Hacker News: russfink

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?

New comment by russfink in "MIT Missing Semester 2026"

russfink — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 15:55:26 +0000

Conspicuously missing is a direct mention of AI tools. Is MIT, like others, side-stepping the use of AI by students to (help them) complete homework assignments and projects?

New comment by russfink in "MIT Missing Semester 2026"

russfink — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 15:53:04 +0000

Link to the About page that clearly describes the effort and rationale.

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/about/

New comment by russfink in "Workday project at Washington University hits $266M"

russfink — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 21:35:57 +0000

Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems to handle its tasks, especially with AI’s around to offer coding help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it to students to develop said systems.

New comment by russfink in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"

russfink — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:26:53 +0000

One trick I have tried is asking the LLM to output a specification of the thing we are in the middle of building. A commenter above said humans struggle with writing good requirements - LLMs have trouble following good requirements - ALL of them - often forgetting important things while scrambling to address your latest concern.

Getting it to output a spec lets me correct the spec, reload the browser tab to speed things up, or move to a different AI.

New comment by russfink in "After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers"

russfink — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 01:06:42 +0000

Damn … Crucial P3 plus and P5 plus support Opal 2.0 full disk encryption. This leaves Samsung standing nearly alone in the consumer market, except for some smaller names.

New comment by russfink in "Xlibre is a fork of the Xorg Xserver with lots of code cleanups"

russfink — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:06:23 +0000

If it matters, many of their issues were apparently closed without comment. Here is an issue asking to resolve this. It also lists many of the commits.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/182...