Hacker News: sfilmeyer

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

sfilmeyer — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:47:07 +0000

I suspect this is a real problem for charities, though. If those bots are using stolen credit cards, the "donations" are going to cost the charities money after they pay extra fees to the credit card processors. Nonprofits are sometimes used to test stolen credit cards before making more profitable fraudulent transactions, so there's a real risk of it costing them money if they get rid of the captcha but don't replace it with something sufficiently high quality, even after accounting for the occasional lost donation.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

sfilmeyer — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:01:08 +0000

This article claims 104 mph, not 24 mph: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/us/timeline-air-canada-collis...

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"

sfilmeyer — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:37:47 +0000

This also requires knowing how much it will shrink, and accurately gauging if I've left enough buffer when trying something on at the store.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Why does a least squares fit appear to have a bias when applied to simple data?"

sfilmeyer — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 03:25:04 +0000

Wikipedia has some notes on why least squares, and how you might get there from other assumptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares#Statistical_test... .

Also, quadratics are just much easier to work with in a lot of ways than higher powers. Like you said, even powers have the advantage over odd powers of not needing any sort of absolute value, but quartic equations of any kind are much harder to work with than quadratics. A local optimum on a quartic isn't necessarily a global optimum, you lose the solvability advantages of having linear derivatives, et cetera.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options"

sfilmeyer — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 15:04:42 +0000

I feel like there's a bit of a jump from "tech-savvy" to de-soldering things on an expensive piece of home electronics. As it stands now, though, I agree that turning off the smart TV features seems to be the way to go for most people.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Two billion email addresses were exposed"

sfilmeyer — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:34:45 +0000

Troy Hunt has been running Have I Been Pwned for years. He even uses the k-anonymity model to allow you to search if a password has been pwned without giving him the password if you don't trust him.

I get your general point, but he's been a leader in this space and walking the walk for a decade. I'm not even into security stuff or anything particularly related to this, and I still recognized his name in the OP domain.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "The Weird Concept of Branchless Programming"

sfilmeyer — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 17:54:52 +0000

I enjoyed reading the article, but I'm pretty thrown by the benchmarks and conclusion. All of the times are reported to a single digit of precision, but then the summary is claiming that one function shows an improvement while the other two are described as negligible. When all the numbers presented are "~5ms" or "~6ms", it doesn't leave me confident that small changes to the benchmarking might have substantially changed that conclusion.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study"

sfilmeyer — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 21:31:40 +0000

Thank you! You're right that's the sort of "hacked together" solution that looks cool but beyond my abilities, and I appreciate the first two links.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study"

sfilmeyer — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 13:49:45 +0000

Can you link an example of a window unit ERV? I tried searching briefly, and came across some folks hacking together units to make them work with windows or adding their own ducting, but nothing analogous to a simple window air conditioning unit. As a renter of an apartment in a very much not modern home, I don't really see anything that seems like it would work.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "In Maine, prisoners are thriving in remote jobs"

sfilmeyer — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:09:13 +0000

That makes sense along the lines of their second proposal, but doesn't address the concerns of the first. Part of democracy means voting for the folks who govern you, but a prisoner might be left unable to vote in an election for the local state or municipal governments.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Nvidia buys $5B in Intel"

sfilmeyer — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:59:24 +0000

>2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.

This definitely isn't a thing that every company does (or even close to every company).

New comment by sfilmeyer in "About the security content of iOS 15.8.5 and iPadOS 15.8.5"

sfilmeyer — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 01:17:36 +0000

> What’s Apple’s default time frame for security support?

This isn't thaaaaat far out of support. Their last security update for iOS 15 was just earlier this year, and they only dropped iPhone 6s from new major versions with iOS 16 a few years ago. As someone who has kept my last few iPhones for 5+ years each, I definitely appreciate that they keep a much longer support window than most folks on the Android side of things.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Los Alamos is capturing images of explosions at 7 millionths of a second"

sfilmeyer — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:01:29 +0000

Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but you seem like you're talking about privatizing this research whereas the other commenter seems to be talking about public cuts leading to a reduction of research. Just because something gets cut doesn't mean it gets outsourced elsewhere.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "The case for having roommates even when you can afford to live alone"

sfilmeyer — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 15:23:29 +0000

I'm a man, and had wonderful experiences with my many (mostly male) roommates, with only occasional hiccups. Saying adult men cannot live together seems pretty excessive.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Copyparty – Turn almost any device into a file server"

sfilmeyer — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:25:34 +0000

On the spectrum of illegality, things can get a lot more extreme than a bit of copyright infringement.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "I wasted weeks hand optimizing assembly because I benchmarked on random data"

sfilmeyer — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:28:21 +0000

As a counterpoint, what fraction of the future engineers who will touch the project are likely to be able to competently edit the finite automata based version without introducing bugs and what fraction will be able to competently edit the if statement that checks the particular policy?

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Lost Chapter of Automate the Boring Stuff: Audio, Video, and Webcams in Python"

sfilmeyer — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:52:51 +0000

I'm not in near deep enough to have any ideas what you're talking about, and the link didn't really help. Can you explain?

Who is Tim Peters? How were they slandered? What did the author do that you disliked? Who is Glyph Lefkowitz? Why is citing Glyph Lefkowitz an indictment of the author?

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Battle to eradicate invasive pythons in Florida achieves milestone"

sfilmeyer — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 02:03:01 +0000

>dangerously high levels of mercury

All the better for a tuna substitute!

More seriously, from your article

>4.86 mg/kg in liver tissue from a snake that was 4.7 m long but overall averaged 0.12 ± 0.19 mg/kg in tail tip

Tuna looks like it's about 0.39 mg/kg, so the liver tissue is suuuuper high but the tail tip is just normal high mercury.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Silicon Valley finally has a big electronics retailer again: Micro Center opens"

sfilmeyer — Sat, 31 May 2025 03:41:36 +0000

Comments like this remind me I might be the only person in Massachusetts honestly calculating my use tax for my tax return every year.

New comment by sfilmeyer in "Mass spectrometry method identifies pathogens within minutes instead of days"

sfilmeyer — Thu, 08 May 2025 15:21:50 +0000

>On the other hand, even 0.01% is not acceptable when the system is responsible for human lives.

I've got bad news for you about a whole lot of medical tests and interventions if 0.01% is unacceptable for you. I get your point that the stakes might be higher with medical technology than in some other fields, but you're still setting the bar too high.

The first pathogen I saw mentioned by name while skimming through the linked article was H. Pylori, where the false-positive and false-negative rates for various currently used tests are several dozen times worse than that at about 0.30-0.90% [0]. Even just being hospitalized in and of itself has failure rates. Just eyeballing some of the numbers at [1] and elsewhere, I suspect that at least 0.01% of hospitalizations result in a death attributable to a hospital acquired infection.

[0] https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2019/0701/p16.html [1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthcare-associated-infections/php/dat...