Hacker News: russfink

New comment by russfink in "πFS"

russfink — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:48:20 +0000

Unless, in turn, you locate the index itself in pi at a much smaller index. And so on...

Find k candidate indices for your data, then locate each of them. If the smallest one is a significantly smaller index space, repeat.

AI that improves itself indefinitely

russfink — Fri, 15 May 2026 07:02:44 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/14/what-happens-when-ai-starts-building-itself/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145410

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by russfink in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

russfink — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:58:18 +0000

In the same vein - the Roswell Museum and Research Center - the library portion is underrepresented in its ads. It is a library about the size of an elementary / middle school library filled with supposed accounts and testimony, academic-style papers and reports. One could spend days admiring this collection. (I’m not shilling for it, just pointing out the best part is not the latex cadavers in the other room.).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_UFO_Museum_and_R...

New comment by russfink in "Canvas is down as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

russfink — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:58:33 +0000

It depends on what vintage of Blackboard your IT team has installed. We moved from a circa 2011 BB instance to Canvas in 2022, and it was hands down superior. A different university is running the most recent BB and it’s similar to Canvas.

New comment by russfink in "Claude Opus 4.7"

russfink — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:28:54 +0000

LLM’s: sometimes wrong but never in doubt.

New comment by russfink in "Claude Opus 4.7"

russfink — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:26:37 +0000

Or, the first time a mistake is detected, a correction is automatically applied.

New comment by russfink in "Turing Completeness of GNU find"

russfink — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:52:05 +0000

Okay, but what are the cybersecurity implications of this discovery? A new living-off-the-land approach? Resource exhaustion? Covert servers?

New comment by russfink in "Turing Completeness of GNU find"

russfink — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:50:24 +0000

Sorry for the novice question, but how do you determine this is AI?

New comment by russfink in "Official specification and reference code for Fast Lightweight Online Encryptio"

russfink — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:50:41 +0000

Not sure I understand the problem this is trying to solve. I can hash a 2Gb file with an empty hash placeholder, sign the hash and store it in the file. Then on decryption, zero out the placeholder, hash the whole file, and compare the result to the included signed hash placeholder without storing 2Gb in memory.

New comment by russfink in "Log into 28 vintage computer systems in the browser / Interim Computer Museum"

russfink — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:42:59 +0000

Hug of death via Tom’s Hardware

Log into 28 vintage computer systems in the browser / Interim Computer Museum

russfink — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:42:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/you-can-log-into-28-vintage-computer-systems-in-your-browser-for-free-thanks-to-the-interim-computer-museum-and-sdf-org-experience-legendary-oses-architectures-programming-languages-and-games

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47117411

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by russfink in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

russfink — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 04:57:08 +0000

I must be the only one who thinks this, but this is the age of getting things done. I don’t have to worry about syntax or off by one errors, I tell it what to do and it generally does it, instantly!

Oh, and I’m 57 and was programming the Commodore Pet when I was 11. I’m relieved to be (mostly) free of syntactic shackles.

Vote me down, but also prove me wrong.

New comment by russfink in "How not to securely erase a NVME drive (2022)"

russfink — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:39:29 +0000

sedutil-cli —yesIwantToEraseALLmydata $PSID /dev/sda1 or something like that.

New comment by russfink in "After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand"

russfink — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:32:43 +0000

This. Most people defer the solving of hard problems to when they write the code. This is wrong, and too late to be effective. In one way, using agents to write code forces the thinking to occur closer to the right level - not at the code level - but in another way, if the thinking isn’t done or done correctly, the agent can’t help.

New comment by russfink in "Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf]"

russfink — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 21:58:24 +0000

zOMG dying laughing here

New comment by russfink in "Scanning ultrasound as a neuromodulation therapy in Alzheimer's disease"

russfink — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:17:22 +0000

> With four treatment sessions spaced fortnightly,

This is a clearer statement of “Every two weeks” than “bimonthly” or “semimonthly.”

Brilliant!

New comment by russfink in "The Accountability Trap: Why School Systems Abandon Gifted Students"

russfink — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 13:09:44 +0000

Mathematically speaking, “no child left behind” is equivalent to “no child out in front.”

New comment by russfink in "Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English"

russfink — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 03:32:45 +0000

Except what if you don’t really grok those ffmpeg flags and the LLM tells you something wrong - how will you know? Or more common, send you down a re-encode rabbit hole when you just needed a simple clipping off the end?

New comment by russfink in "I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone"

russfink — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 04:09:39 +0000

Ten years old laptop? Pretty sure it has a TPM 2.0 on it.

New comment by russfink in "Reflections on AI at the End of 2025"

russfink — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 17:40:15 +0000

Practical question: when getting the AI to teach you something, eg how attention can be focused in LLMs, how do you know it’s teaching you correct theory? Can I use a metric of internal consistency, repeatedly querying it and other models with a summary of my understanding? What do you all do?