a stupid idea" and the idea would get changed. They muddled along for some years until he found the right people to run things, and have been doing pretty well ever since. Last I checked it was still a good place to work for.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "The Underhanded C Contest"

pseudohadamard — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 04:22:22 +0000

It was actually due to the original developer assuming FP compares were exact. It was never an issue, the code went through huge amounts of auditing and testing, just an interesting coincidence that the underhanded contest used something so similar to its underhandedness.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

pseudohadamard — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:26:02 +0000

For people who haven't tried Fable yet, here's an emulation you can use to experience Fable, just paste this into whatever you're using to access Claude:

-- Snip --

echo "Switched to Opus 4.8. Fable's safeguards flagged this message"

switch model to Opus 4.8

-- Snip --

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Lake Powell Water Critically Low; Wyoming Expects More Demand On Flaming Gorge"

pseudohadamard — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:59:38 +0000

For anyone interested in the background behind this clusterfuck, Climate Town has a good explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XusyNT_k-1c . It's not just drought, it's because many of the players involved are required to waste as much water as they can - the video has the details.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "The Stockholm Telephone Tower with Approximately 5,500 Telephone Lines, 1890"

pseudohadamard — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:43:28 +0000

And if you've ever been to cities in Asia or India, Bangkok being one that springs immediately to mind, you'll still see this spaghetti-explosion wiring on streets everywhere.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers (2013)"

pseudohadamard — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:24:21 +0000

> Because my folks lived in a little house just around the corner from Harry’s,

Was life going swell and everything was just peachy except, of course, for the undeniable fact that every single morning your mother would make you a big ol' bowl of sauerkraut for breakfast?

(Now try re-reading it without it coming across as a Weird Al voiceover).

New comment by pseudohadamard in "The Underhanded C Contest"

pseudohadamard — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 03:21:02 +0000

Interesting that the case they were using was the Nuclear Threat Initiative and FP uncertainties, I've audited some, ah, nuclear-physics-related code that had an issue due to FP uncertainties...

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Obfuscation: Building the final boss of cryptography (Part I)"

pseudohadamard — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 02:55:50 +0000

Nor does the claim "The most powerful primitive that has been conceived in cryptography is obfuscation". A good test for how useful a cryptographic primitive is is "if you magically removed this from existence, would any attackers notice?". For this one the answer would be "no".

I'd say the actual most powerful primitive in crypto is KDFs/MACs (there's some overlap, e.g. HKDF). Remove that and pretty much everything that requires security would collapse overnight. Not just the obvious TLS and SSH but the global payments infrastructure and a lot of other less-visible things.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Most arguments are about ego, not ideas"

pseudohadamard — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 02:49:30 +0000

In some cases it's worth arguing even if you know you can't win in order to provide pushback against really dumb ideas. This doesn't happen nearly enough in standardisation work, where a small number of professional meeting-goers can railroad through unbelievably bad, broken standards because no-one pushes back.

Anyone who's ever worked on a standards body will be getting flashbacks at this point.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment"

pseudohadamard — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 01:48:38 +0000

Apart from the obvious "well, don't do that then", I'd probably use an ARM-based ODroid for development work, and if I needed more horsepower, the ODroid as a front-end for said thing with more horsepower.

(I actually do development on ODroids, they're quite nice, if underpowered compared to the Intel/AMD equivalents).

New comment by pseudohadamard in "I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)"

pseudohadamard — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 01:44:44 +0000

Good point, I've used that to find all sorts of things inside the walls. As you say, it works best when there's serious thermal bridging going on.