Hacker News: pseudohadamard

New comment by pseudohadamard in "5 years of social media history required to enter the US"

pseudohadamard — Tue, 05 May 2026 06:28:56 +0000

I wouldn't go to Russia today but a friend of mine did, his wife is Russian and her babushka was dying so they went to see her. Wasn't really much of a problem, you just had to go in via China but no problems getting in or out. China was also mostly a formality, they stayed overnight and the hotel staff gave them the details of the unblocked WiFi to use to to bypass the Great Firewall.

The thing with East Germany was that they were concerned about people wanting to get out, not people coming in. So they scanned the vehicle for contraband goods going in and concealed people coming out, but apart from that it was just standard Soviet-bloc bureaucracy. The other thing was that, even though it was a somewhat totalitarian state they played by the rules, as a visitor unless you did something outrageously stupid nothing was going to happen to you. I had a camera on my lap and had been taking photos of the border installations, a border guard saw me holding the camera and said something like "you're not taking photos are you?" - "no, just changing the film" - "well, OK then".

New comment by pseudohadamard in "5 years of social media history required to enter the US"

pseudohadamard — Tue, 05 May 2026 06:13:52 +0000

See my earlier post above. I've been to East Germany and it was considerably less bad than entering the US today.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "5 years of social media history required to enter the US"

pseudohadamard — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:54:51 +0000

I noticed that too, travel agent said that getting to Europe via not-the-US was literally double the cost of going via the US. I ended up going via Dubai (also very cheap for some odd reason) because it's less risky than via the US.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "5 years of social media history required to enter the US"

pseudohadamard — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:52:39 +0000

I've been to Russia in the past, before the recent crap, and it was actually a breeze to get in, you just paid the embassy for a visa stamp in your passport and that was it. Why are you coming, "tourism", where are you staying, "this hotel", and once you landed they barely glanced at your passport but just waved you through.

I've also been to a few other semi-totalitarian countries in the past, the most extreme of which would have been East Germany, and that was less painful to get into than the US.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

pseudohadamard — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:21:48 +0000

As you point out, in some cases it's better to just accept that you're not good with names if the effort of trying to deal with it is affecting your other interaction with people. A former neighbour of mine was so bad at names and faces that she wouldn't recognise you in the street and walk right past you, making it seem like she was blanking you. Once I experienced that I realised that simply not being able to remember someone's name wasn't really such a killer, a lot of the time you can cover it up. Also, while you may feel bad about it, it's possible the other person has barely even noticed it, or if they have will forget about it 30 seconds later.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "An Analysis of the PocketOS Debacle"

pseudohadamard — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:07:38 +0000

The DailyWTF has a good breakdown of what went wrong in the recent PocketOS debacle, giving an alternative perspective to the "blame the AI" narrative. Make sure to read the comments too.

An Analysis of the PocketOS Debacle

pseudohadamard — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:07:38 +0000

Article URL: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/empty-pockets

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017631

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by pseudohadamard in "People who are blind from birth never develop schizophrenia"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:24:45 +0000

Well the voices have definitely told me my aphantasia is keeping me safe.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Or Mannheim, where the streets in the central Quadratestadt area have no names. Or Japanese addresses which don't have streets. Or Queen Street in Australia/NZ, places largely settled during the reign of Queen Victoria so absolutely everywhere has a Queen Street. Or any city over a certain size where, through simple statistics, you're going to end up with streets with similar-sounding names.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:51:45 +0000

That's one thing that struck me in TFA, almost everything mentioned was stuff I never asked for and never wanted: CoPilot in my inbox, some Insider Program bumf, widgets and feeds, the sole thing in there that means anything is that updates are slightly less annoying.

So TFA is really "we've spent the last two months monkeying with the crap that no-one asked for or wants, and Update is mildly less annoying". That's not really much of an announcement.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "A more efficient implementation of Shor's algorithm"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 04 May 2026 05:01:40 +0000

That's because it's easier to cheat with the IFP (the underlying problem that RSA is built on) than the DLP, so everyone generates RSA "records" and ignores the actual problem that needs to be solved.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "A more efficient implementation of Shor's algorithm"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:58:40 +0000

It doesn't, but it's much harder to cheat with the DLP than it is with the IFP, which is what RSA is, which is why everyone announces records for RSA and ignores the fact that the actual problem to solve is the DLP. An example of how to cheat with the IFP is the "compiled Shor's algorithm" which produces the answer by non-quantum means and then throws in a quantum of quantum to make it look like magic happened.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "A more efficient implementation of Shor's algorithm"

pseudohadamard — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:55:47 +0000

That's the whole point. And it's not "build on their work", it's "question their work", because so far every time someone's announced some magic quantum thing it's been followed up shortly afterwards by people poking holes on it, a famous recent example being the "quantum computer" that was replaced by /dev/random and it produced the same results. So the magic here isn't the quantum, it's coming up with a way to publish a claim in a way that it can't be refuted.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Lib0xc: A set of C standard library-adjacent APIs for safer systems programming"

pseudohadamard — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:43:21 +0000

Does anyone know if clang's " " format can be given as " "? PREfast has been doing this for over 20 years and it looks like a lot of the clang annotations map directly to PREfast ones, it would allow a vast amount of PREfast-annotated code to be used with clang.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Lib0xc: A set of C standard library-adjacent APIs for safer systems programming"

pseudohadamard — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:38:21 +0000

Not sexy? Yeah, I can manage that one too.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing the Skulls on Their Caps"

pseudohadamard — Sun, 03 May 2026 12:57:25 +0000

Palantir have rats anuses on their caps though, not just skulls.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Brace for the patch tsunami: AI is unearthing decades of buried code debt"

pseudohadamard — Sun, 03 May 2026 12:57:20 +0000

It really depends on where you're starting from. If it's well-written code then it's not nearly as drastic. Claude found quite a few problems in our code but none of them were of any impact because it's constantly run through a large range of SAST tools, fuzzers, Valgrind, and so on, so it was all in things that those couldn't discover like code paths that were never exercised, irrelevant API contract violations, that sort of thing, the sort of stuff that was wrong but wouldn't result in externally-observable behaviour which is why fuzzing, valgrind, and so on hadn't turned it up.

OTOH if you've got it-compiles-ship-it code then the AI will turn up about ten thousand issues which will overwhelm both you and the attackers, so both sides will tell it to only focus on exploitable stuff and fix or exploit that depending on which side you're on. This is how many SAST tools are used, first time you run it you get 8,000 problems reported so you declare that the baseline and only fix new stuff that turns up.

There's safety in numbers, even if the numbers are bad.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Why IPv6 is so complicated"

pseudohadamard — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:29:24 +0000

Their NAT-phobia was legendary, and it carried through to other WGs as well like IPsec. The fact that IPsec broke NAT was a feature because it would force everyone to move to IPv6 ,for example.

The crazy was strong in those ones.

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Integer Overflow Checking Cost"

pseudohadamard — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:29:18 +0000

It's gcc 4.x so more an archaeological curiosity than anything else. Did gcc have stdckdint back then?

New comment by pseudohadamard in "Unsigned sizes: A five year mistake"

pseudohadamard — Sun, 03 May 2026 09:03:32 +0000

But a blog doing the wrong thing. Who decided that light grey on white was a great way to present text?

For anyone else struggling to read it, Ctrl-A will make it legible.