halosghost

See also, one of the older / more-robust entrants in this space [0], and one of the more innovative (still from a hot-second ago now…) [1].

All the best,

0. https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

1. https://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/

https://unbiassly.com/terms_of_service is 404.

All the best,

-HG

I flagged this as undisclosed slopware being pushed as secure cryptographic engineering with no reasonable measure of human review.

All the best,

-HG

I flagged this as heavily-clickbaited self-promotion.

All the best,

Just to say, I actually disagree entirely. I do not believe press releases are, almost ever, valuable. Papers are just a format (with some writing style conventions that tend to follow the given field-of-study); they may be intimidating for many, but the hacker spirit and ethos is to dive in and tackle it, and that will pay far more dividends for everyone reading it than to consume more advertising. :)

All the best,

-HG

Hey @dang (I know it doesn't work, but isn't it fun to use your imagination?), can we get this press release replaced by a link to the actual paper [0]? This one is even open-access!

All the best,

-HG

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64982-y

Kentucky Route Zero [0], which managed to not just be beautiful in its own right, but so perfectly captures the visual language it's aiming for that you'll just lose yourself in moments of experience.

Also, Pathologic 2 [1] (probably, if you have more fortitude than me, maybe the original or HD remaster are of value [2]).

All the best,

-HG

[0] https://www.gog.com/en/game/kentucky_route_zero

[1] https://www.gog.com/en/game/pathologic_2

[2] https://youtu.be/JsNm2YLrk30

From `/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose`:

    ...
    <Multi_key> <less> <apostrophe>     : "‘"   U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <less>     : "‘"   U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <greater> <apostrophe>  : "’"   U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <greater>  : "’"   U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <less> <quotedbl>       : "“"   U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <quotedbl> <less>       : "“"   U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <greater> <quotedbl>    : "”"   U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <quotedbl> <greater>    : "”"   U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    ...
    <Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <minus> : "—"   U2014 # EM DASH
    ...

I genuinely do not understand how compose-lacking ɪᴍᴇs continue to see use—so much more of the full unicode spec is trivially available to you… even quite intuitively.

All the best,

-HG

Because, like everyone else that keeps using <LLM-of-choice>, they think it can be relied upon either because they don't care enough about the work they do to actually do it, or because they have bought the marketing hype.

“The beatings shall continue until morale improves…”

All the best,

I flagged this post as the article is rather exclusively culture-war politics (which accurately reflects all other comments from this poster), and has nothing to do with tech or hacker culture.

[Edit:] Also, just to be clear, it's transparently prejudiced drivel that doesn't deserve the time it takes to skim the title. And yes, I read more than the title. The full article is garbage. :)

All the best,

-HG

Note that this is actually one of the things Anubis does. That's what the proof-of-work system is, it just operates across the full load rather than targeted to a specific user's load. But, to the GP's point, that's the best option while allowing anonymous users.

All the best,

-HG

See also: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/crypto-right-answer...

All the best,

-HG

I don't understand how it is harming anyone—unlike web designers who actively design inaccessible websites—and while I suppose I could offer a reason, I don't particularly feel the need to explain myself.

I am sorry that this seems to have struck a nerve for you. And, as I genuinely mean to convey every time, I wish you…

All the best,

-HG

While I fully understand, and try hard to refrain from making such comments, given that the actual point of this article is about stress-relief, but it leverages design patterns which are genuinely awful for accessibility and positive, consistent experiences on the web, it does actually feel topical to me.

Put another way, I do not believe this is about a “tangential” annoyance.

All the best,

-HG

What can I say? It's a habit I developed long ago… [0][1]

All the best,

-HG

[0] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1417817#p1417817

[1] for anyone who doesn't have an Arch BBS account: https://0x0.st/8OL4.png

As opposed to overly-engineered websites that hijack [0] scroll-behavior, which only increase anxiety and fury.

ಠ_ಠ

All the best,

-HG

[0]: web-designers take-note, the normal term [1] in the field for doing this refers to violent crime. Think on your sins.

