Hacker News: rdl

New comment by rdl in "The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel"

rdl — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:46:18 +0000

EU changed a lot this year (EU EES and ETIAS, long delayed), so this is probably different now than it was for some people before. It should be passport + biometric in and out, with a passport and biometric enrolled once as well, and visa-free stay duration (and other activities, like criminal stuff) logged against that record as well. Previously if you entered in one country and exited in another there wasn't really any closure of the record, so they effectively didn't care, and you could stay in EU indefinitely (and enter/exit much more while also overstaying, especially if you had multiple passports or could enter/exit from different countries).

New comment by rdl in "Om Malik has died"

rdl — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:28:29 +0000

I still remember him being one of the best writers about tech (a bit more than "journalism" in that a lot of it was of more evergreen value...) from the dotcom boom and then the peak "interesting" web apps period (2004-~2015 or so, when AJAX/etc was still new, and things hadn't calcified so much). Didn't know about his later health issues, I assumed he had just moved on to other interests naturally. RIP.

New comment by rdl in "Midjourney Medical"

rdl — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:04:55 +0000

We also used to x-ray people for shoe fitting/for lulz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope

New comment by rdl in "Midjourney Medical"

rdl — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:02:41 +0000

This will be really interesting for brain imaging I think -- particularly for non-penetrating trauma (blast, crash, falls) in environments where MRI is unsuitable/unavailable, or where potential injuries are very common and thus per-scan cost is critical.

If you scanned every American Football player before/after a game, it would probably lead to an end of the sport. Similarly with boxing, and soccer heading practice.

Also would be super useful in war zones -- you can't MRI due to metal fragments, and can't CT over and over again due to radiation, and right now most of the guidance is "don't get injured again" and is broadly ignored. Being able to scan people near point of injury (or just after high risk activities) would be great.

(Obviously lots of other uses for this in disease screening, etc.; difficulties with ultrasound due to bone, gas, etc.)

New comment by rdl in "A successful Japanese trial of a ramjet engine designed for Mach‑5 aircraft"

rdl — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:46:32 +0000

If a fund can get into the Anthropic Series A vs. not get into the Anthropic Series A based on a flight to meet with the team, that is worth buying the supersonic plane even if you scrap it after.

New comment by rdl in "A successful Japanese trial of a ramjet engine designed for Mach‑5 aircraft"

rdl — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:20:31 +0000

Vastly more favorable today than it was when Concorde flew.

1) Rich people are WAY richer, and time is even more valuable 2) Businesses have some very important employees and "2 day trip" vs "3-4 day trip" is worth $50-100k 3) Larger population of people able to pay $20-30k for a flight than ever before.

The biggest practical impact is there's probably going to be a private jet version instead of just a commercial one, and there will likely be transpacific demand exceeding transatlantic. Also government/military use.

New comment by rdl in "Is AI Profitable Yet?"

rdl — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:39:41 +0000

That would be true if everyone weren't supply constrained and buying literally everything they can find.

There are actual risks that this trend doesn't continue, but as long as the trend continues, it is pretty good for revenue. "AI shown to hit a wall/doesn't actually deliver/stops growing so fast", "massive improvement in hw efficiency or tech such that all the old stuff becomes obsolete", "bottleneck on power/regulations/etc such that no one wants anything but the most efficient cutting edge stuff" would be the ways it could end and then all these factors reverse. Right now, power is so constrained that old, inefficient power generation is actively being turned back on or set up at new sites (e.g. old aviation turbines which are very inefficient compared to combined cycle).

New comment by rdl in "Is AI Profitable Yet?"

rdl — Sat, 23 May 2026 06:44:27 +0000

If "cost" is mostly capital investments, absolutely. Normally you'd use operating cost (which for capital equipment would be depreciation and interest), and here they are using the capital cost as full cost.

No one really knows how quickly AI hardware investments will become obsolete and thus how long it should be amortized, but 2-3 years would be extremely conservative, and in fact used H100 (discontinued/2 generations old) prices are higher today than they were when the equipment was new several years ago.

New comment by rdl in "Is AI Profitable Yet?"

rdl — Sat, 23 May 2026 02:52:00 +0000

For a rapidly growing new line of business, this isn't bad at all.

