Hacker News: thadt

New comment by thadt in "NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era"

thadt — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:59:56 +0000

Agreed. I scanned a short book with my phone, and a dedicated scanner would have been nice to have.

But with page flattening and separation and automated capture, it went much faster than I would have thought. If I were going to do a lot more, I'd want something like a scan tent [1]. It's not as ergonomic as a dedicated solution, but in 2026 a phone and some light can get you a lot of the way there, pretty fast.

[1] https://www.transkribus.org/scantent

New comment by thadt in "NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era"

thadt — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:10:54 +0000

Maybe not years ago, but scanning documents with the phone in your pocket has become incredibly efficient. That combined with AI transcription and indexing for search makes such a project faster and cheaper in 2026 than at almost any other time in the past.

New comment by thadt in "An Introduction to Meshtastic"

thadt — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:09:43 +0000

That’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how autonomous your drone is and what you need to guide it to do…

New comment by thadt in "AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC"

thadt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:02:14 +0000

They're doing transcription, not translation - so, turning someones pages of scrawled script into typewritten text. They have around 20 people nationwide that are able to do this. Most of them are older volunteers who aren't all that interested in computer assistance, but about a third of them have started leveraging the newer AI tools and it has accelerated their throughput significantly.

Having a 'best guess' at the lettering is really handy - in some cases the writing is really rather difficult to make out at all. Even being able to run something as simple as frequency analysis on stroke patterns would be a massive benefit.

At this point they're becoming throughput bound on the scanning process. Diaries are digitized since the archive is in one place and their transcription experts are spread out over the country.

New comment by thadt in "AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC"

thadt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:50:33 +0000

AI had been a super useful for processing historical data. Interviewed a volunteer last month from the diary archive in Germany, and they're using supervised AI for diary transcription. Going from (old) personalized hand script to text is a lot of work, even for experienced transcribers. Being able to automate the first pass of that has been a huge boon to their processing pipeline.

A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines

thadt — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:31:20 +0000

Article URL: https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662234

Points: 551

# Comments: 248

New comment by thadt in "12k AI-generated blog posts added in a single commit"

thadt — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:21:26 +0000

Ironically, the reason I used Google the most then was because it indexed Usenet while so many other parts of the Internet offered by the other engines were "slop". My, how the turn tables.

New comment by thadt in "Vulnerability research is cooked"

thadt — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:50:09 +0000

In general I agree and suspect that memory safety is a tool that will continue to pay dividends for some time.

But there are tradeoffs and more ways to write correct and 'safe' code than doing it in a "memory safe" language. If frontier models indeed are a step function in finding vulnerabilities, then they're also a step function in writing safer code. We've been able to write safety critical C code with comprehensive testing for a long time (with SQLite presenting a well known critique of the tradeoffs).

The rub has been that writing full coverage tests, fuzzing, auditing, etc. has been costly. If those costs have changed, then it's an interesting topic to try to undertand how.

New comment by thadt in "Vulnerability research is cooked"

thadt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:12:59 +0000

So the intersting question: are we long term safer with "simpler" closer to hardware memory unsafe(ish) environments like Zig, or is the memory safe but more abstract feature set of languages like Rust still the winning direction?

If a hypothetical build step is "look over this program and carfully examine the bounds of safety using your deep knowledge of the OS, hardware, language and all the tools that come along with it", then a less abstract environment might be at an overall advantage. In a moment, I'll close this comment and go back to writing Rust. But if I had the time (or tooling) to build something in C and test it as thoroughly as say, SQLite [1], then I might think harder about the tradeoffs.

[1] https://sqlite.org/whyc.html

New comment by thadt in "A sea of sparks: Seeing radioactivity"

thadt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:51:11 +0000

Bananas are like XML that way. If you're not getting the results you want, you're just not using enough of them.

New comment by thadt in "We broke 92% of SHA-256 – you should start to migrate from it"

thadt — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:19:23 +0000

They specifically call out Yingxin Li[1] in the acknowledgements section of the paper?

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/349

New comment by thadt in "A better streams API is possible for JavaScript"

thadt — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:18:58 +0000

Clarification - in the past when I've written high performance data tools in JS, it was almost entirely to support the use case of needing it to run in a browser. Otherwise, there are indeed more suitable environments available.

To your question, I was about to point out Firefox[1], but realized you clarified 'mainstream'[2]...

[1] https://briangrinstead.com/blog/firefox-webcomponents

[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

New comment by thadt in "The quixotic team trying to build a world in a 20-year-old game"

thadt — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 15:39:45 +0000

As someone who spent hours playing Jedi Knight with friends and lots of mods, allow me to say - thank you :)

New comment by thadt in "A better streams API is possible for JavaScript"

thadt — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 15:32:48 +0000

Browsers

New comment by thadt in "Those who can, teach history"

thadt — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:03:19 +0000

Getting a broad overview of "world history" is useful for having basic context for large events, but, IMHO, history gets so much more interesting and educational when you're deep into individual people's lives and stories. I'm probably a bit biased, but tend to agree with the suggestions that you pick a time and place and dive deep into an individual or event that catches your fancy.

New comment by thadt in "Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance"

thadt — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:59:50 +0000

Oh man, have I gotten to read a lot of history recently.

And also fiction.

Frequently at the same time.

New comment by thadt in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"

thadt — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:21:55 +0000

I used to love using em dashes.

I still do - but I used to, too.

New comment by thadt in "STFU"

thadt — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:50:48 +0000

In the 80's we had a way to deal with that kind of thing [1]. Just gotta practice to get the technique right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1GyHQiuneU

New comment by thadt in "April 9, 1940 a Dish Best Served Cold (2021)"

thadt — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:47:37 +0000

A cursory search doesn't seem to turn up anything solid.

But it would be interesting to know. I'll be in the German diary archive in March and made a note to keep an eye out for it.

New comment by thadt in "Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system"

thadt — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:04:54 +0000

Zyklon-B wasn’t much of a secret - it was used all over the place as a pesticide. Most soldiers would have been about as familiar with it as we would with Raid spray or bug traps.