[1]: https://robinrendle.com/notes/scrolljacking/

Given that Firefox now sells your data [0], this move should be seen as nothing less than actively adversarial.

The ship has been sinking for a while; now the crew is trying to light the remaining decks on fire.

All the best,

-HG

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...

Broadside coding?

It appropriately invokes the scattershot nature of generative tooling (“this code couldn't parse the broadside of a barn”) and the violent and malicious nature of the ones in-control of such things (“I stumbled on an indie site! Bring the broadside to bear! All scrapers, free-fire!”)…

All the best,

-HG

Yeah, haven't read the book, but the article completely ignores "EEE."

All the best,

-HG

I am afraid your “human in the loop” isn't [0].

You acknowledge the problem of AI slop up-front, but seem to have chosen to plow forward anyway. Please do consider your actions and their effects carefully [1]. You are in a position of potential influence; try not to squander it.

All the best,

-HG

[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/30/a-neck-in-a-noose/

[1]: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/radical.pdf

It would probably require a “hard fork,” which is generally considered to be a major change in the Bitcoin world.

All the best,

If by “crypto,” the grandparent meant “cryptography,” this is not true. Most widely-deployed asymmetric/public-key primitives (e.g., RSA, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), etc.) are quite fragile against an adversary with a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC). To clarify how fragile, the general consensus/state-of-the-art as far as I am aware, is that Shor's algorithm (which breaks asymmetric primitives) requires about 2x the number of perfect, logical qubits as the RSA key-size (e.g., ~4000 qubits for factoring RSA 2048); however, because none of our qubit designs have a low enough error rate, you need about 1000 qubits to simulate/error-correct for a single logical qubit—so, currently, it's expected you would need around 4_000_000 physical qubits to factor RSA-2048. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is specifically the subset of cryptography that is designed to withstand attacks from quantum-enabled adversaries; it is still being actively designed, studied, standardized, implemented, and deployed.

If instead, the reference was to “cryptocurrencies,” most cryptocurrencies I am aware of depend on non-PQ constructions, and fall into the same buckets as RSA and ECC. Some systems, like Bitcoin, are in significant danger without large overhauls—if a practical CRQC is actually realized. There are efforts underway throughout the cryptocurrency communities to try to prepare for such an eventuality, but to my knowledge, none of them have major adoption yet.

As a final note on investment advice: I don't give out investment advice. :)

All the best,

No. If their claim is true, they have a new prototype of a single qubit that they say could enable faster scaling up of qubit arrays (which means asymmetric/public-key cryptosystems like RSA will be in trouble sooner than we thought they might be). However, this work does not demonstrate that scaling potential at all. In the spirit of Betteridge's Law of headlines, if such a thing were easy for them to demonstrate, why would they announce this now, with a single logical qubit, rather than when they've demonstrated at least some scaling potential?

This understanding of QC is common, but isn't quite right. Quantum computation is actually really hard to parallelize (which is why Grover, though a bit frightening since it halves the security of symmetric primitives, is actually kind of damning for QC—because you can't parallelize that search really at all, so halving is the best a quantum adversary can get against things like AES-256).

I stand by my assertion that, until a QC announcement includes replicable benchmarks on actual use-cases, such things can be safely dismissed.

If you continue to be concerned (not necessarily unhealthy), engage cryptographers and security engineers to help your projects build know-how on hybrid (in this case, classical/PQ) cryptosystems, and get them deployed sooner rather than later.

All the best,

If this is genuinely worrying to you, take some solace in that post-quantum alternatives are undergoing standardization and implementation right now (Signal and iMessage, for example, have already deployed some PQC, as have others).

However, this announcement is a nothing-burger. As I mentioned down-thread, you should view any QC announcement/press-release with extreme skepticism unless it includes replicable (read: open-source targeting hardware other researchers can test on) benchmarks for progress on real-world use-cases (e.g., Shor, Grover, or a newly-identified actually-interesting use-case). OP does not. Nothing to see here.