New comment by rdl in "Peter G. Neumann, Who Warned of Computer Security Risks, Dies at 93"

rdl — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:46:06 +0000

I think RISKS (which he edited) was one of the first places I saw computer security discussed in a meaningful way outside a military context (NSA, Puzzle Palace, Rainbow Books, etc.)

Peter G. Neumann, Who Warned of Computer Security Risks, Dies at 93

rdl — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:43:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/obituaries/peter-g-neumann-dead.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173454

Points: 23

# Comments: 4

New comment by rdl in "I want to live like Costco people"

rdl — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:15:41 +0000

Where I live (Puerto Rico) Costco is basically the only decent midrange to upper midrange store. There are a couple higher end butcher shops, but local groceries are "smart and final" or other discount-US grocery equivalent, with prices at mainstream NYC levels, while Costco is basically the same prices as most of the US, and ~70% of the selection of Bay Area Costco. Easy choice (along with Amazon and other online shopping).

New comment by rdl in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

rdl — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:09:17 +0000

If the issue are tent stakes/lag bolts which get buried under surface, clear solution would be metal detectors available to borrow/rent (or brought by each camp). Also probably could do a drone or ground robot with a metal detecting loop on the bottom.

New comment by rdl in "Craig Venter has died"

rdl — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:06:40 +0000

He was pretty shockingly an entrepreneur and inventor in all the best ways,’in a field dominated by very cautious scientists (who are great too, but who likely never would have gotten the genome sequenced within 10-20 years of when he did it). It was basically the Apollo Project in a field which was more like 1980s NASA in culture.

Craig Venter has died

rdl — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:44:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.jcvi.org/media-center/j-craig-venter-genomics-pioneer-and-founder-jcvi-and-diploid-genomics-inc-dies-79

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957101

Points: 342

# Comments: 85

Prototown: America's answer to China is hiding in rural Texas

rdl — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:14:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIob2-ugCO0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904598

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

H.R. 8250 – Parents Decide Act (mandate OS age validation)

rdl — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:09:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8250/text

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805033

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by rdl in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

rdl — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:58:30 +0000

My theory is a lot of the anti-AI sentiment is specifically US geopolitical adversaries (pick one or more: China, Russia, Iran, ...) who want a bad outcome for the US (AI as potential AGI; AI as one of the few successful economic sectors of the US; general desire to cause societal disruption or collapse and AI as convenient target). Probably >95% of the really bad stuff (the micron fab disruption, attacks on AI datacenters, ...) is probably root-cause that, possibly executed by useful idiots, people paid by organizations, etc. 5% is normal NIMBY stuff. Approximately measure 0 is Zizian death cultists.

I don't any of these will be dissuaded by cute family photos. Fortunately the frontier model companies and major infrastructure providers are able to pay for top-tier corporate security (although tech people generally have been unwilling to do this at home for lifestyle reasons), but I'd be afraid for people elsewhere in the supply chain.

(And destructive attack is all on top of the normal corporate espionage, infiltration, subversion, etc.)

New comment by rdl in "EFF is leaving X"

rdl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:58:00 +0000

It's depressing now, but also was genuinely amazing how great EFF was early on. I think a lot of that had to do with the board, membership, and staff (such as yourself) intentionally trying to keep things balanced and focused. Thank you for all the great stuff you and the rest of the org did back then.

New comment by rdl in "Cloudflare targets 2029 for full post-quantum security"

rdl — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:11:51 +0000

It will be interesting to compare PQ rollout to HTTPS rollout historically (either the "SSL becomes widespread in 2015" thing, or the deprecation SSL 3.0). Cloudflare is in an easy position to do stuff like this because it can decouple end user/browser upgrade cycles from backend upgrade cycles.

Some browsers and some end user devices get upgraded quickly, so making it easy to make it optionally-PQ on any site, and then as that rollout extends, some specialty sites can make it mandatory, and then browser/device UX can do soft warnings to users (or other activity like downranking), and then at some point something like STS Strict can be exposed, and then largely become a default (and maybe just remove the non-PQ algorithms entirely from many sites).

I definitely was on team "the risks of a rushed upgrade might outweigh the risks of actual quantum breaks" until pretty recently -- rushing to upgrade has lots of problems always and is a great way to introduce new bugs, but based on the latest information, the balance seems to have shifted to doing an upgrade quickly.

Updating websites is going to be so much easier than dealing with other systems (bitcoin probably the worst; data at rest storage systems; hardware).