Hacker News: totony

New comment by totony in "Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets"

totony — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 06:40:42 +0000

Having to put this much effort everytime a new technology comes out is so unproductive. How about have standards for elected officials not to abuse their power? Maybe have an ethics comittee or something? In academia, there's not a rule for every situation; ethics comittee handle this

New comment by totony in "Microsoft Releases AI Call Center Stack with Voice, SMS, and Memory"

totony — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 08:44:08 +0000

Then the AI misunderstands you and you end up in a loop of autogenerated responses, or just a "please visit our website for this inquiry."

New comment by totony in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

totony — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 01:05:52 +0000

As far as I can tell, the push against immigration in Canada is mainly around unskilled workers (which a lot of TFW are) and asylum seekers, but we will see how this pans out.

New comment by totony in "SELinux bypasses"

totony — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 20:02:03 +0000

Most distros use https://github.com/SELinuxProject/refpolicy while RHEL uses https://github.com/fedora-selinux/selinux-policy

It's also my experience that Fedora has better support for it, but Gentoo used to be good enough with hardened gentoo (they use https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/hardened-refpolicy.git/). Redhat and Gentoo are the only ones that officially support it afaik. I think hardened gentoo might have lost popularity since the fall of grsec, but I'm not sure how popular it is currently.

New comment by totony in "EUCLEAK Side-Channel Attack on the YubiKey 5 Series"

totony — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 21:29:08 +0000

I used ublock origin to block the overlay and loading indicator. A loading indicator on a website is bad practice anyway imo

New comment by totony in "Just Be Rich (2021)"

totony — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 23:36:34 +0000

Housing crisis is more of a political issue than supply/demand i feel like

New comment by totony in "NixOS just dropped Anduril as a NixCon sponsor"

totony — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 16:27:14 +0000

I don't think any non profit should ever refuse money. If they make money from something you disagree with, then taking that money and using it in the scope of your non-profit (which you agree with) is a moral imperative

New comment by totony in "Cash payments above €3000 to be outlawed in Netherlands"

totony — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 15:56:01 +0000

What if the bank doesn't allow you to make that transaction? How much delay are you willing to accept? Fees?

New comment by totony in "Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10"

totony — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 02:30:26 +0000

Python works around this by having multithreading through multiprocessing and IPC. its made pretty easy to use with the futures builtin module but is finicky/slow/hard to support.

New comment by totony in "Supreme Court Rejects Student Loan Forgiveness Plan"

totony — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:15:16 +0000

Considering these loans are non forgivable because of the governement, I think they are responsible for the exponential growth in cost and should bear the blame

New comment by totony in "Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces"

totony — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 01:04:55 +0000

Having a cursor to access files is mostly legacy no? The difference between memory and storage is getting very small, e.g. ssds and optane

New comment by totony in "OpenAI Tokenizer"

totony — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 14:55:21 +0000

The actual tokenizer often does not matter since you can add pre processors/normalizers. I assume they did it like this because capitalization matters in a lot of contexts

New comment by totony in "Llama.cpp 30B runs with only 6GB of RAM now"

totony — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 06:03:07 +0000

Or big cloud platform could give some compute for free, give back some of the profit they get from oss.

New comment by totony in "Google to delay portion of staff bonus"

totony — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 06:29:46 +0000

They have eliminated reserve requirement, but there still are capital requirements.

New comment by totony in "DALL-E for Playlists"

totony — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 23:49:14 +0000

Having worked with the same tech, I'd assume this is pretty inexpensive both to train and run. Probably in the low 1000s (maybe even mid 100s?) to train. knn search on 35k entries is pretty simple. The most expensive is probably the cross encoder (both to train and to run). Would also be interested to know

New comment by totony in "Getty Images is suing the creators of Stable Diffusion"

totony — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 14:50:53 +0000

Crazy how everyone is sueing stability ai but no one is sueing openai. Is this how society rewards openness? This will just end up with more concentration of power

New comment by totony in "Worst interview questions for software developers"

totony — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 16:51:18 +0000

For 25% more time you would expect more than 25% more pay, since the marginal value of your free time grows as it gets shorter

New comment by totony in "Przewodów village in Poland hit by two Russian missiles, two dead"

totony — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 23:52:48 +0000

That's a very subjective (and I assume unpopular) opinion. Western nations especially do not share you views, with popular addages being "better die on your feet than live on your knees," "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," etc.

Not that I think appeasement would work, but I think a chance of freedom is more important than a life of servitude for a lot of the west (most?)

New comment by totony in "Signal Introduces Stories"

totony — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 04:34:34 +0000

Why not use a merkle tree/blockchain? Usually a meme, but seems like a good solution here: every message is a blob containing the mssage and the hash of the previous received blob. As long as order and messages are the same, the message is valid.

A bad actor could screw with you in this naive implementation though

New comment by totony in "Brave New Trusted Boot World"

totony — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:52:51 +0000

>Most popular Linux distributions generate initrds locally, and they are unsigned, thus not protected through SecureBoot (since that would require local SecureBoot key enrollment, which is generally not done), nor TPM PCRs.

You can sign initrd and check it using (signed) grub. But yes you need local key enrollment. Maybe making this easier is the solution though? Instead of relying on Microsoft to be charitable with its keys.

>No rollback protection (no way to cryptographically invalidate access to TPM-bound secrets on OS updates)

Revoke the key used to sign either grub, the kernel or the initrd?

>Unified Kernel Image

UKI are systemd-specific and mostly a joke AFAICT. Linux supports embedding an initrd into its efi bin. Why make a new thing?

The main object of this whole article is to make PCRs contain hashes of the current system state. Its only advantage is that it can be used to restrict some TPM access. To do that, it tries to introduce a new way to do things which adds nothing to the average user. This is mainly useful for distributions that want to have complete control on the boot process (most Linux distributions do not). A distribution can already do most (everything?) of what is suggested using rotating keys/key revocation locally, but this would introduce the possibility of forced attestation of local state. It's a plus for big organizations, but I fail to see how this improves the state of Linux for the user. At best it's an alternative to using local signing (which is already possible), at worst it's an entry into attestation of local state (DRM).