Hacker News: ted_dunning

New comment by ted_dunning in "Peptides: where to begin?"

ted_dunning — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:29:32 +0000

Sure. He says that they commonly use steroids. It's no wonder they have degenerative joint disease.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Random numbers, Persian code: A mysterious signal transfixes radio sleuths"

ted_dunning — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:24:52 +0000

It's called a book cipher and it is definitely subject to various statistical attacks, especially if you have a list of almost all books.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Random numbers, Persian code: A mysterious signal transfixes radio sleuths"

ted_dunning — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:19:30 +0000

KP4MD detected wingtip vortices from reflected VHF signals.

https://www.cfmilazzo.com/aircraft-wingtip-vortices

New comment by ted_dunning in "Random numbers, Persian code: A mysterious signal transfixes radio sleuths"

ted_dunning — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:16:03 +0000

That is a book cipher, not a one-time pad.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Sodium-ion EV battery breakthrough delivers 11-min charging and 450 km range"

ted_dunning — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:07:47 +0000

Apparently it only smells bad if you have non-lethal concentration.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Can you get root with only a cigarette lighter? (2024)"

ted_dunning — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:09:02 +0000

Uh... yeah.

Just hold the sysadmins hand over the lighter until they tell you the password.

Never forget the easy way in ... the humans.

New comment by ted_dunning in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

ted_dunning — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 06:45:45 +0000

Explain your needs and they will be incredibly gracious.

They will also be sad for you to miss the rice.

New comment by ted_dunning in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

ted_dunning — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 06:23:12 +0000

There are still contradictory customs around this enough that it is standard practice to warn exchange students from Europe that if they finish absolutely everything on their plate that this is a signal in many American homes that you should be served more. This can lead to some real discomfort as the student tries to eat everything they are given which leads to being given more and more.

So at the same time it is considered poor taste to take more than you can eat, it is also considered poor form to offer a guest anything less than more than they can eat. This also shows up when people rate restaurants by the serving size.

New comment by ted_dunning in "My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)"

ted_dunning — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 20:21:31 +0000

At that point I would be very impressed if you could remember what the timers are for.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Glassworm Is Back: A New Wave of Invisible Unicode Attacks Hits Repositories"

ted_dunning — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:31:04 +0000

Check out emacs for options like this.

And, yes, there is a circumstance if you want to include Arabic or Hebrew in comments or strings. You need the zero width left-right markers to make that work.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Glassworm is back: A new wave of invisible Unicode attacks hits repositories"

ted_dunning — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:26:52 +0000

To prevent ligatures from forming when you need that.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Glassworm is back: A new wave of invisible Unicode attacks hits repositories"

ted_dunning — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:26:27 +0000

As do tabs, ems, ens and quads.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Glassworm is back: A new wave of invisible Unicode attacks hits repositories"

ted_dunning — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:25:27 +0000

They only render differently in some fonts, on some displays.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Glassworm is back: A new wave of invisible Unicode attacks hits repositories"

ted_dunning — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:24:00 +0000

But these characters only look identical in some fonts. Are you saying that if you change font, some characters in a string should change appearance and others should not?

And what about the round-trip rule?

And ligatures? Aren't those a semantic distinction?

New comment by ted_dunning in "Glassworm is back: A new wave of invisible Unicode attacks hits repositories"

ted_dunning — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:22:13 +0000

One of the ground rules of Unicode is the round trip rule. You have to be able to translate to and from Unicode without loss of information.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Glassworm Is Back: A New Wave of Invisible Unicode Attacks Hits Repositories"

ted_dunning — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:20:37 +0000

No need to remove them. Just make them visible for applications that don't need to render every language. Make that behavior optional as well in case you really want to name characters with Hangul or Tibetan.

Some middle ground so that you can use greek letters in Julia might be nice as well.

But I don't see any purpose in using the Personal Use Areas (PUA) in programming.

New comment by ted_dunning in "We Will Not Be Divided"

ted_dunning — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:47:49 +0000

Donating the first polio vaccine to humanity.

Funding the majority of HIV prevention in Africa.

The list is long, but you knew that.

New comment by ted_dunning in "We Will Not Be Divided"

ted_dunning — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:19:30 +0000

There is no Secretary of War. The name of the Defense Department is set by statute that has not been named regardless of Pete Hegseth's cosplay desires.

New comment by ted_dunning in "We Will Not Be Divided"

ted_dunning — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:18:14 +0000

No. It is much more than this.

If I sell red widgets that I make by hand to the government, I won't be allowed to use Anthropic to help me write my web-site.

New comment by ted_dunning in "We Will Not Be Divided"

ted_dunning — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:16:56 +0000

It means that all companies contracting with the government have to certify that they don't use Anthropic products at all. Not just in the products being offered to the government.

This is a massive body slam. This means that Nvidia, every server vendor, IBM, AWS, Azure, Microsoft and everybody else has to certify that they don't do business directly or indirectly using Anthropic products.