Hacker News: thayne

New comment by thayne in "A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Responds to "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better""

thayne — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:50:13 +0000

Maybe. I'm not sure if the original author's intent was to say how risc-v could be better or to say it is bad and people should use other (proprietary) ISAs instead.

New comment by thayne in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

thayne — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 20:35:55 +0000

If only ISAs weren't protected (or protectable) by patents.

New comment by thayne in "I close SSH port 22 (and what I use instead)"

thayne — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:09:34 +0000

My understanding is even with a PSK you need port 500 open for the initial handshake.

New comment by thayne in "I close SSH port 22 (and what I use instead)"

thayne — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:02:24 +0000

If you are connecting from a residence or a mobile device (like a laptop), your ip address isn't fixed, so a firewall won't help.

New comment by thayne in "I close SSH port 22 (and what I use instead)"

thayne — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:00:47 +0000

I think you are missing the point. It isn't about increasing the bits of security, it's about avoiding the flood of port scanners and the logs that produces.

IPsec is way more complicated to set up than this (or other VPN solutions like Wireguard or OpenVPN for that matter), and doesn't even completely solve that problem, because your ipsec port is open. Although, admittedly, there are probably less bots looking for ipsec than ssh.

New comment by thayne in "AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users"

thayne — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:59:05 +0000

> the KJV is copyrighted in the UK

But that only applies if you are subject to UK law right?

New comment by thayne in "Tailscale Traces Database Corruption to 16y/o SQLite WAL-Reset Bug"

thayne — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:42:35 +0000

Those seem consistent to me. Some pages weren't written to the WAL (yet?), but something else referenced them or otherwise indicated they existed, so then the other process tried to read them, resulting in the issue in the first quote.

New comment by thayne in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"

thayne — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:19:55 +0000

> the convention is kind of to have a constructor pattern with a NewStruct(...) *Struct method that initializes all properties

But that doesn't stop you from declaring a var s Struct, and never initializing it, or making a NewStruct {}.

> can't you build your own validator for that with the reflect package in the Add() method of your UI graph

Besides the fact that that would almost certainly significantly hurt performance, how would you be able to differentiate between unitialized data and data that was intentionally set to the zero value?

New comment by thayne in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"

thayne — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:13:58 +0000

nil pointer panics aren't nearly as bad as values getting zero initialized, then used in places that assume they were initialized, and getting subtle bugs because the state is inconsistent.

New comment by thayne in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

thayne — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:54:07 +0000

Maybe. That is still pretty different from the source code for software though. Suppose OpenAI released all the training data, training methodology, and training source code, but didn't release the weights for a frontier model. Would that allow you to build the same model? Not unless you have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on it. And even then you won't get the exact same thing. That's not to say it isn't valuable. But I'm not sure "open source" is really the right term for that either.

New comment by thayne in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

thayne — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:45:14 +0000

These things are not mutually exclusive. You can say that Nazis were evil and also analyze the factors that led to them coming into power.

New comment by thayne in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

thayne — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:26:15 +0000

Would you say it is a fallacy to apply such value judgements to say, the institutions of the National Socialist Party (Nazis), the KKK, the KGB, etc? How about a company whose business was selling slaves?

To be clear, I'm not saying being an employee of Meta is comparable to being a member of the aforementioned groups. But I don't think it is always a fallcy to apply a value judgement to an institution.

New comment by thayne in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

thayne — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:02:09 +0000

"open source" doesn't even make much sense for a model. But llama isn't even fully open weights due to the restrictions on its use.

New comment by thayne in "Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”"

thayne — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:18:14 +0000

Plenty of things with prior art are successfully patentend. And are successfully enforced, because it is cheaper to pay the troll to cross the bridge than to take it to court. It isn't until the sue the wrong person who has the backbone and the resources to contest it that the patent gets revoked.

New comment by thayne in "Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload"

thayne — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:54:53 +0000

A bugtracker is inherently dynamic.

New comment by thayne in "Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload"

thayne — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:53:51 +0000

My residential ISP doesn't support IPv6 at all. If a site is ipv6 only, I can't reach it unless I use a VPN.

New comment by thayne in "Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload"

thayne — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:47:29 +0000

Perhaps the biggest problem is 5 cents or less isn't enough to cover minimum transaction fees.

New comment by thayne in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"

thayne — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:44:20 +0000

Also a lot of them may or may not be safe depending on additional context that you don't have in the test.

New comment by thayne in "SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?"

thayne — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:14:32 +0000

> I suspect the repo in question was generated with a year-old LLM

I suspect there are a lot of people running inexpensive models that are searching for vulnerabilities across a lot of projects, probably in an automated way (ex with openclaw or similar) in the hopes of winning a bounty and/or noteriety.

New comment by thayne in "SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?"

thayne — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:01:14 +0000

Even more than that, a lot of vulnerabilities require untrusted input to exploit, but the library or executable is usually only used with trusted input. For example, suppose the chacha20 function had a vulnerability that was exploitable with a malicious secret key, but you only call it with your own, definitely not malicious, key. The vulnerability doesn't impact you, but your security policy might still require you to update. And no amount of splitting the package will help with that.