<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: zahllos</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zahllos</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 17:46:56 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=zahllos" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not the OP, but: -march says the compiler can assume that the features of that particular CPU architecture family, which is broken out by generation, can be relied upon. In the worst case the compiler could in theory generate code that does not run on older CPUs of the same family or from different vendors.<p>-mtune says "generate code that is optimised for this architecture" but it doesn't trigger arch specific features.<p>Whether these are right or not depends on what you are doing. If you are building gentoo on your laptop you should absolutely -mtune=native and -march=native. That's the whole point: you get the most optimised code you can for your hardware.<p>If you are shipping code for a wide variety of architectures and crucially the method of shipping is binary form then you want to think more about what you might want to support. You could do either: if you're shipping standard software pick a reasonable baseline (check what your distribution uses in its cflags). If however you're shipping compute-intensive software perhaps you load a shared object per CPU family or build your engine in place for best performance. The Intel compiler quite famously optimised per family, included all the copies in the output and selected the worst one on AMD ;) (<a href="https://medium.com/codex/fixing-intel-compilers-unfair-cpu-dispatcher-part-1-2-4a4a367c8919" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/codex/fixing-intel-compilers-unfair-cpu-d...</a>)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:39:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711200</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711200</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711200</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "Cyber.mil serving file downloads using TLS certificate which expired 3 days ago"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No unfortunately it is not correct. You can supply a different CA to verify client certs against to what is given in server hello. There's no need for them to be related at all.<p>Critically you probably want to use a custom CA for client certs. The usual implementation logic in servers is "is this cert from the client signed by one I trust?". If that CA is LetsEncrypt say then that's a lot of certificates that will pass that check.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:51:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495606</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495606</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495606</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree. I wanted a particular tool to support my development. The libraries are well known and understood by people who work in text editors, but this is not my area and I have a busy life. Simply working out what I needed to know produced enough inertia to stop it happening.<p>I finally made it with Claude. I've been writing code a while so I absolutely didn't let Claude loose and I still refactored stuff by hand as sometimes that was faster than trying to get Claude to do it. I also know what the whole thing does - I read all the diffs it presented.<p>I wouldn't fully trust it to go off and do its thing unsupervised especially in my areas of speciality. But the scaffolding work like command line arguments - typing all that out was never my passion and I had snippets in my editor for most of it.<p>Perhaps if your passion is the process of doing that kind of meticulously laying out of each file then I can understand. Although the journey for me is the problem solving. Nothing much excites me about any of the boilerplate parts.<p>Claude can certainly take a stab at the solution too and is best when it has some kind of test case to match or validation step. To me working out what those are was always the core of the job and without them Claude can make plenty of mistakes.<p>It's just a tool and I use it in ways to support what I enjoy.<p>My work situation is way more complicated. Bigcorp organizational dynamics nullify any marginal gain anywhere.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:48:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387356</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387356</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387356</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The windows assessment and deployment kit is what you need, with the windows pe add-on: <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/winpe-create-usb-bootable-drive?view=windows-11" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...</a><p>You should be aware there's a 3 day limit to uptime, then PE reboots. You can work around that: <a href="https://lsoft.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011128377-I-need-to-erase-a-larger-volume-of-data-from-Boot-Disk-but-WinPE-reboots-every-3-days-How-can-I-run-WinPE-based-Boot-Disk-for-more-than-3-days" rel="nofollow">https://lsoft.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011128377-I-n...</a><p>The other thing to tell you is that this is not a live version of windows with all the features of the full desktop. It is the windows that runs the windows installer application, so enough windows to do that and no more.<p>I would personally recommend linux instead.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:03:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800030</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800030</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800030</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I understand his concern perfectly. What I am saying is that his concern is not mitigated at all by the presence or absence of an IETF standard.<p>This is going to happen anyway (non hybrid) at least inside USG because that's what NSA want.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2025 08:13:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46043512</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46043512</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46043512</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I guess that would have been Silverman etc? That's true there was NTRU before reductions were shown. Good call.