Hacker News: ted_dunning

New comment by ted_dunning in "Moving integer division to floating-point is trivial"

ted_dunning — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:13:15 +0000

IT started in the 60s with the CDC6400, actually. It's no wonder you missed it.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Moving integer division to floating-point is trivial"

ted_dunning — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:08:20 +0000

As the article says, some processors only have an instruction that produces 1 bit of quotient per cycle. This gives a variable time for integer division which can be longer than the time it takes to do a floating point operation.

This sort of limitation has a long pedigree and is surprisingly common. For instance, the CDC 6000 series had no general purpose integer arithmetic unit. The DEC Alpha had no integer divide and the standard RISC-5 spec also omits it. Same for low-end ARM chips.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Stowaway – Take the window seat on any plane or satellite overhead"

ted_dunning — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:46:49 +0000

The visualization for the aisle seat is much less interesting than for the window seat.

Maybe that's why they built what they built.

New comment by ted_dunning in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

ted_dunning — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:36:23 +0000

Having to serve 1000x more traffic from bots is completely unacceptable for most site owners as well.

The fact that this trade-off isn't obvious indicates you haven't tried to run a site at scale and make a living off of it.

New comment by ted_dunning in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

ted_dunning — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:27:05 +0000

The entire blog was about how the site owner doesn't want to put it in the open.

Your pontificating can't change the fact that he can do whatever he wants with his site.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Pass the Passkey: A Novel Attack Surface in Passwordless Authentication"

ted_dunning — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:04:39 +0000

It's not that simple. The stolen file has no clear text passwords and ideally, these passwords can only be decrypted on the right hardware with user confirmation. Of course, eternal and repeated confirmation requests are an anti pattern all their own, but the cloud attestation service not verifying the hardware sounds like a really glaring omission.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Pass the Passkey: A Novel Attack Surface in Passwordless Authentication"

ted_dunning — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:02:41 +0000

But when you do, there are glaring holes these people uncovered.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Pass the Passkey: A Novel Attack Surface in Passwordless Authentication"

ted_dunning — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:45:50 +0000

It is hard to find the content for all of the glitzy ads on this site.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequences"

ted_dunning — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:35:03 +0000

The problem with this logic is that if 80% of the salmon in the water are sterile, then the probably of a fruitful mating is only 20% of the previous rate. For most wild populations, this is cataclysmically bad.

It works on screw worm flies. It will have a similar effect on wild salmon.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner [video]"

ted_dunning — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:33:51 +0000

It would have been pretty easy to use a horizontal line scanner to get image speed.

In any case, it seems that using a full frame video would be much easier to post process since frame to frame correlation tells you everything you need to know about motion.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey"

ted_dunning — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:43:51 +0000

Define "most" and "us".

If us means humans living in democracies, I would say that parliamentary democracy has more supporters and constitutional republics.

And even if us == the US, I would argue that most US citizens actually have only a very hazy idea about how their own system of government works, much less how others work. Most of these people think that chanting "USA, USA" in unison is democracy.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey"

ted_dunning — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:38:39 +0000

Alex Pretti would like a word.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey"

ted_dunning — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:33:21 +0000

Albania and Georgia have much healthier culture of resistance than the US.

The US has almost entirely lost this culture except for short moments in isolated places. Minneapolis is nearly a proof by exception in this. Very, very few people need to be detained or killed to get the mass of Americans to stay inside and self-censor. Much less is required to get businesses to put their head down and play nice with the government.

New comment by ted_dunning in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

ted_dunning — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 05:24:46 +0000

Buying a bond at a discount is no different than buying at face value and paying back with interest.

Any claims that there is any important difference is sophistry.

New comment by ted_dunning in "My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault"

ted_dunning — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:47:51 +0000

But this partition would be visible.

The OP had a version that is invisible.

New comment by ted_dunning in "My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault"

ted_dunning — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:35:29 +0000

Unless they disassemble this drive, a forensic dump will only show the open partition.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled"

ted_dunning — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:36:50 +0000

A similar distinction with opposite polarity, however.

A public school in Britain does not receive public funding.

A public school in the US is entirely publicly funded.

New comment by ted_dunning in "Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide"

ted_dunning — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 22:43:15 +0000

And make a video about how to make a dashboard (that you call Jarvis).

New comment by ted_dunning in "FDA advisors unanimously vote to approve Moderna's mRNA after agency drama"

ted_dunning — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 03:21:14 +0000

Wow... that took me several, uh, seconds to find.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2516491

There's your hard data.

New comment by ted_dunning in "FDA advisors unanimously vote to approve Moderna's mRNA after agency drama"

ted_dunning — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 03:18:06 +0000

What do you mean by "immunizing vaccines"?

In the first sentence, you say that flu vaccines are not and in the second you admit they are.

Maybe you meant that their coverage is not comprehensive. If so, that's what you should say.

mRNA flu vaccines have substantial potential advantages in terms of the ability to target a wider spectrum of variants and faster time to manufacture.