Hacker News: robryk

New comment by robryk in "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work"

robryk — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:23:52 +0000

Why do you think that this other kind of accountability (which reminds me of the way captain's or commander's responsibility is often described) is incompatible with what the article describes? Due to the focus on necessity of manual testing?

New comment by robryk in "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work"

robryk — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:18:58 +0000

Would automated tests that produce a transcript of what they've done allow perusing that transcript to substitute for manual testing?

New comment by robryk in "A school locked down after AI flagged a gun. It was a clarinet"

robryk — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:16:23 +0000

Even if the situations are noticed and seen fully, does it cause the schools to not punish the victim? The stories I've heard about zero tolerance policies were that _even when the situation was fully obvious_, victims got punished because they took part in an altercation.

New comment by robryk in "Cuddle Fish – A Soft Floating Robot for Safe Physical Interaction"

robryk — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 13:22:55 +0000

Why? You just need to choose electronics that doesn't use micro mechanical designs that would be damaged by helium. (Or are you pointing at some other reason?)

New comment by robryk in "Unforgeable Quantum Tokens Delivered over Fiber Network"

robryk — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 20:14:07 +0000

The larger issue for most quantum key exchange setups is the transition from classical to quantum: you want not to accidentally generate two unentangled photons in the same secret polarization.

New comment by robryk in "A Hamiltonian Circuit for Rubik's Cube"

robryk — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 19:19:24 +0000

I think you are on the right track (sorry, I did not verify all the individual statements). If you weren't already aware of them, you might wish to learn what normal subgroups are, see how you can have a subgroup that's not a normal subgroup (and probably see what cosets are at the same time), and see how does dividing a group by a normal subgroup (to yield a group) work and what properties it has.

New comment by robryk in "A Hamiltonian Circuit for Rubik's Cube"

robryk — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 13:26:02 +0000

The reason why it's not so simple is that various operations on the cube do not commute (whereas rotations of different wheels on a combination lock do).

New comment by robryk in "UK rail minister got engineer sacked for raising safety concerns"

robryk — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 12:59:08 +0000

Is it still not a free action if it replaced an ad?

New comment by robryk in "Scientists achieve more than 98% efficiency removing nanoplastics from water"

robryk — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 16:04:19 +0000

Is it also impractical for treating potable water supplies, or for treating wastewater? (You mentioned only _bottled_ water companies.)

New comment by robryk in "Degrees of Kevin Bacon Using Postgres"

robryk — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 10:28:41 +0000

I don't see why one has to create the actor-actor relation table. I would rather search for shortest paths in the bipartite graph where nodes are movies and actors, and divide the results by 2.

New comment by robryk in "How the Totem Compass Works"

robryk — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 21:17:01 +0000

I wonder if they intend to measure pressure and display altitude difference (or at least its sign) at some point. (That could be very helpful when skiing.)

New comment by robryk in "Button Stealer"

robryk — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 10:13:09 +0000

You can always exfiltrate by inserting stuff into the page's DOM that will do the exfil from the page's context.

New comment by robryk in "Cancel Adobe if you are a creative under NDA with your clients"

robryk — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 12:15:16 +0000

Why isn't this the model case for small claims courts?

New comment by robryk in "This Message Does Not Exist"

robryk — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 14:13:39 +0000

As with race conditions, making things faster doesn't change things but only exposes preexisting problems. The preexisting problem I see here is sloppy definition of existence for the message: if you can see the message on a burning piece of paper, it should be considered to still exist (just as a message being sent with smoke signals does not disappear the moment it's committed to smoke).

E: The obvious way to fix this is to stop talking about messages existing/not existing, but talk in terms of messages being stored in X (or having been deleted from X), for some value of X.

New comment by robryk in "A man ordered to hide his boat painted the boat on his fence"

robryk — Fri, 31 May 2024 10:34:15 +0000

HOAs require more than (or a very specific extension of) freedom of association to exist: they require an ability to bind any future owners of a piece of land to join the HOA (regardless of how they acquired that land: via sale, inheritance, bankruptcy, ...). For property that's not real estate that's usually not possible (see e.g. inability of companies to provide binding promises on how the data they have are used after they go bankrupt). Given that this ability applies very inconsistently across types of property, it doesn't seem like an essential part of freedom of association.

New comment by robryk in "The curious case of the missing period"

robryk — Tue, 21 May 2024 22:47:47 +0000

To steelman the GP's POV: there are other parts of solutions to problems where similar levels of rigour are required and cannot be filled in by using a preexisting library (state machines for distributed business logic come to mind as an example). Eliminating the need for that here doesn't help that much in general, and might even make things worse, because it gives people less experience with tasks demanding rigour before they tackle ones that are both subtler and harder.

New comment by robryk in "Ask HN: What have you built with ESPHome, ESP8266 or similar hardware"

robryk — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 21:56:18 +0000

I have a power meter that sits in front of my kettle (that I also use as a teapot) that notifies me when the tea has finished brewing (i.e. when it finished boiling + a fixed delay).

New comment by robryk in "The man who killed Google Search?"

robryk — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 22:42:32 +0000

I don't see why subjective morals cannot be realistically followed. Do you mean that it will mean sufficiently different things for different people that they any promise of this shape will not communicate much to strangers, or something else?

New comment by robryk in "XZ backdoor story – Initial analysis"

robryk — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 10:43:22 +0000

> The only variable inside its own table is yolAbejyiejuvnup=Evjtgvsh5okmkAvj, which in this context serves as a kill switch.

This seems false? The trie contained also strings like `WAYLAND_DISPLAY=`, so IIUC the backdoor would remain dormant if someone tried to run sshd from something that looks like an interactive session.

New comment by robryk in "Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD"

robryk — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 23:24:02 +0000

I don't understand what happens when the sensor is bent in more than one location.

At the beginning you mention a ToF sensor, which made me think that you're looking at reflections from the bends and measuring distance to them, but this seems not to be the case. ISTM that if you bend the sensor in two places, you'll simply get the sum of the logattenuations from both. If we assume that the "strength" of the bend continuously changes attenuation, ISTM that you need as many strands as there are gap locations to be able to disambiguate between any two sets of bends.

Am I misreading something or is this intended to operate in cases where we know only one bend is present?