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:49:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46041146</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46041146</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46041146</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Source for this loss of security? I'm aware of the MATZOV work but you make it sound like there's a continuous and steady improvement in attacks and that is not my impression.<p>Lots of algorithms were broken, but so what? Things like Rainbow and SIKE are not at all based on the hardness of solving lattice problems.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:46:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038370</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038370</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46038370</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sure. I'm not American either. I agree, maximum scrutiny is warranted.<p>The thing is these algorithms have been under discussion for quite some time. If you're not deeply into cryptography it might not appear this way, but these are essentially iterations on many earlier designs and ideas and have been built up cumulatively over time. Overall it doesn't seem there are any major concerns that anyone has identified.<p>But that's not what we're actually talking about. We're talking about whether creating an IETF RFC for people who want to use solely use ML-KEM is acceptable or not - and given the most famous organization proposing to do this is the US Federal Government it seems bizarre in the extreme to accuse them of backdooring what they actually intend to use for themselves. As I said, though, this does not preclude the rest of the industry having and using hybrid KEMs, which given what cloudflare, google etc are doing we likely will.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:10:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037082</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037082</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037082</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Indeed. Dual_EC was a NOBUS backdoor relying on the ECDLP. That's fair.<p>My point was more that it looked suspicious at the time (why use a trapdoor in a CSPRNG) and at least the possibility of "escrow" was known, as evidenced by the fact that Vanstone (one of the inventors of elliptic curve cryptography) patented said backdoor around 2006.<p>This suspiciousness simply doesn't apply to ML-KEM, if one ignores one very specific cryptographer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:30:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036613</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036613</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036613</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>SHA-2 was designed by the NSA. Nobody is saying there is a backdoor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:24:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035797</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035797</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035797</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I will reply directly r.e. the analogy itself here. It is a poor one at best, because it assumes ML-KEM is akin to "internetting without cryptography". It isn't.<p>If you want a better analogy, we have a seatbelt for cars right now. It turns out when you steal plutonium and hot-rod your DeLorean into a time machine, these seatbelts don't quite cut the mustard. So we need a new kind of seatbelt. We design one that should be as good for the school run as it is for time travel to 1955.<p>We think we've done it but even after extensive testing we're not quite sure. So the debate is whether to put on two seatbelts (one traditional one we know works for traditional driving, and one that should be good for both) or if we can just use the new one on the school run and for going to 1955.<p>We are nowhere near DeLoreans that can travel to 1955 either.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:16:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035679</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035679</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035679</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The commentor means Dual_EC, a random number generator. The backdoor was patented under the form of "escrow" here: <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US8396213B2/en?oq=USOO83.96213" rel="nofollow">https://patents.google.com/patent/US8396213B2/en?oq=USOO83.9...</a> - replace "escrow" with "backdoor" everywhere in the text and what was done will fall out.<p>ML-KEM/ML-DSA were adapted into standards by NIST, but I don't think a single American was involved in the actual initial design.<p>There might be some weakness the NSA knows about that the rest of us don't, but the fact they're going ahead and recommending these be used for US government systems suggests they're fine with it. Unless they want to risk this vulnerability also being discovered by China/Russia and used to read large portions of USG internet traffic. In their position I would not be confident that if I was aware of a vulnerability it would remain secret, although I am not a US Citizen or even resident, and never have been.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:03:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035531</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035531</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035531</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ML-KEM and ML-DSA are not "known weak". The justification for hybrid crypto is that they might have classical cryptanalytical results we aren't aware of, although there's a hardness reduction for lattice problems showing they're NP-hard, while we only suspect RSA+DLog are somewhere in NP. That's reasonable as a maximal-safety measure, but comes with additional cost.<p>Obviously the standard will be used. As I said in a sibling comment, the US Government fully intends to do this whether the IETF makes a standard or not.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:52:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035417</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035417</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035417</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"The government" already have. That's what CNSA 2.0 means - this is the commercial crypto NSA recommend for the US Government and what will be in FIPS/CAVP/CMVP. ML-KEM-only for most key exchange.<p>In this context, it is largely irrelevant whether the IETF chooses or not to have a single-standard draft. There's a code point from IANA to do this in TLS already and it will happen for US Government systems.