Worth saying, I am not a cryptographer—I do cryptography-adjacent research engineering. However, given the level of hype going around this industry, I think it's fair to at least expect to see the spec-sheet as it were.

All the best,

I found this logical leap to be pretty straight-forward, but it is a leap (rather than a clearly-telegraphed step).

My understanding was that the author sees the following:

  - Lots of AI advocates don't just think an AI superintelligence is possible, but desirable
  - They reason that an AI superintelligence will guide humanity to become better, and more intelligent
  - There is no known, proven, objective measure of “intelligence,” all schools so far that espouse such a thing as being possible and coherent stem from eugenics, phrenology, and similar projects (VC, AI founders, and CEOs have significant overlap with these groups)
  - AIs reinforce the biases present in their training sets and tuning, meaning they will gladly spout rhetoric from those same sociopolitical projects
  - People believe AI output readily and blindly

Regardless of whether or not a Superintelligence emerges (I'm betting against), the outcome of this trajectory will be that the eugenics/phrenology ideological descendants will continue to guide any new AI to espouse their beliefs (whether intentionally or due to implicit bias), and that most people will just accept the resulting outputs as True™. AI then will reinforce eugenicist views (as it already is). ∎

All the best,

Agreed wholesale. Any QC announcement that does not include replicable benchmarks for progress executing Shor or Grover (or demonstration of another real-world use-case that they actually address) should be dismissed out-of-hand by everyone except other researchers in QC.

All the best,

I haven't tried it out, I'm afraid (mostly due to time availability). I can say that I think the use of this tool is somewhat limited for the real-world. It is, in some sense, a steganography (the art and study of hiding a secret in undetectable ways, “in plain sight”) tool, but given that the resultant image (the “covertext” in steganography jargon) is semi-obviously noise (rather than some innocuous image), it's going to stand out to anyone hunting for secrets.

[Edit to add:] There is, however, a use-case that is still valid and worth considering: using this tool to communicate messages over a “carrier signal.” I.e., if there's a place where you want to store or transmit a message, but that message is in a format that is not accepted by the channel, but PNGs are allowed, you may be able to use this tool to encode arbitrary information into PNGs such that your message can still be transmitted. However, this is a pretty limited use-case, and is very easily detected.

There are also some niceties missing that I have come to expect from command-line UX (e.g., standardized getopt-style argument handling, terminal-size awareness, etc.) which are things you pick up and start to value as you spend more time in the CLI.

Also, if you want to dive into some of the encryption and security-related work, I'd suggest starting with the excellent CryptoPals challenges [0] (a XOR cipher is one of the first things you build and then break :P).

All the best,

[0] https://www.cryptopals.com/

Hello!

Congrats on getting a proof-of-concept working in this space, especially as young as you are. That's awesome!

However, I would strongly suggest putting a large disclaimer at the very top of this project making clear that it has not undergone rigorous security analysis. Just looking very briefly at the code, the encryption is a hand-rolled XOR cipher directly using a user-provided 10-byte key (keylength being hard-coded).

This is definitely not secure against any, even minimally motivated/aware attacker.

All the best,

I vouched for this post because, even if you think it's more focused on politics than tech, it is covering a political project (and the execution thereof) by a technologist (and several tech-adjacent folk) who has had work frequently featured in this venue.

Moreover, given that this political project places Tech itself front-and-center (both in the use for furtherance of the project as well as serving as the model being emulated/extrapolated), I think it is wholly on-topic for HN.

None of this analysis strikes me as particularly unkind or unfair. I hope the conversation can at least tackle the thorny issues of how tech has been implicated so far, and how it shall be in the future.

All the best,

I love my pebble time steel. In fact, I still have one sitting around (I don't wear it for reasons unrelated to the device's quality). However, just to be clear, the screen is not e-ink. It is “e-paper” (a very low-power, low-fidelity LCD). I think this was a very carefully-considered trade-off; and, at least at the time, I think it was the right call!

I'm strongly considering going back to wearing it.

All the best,