<p>I'd also add that personally I consider NIST P-Curves to be absolutely fine crypto. Complete formula exist, so it's possible to have failure-free ops, although point-on-curve needs to be checked. They don't come with the small-order subgroup problem of any Montgomery curve. ECDSA isn't great alone, the hedged variants from RFC 6979 and later drafts should be used.<p>Since ML-KEM is key exchange, X25519 <i>is</i> very widely used in TLS unless you need to turn it off for FIPS. For the certificate side, the actual WebPKI, I'm going to say RSA wins out (still) (I think).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 14:44:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46034678</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46034678</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46034678</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In context, this particular issue is that DJB disagrees with the IETF publishing an ML-KEM only standard for key exchange.<p>Here's the thing. The existence of a standard does not mean we need to use it for most of the internet. There will also be hybrid standards, and most of the rest of us can simply ignore the existence of ML-KEM -only. However, NSA's CNSA 2.0 (commercial cryptography you can sell to the US Federal Government) does not envisage using hybrid schemes. So there's some sense in having a standard for that purpose. Better developed through the IETF than forced on browser vendors directly by the US, I think. There was rough consensus to do this. Should we have a single-cipher kex standard for HQC too? I'd argue yes, and no the NSA don't propose to use it (unless they updated CNSA).<p>The requirement of the NIST competition is that all standardized algorithms are both classical and PQ-resistant. Some have said in this thread that lattice crypto is relatively new, but it actually has quite some history, going back to Atjai in '97. If you want paranoia, there's always code theory based schemes going back to around '75. We don't know what we don't know, which is why there's HQC (code based) waiting on standardisation and an additional on-ramp for signatures, plus the expensive (size and sometimes statefulness) of hash-based options. So there's some argument that single-cipher is fine, and we have a whole set of alternative options.<p>This particular overreaction appears to be yet another in a long running series of... disagreements with the entire NIST process, including "claims" around the security level of what we then called Kyber, insults to the NIST team's security level estimation in the form of suggesting they can't do basic arithmetic (given we can't factor anything bigger than 15 on a real quantum computer and we simply don't have hardware anywhere near breaking RSA, estimate is exactly what these are) and so on.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 14:26:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46034478</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46034478</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46034478</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ah no I was just being snarky and not at you. We're all missing (hyper)text markup language as the UI markup layer, plus js. We previously had some kind of alternative "load app from internet" but the runtimes were external (and provided lots of fun security holes).<p>I completely agree it would be better to rethink what we want and have markup/code/etc optimised to the task of rendering applications. I don't think it'll happen unfortunately.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2025 13:04:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45914429</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45914429</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45914429</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We could call it Flash. Or Java Applets.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2025 08:57:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45912497</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45912497</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45912497</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "OpenAI probably can't make ends meet. That's where you come in"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah. No revenue. Nobody wants to hear about revenue! It's not about how much you make, it is about how much you're worth and who is worth the most? Companies that lose money.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2025 18:20:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838453</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838453</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838453</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "I'm turning 41, but I don't feel like celebrating"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>End to end could still be default for 1-1 chats. Multi device support turns this into a small group chat but it is doable (Wire did it this way afaik; I think Signal does too).<p>Small groups could likewise be supported.<p>I take the point that for large groups client fan out of the double ratchet doesn't scale. We now have MLS but we didn't. There's also an argument of how can you really keep a secret in an open group of a few thousand people.<p>But on a small, "personal" level, e2e could absolutely be done. Not doing so is a choice, one that conveniently ends with almost everyone's chats stored on servers somewhere.<p>I would go so far as to say I bet telegram is a goldmine for TLAs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Oct 2025 10:43:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537315</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537315</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45537315</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zahllos in "Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can <i>sort of</i> look up a birth certificate but the service isn't designed for that. It is here: <a href="https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/</a><p>This is where you get certified copies should you ever need that for interfacing with foreign governments that want them (the European country I live in very much wants a copy of my birth certificate).<p>It's not an identity check by any means but a legitimate birth certificate ought to be findable here.<p>But yes birth cert + utility bill is a very, very weak binding to identity.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2025 21:03:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45391000</link><dc:creator>zahllos</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45391000</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45391000</guid></item></channel></rss>