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70rdon Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

Skills are used to steer individual models towards desirable behaviors they don't exhibit by default. They're not Pokemon cards. They clutter your context, sometimes for essentially 0 benefit.

70rdon Qwen 3.8 27B available on Cerebras at 1500 tokens/s

Throughput is useful if you want to generate a lot of transcripts for RL. It's for making Qwen better, not for actually using Qwen.

70rdon Remembrance of Scents Past

https://archive.is/XwtK7

70rdon Encrypting files with passkeys and age

Check out Precursor (FPGA device with softcore CPU running on it for trustability).

Xous (microkernel OS for Precursor) has an application called Vault that does FIDO2/U2F as well as password management and USB HID emulation.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates...

Much more on the dev board side and probably overkill for just this purpose but a really cool device.

70rdon OpenDAW – a new holistic exploration of music creation inside the browser

Doesn't Ardour support VST?

70rdon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2025)

Heads up your link is broken, doesn't match any PRs on that repo.

70rdon Pi Pico 2 Extreme Teardown

That channel is great, would be great to find repositories of similar hacker/electronics channels, if anyone has some.

70rdon It's time to stop using SMS (2021)

Anyone tracking signup conversion will realize that phone numbers are autofilled whereas 2FA requires an installation for a greater number of users, leading to drop-off.

70rdon Duty to Document (2023)

Most enduring sofware is always those "one-off prototypes" that people cook up over a few days.

70rdon Open Circuits

I'd buy this (and gift it to everyone I'd think would like it) in an instant. Especially if you somehow included and refined the analysis you have in the blog posts.

70rdon Adventures in reverse engineering Broadcom NIC firmware

You run into ToCToU issues. Even if a chip is "open", how can you be sure the chip you have corresponds to the specification? If that isn't a concern, any FPGA based SoC fits the bill, for example the MNT Reform Kintex-7 module (https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-rkx7-fpga-module).

70rdon TKey is a RISC-V computer in a USB-C case, that can run security applications

Supply chain attacks can be mitigated with "golden chip analysis", you destructively analyse a known good chip after measuring various power and timing benchmarks across adversarial configurations, and repeat those measurements across all future chips and check they are within margin of error.

70rdon TKey is a RISC-V computer in a USB-C case, that can run security applications

Different product at a different price point with different objectives. Security keys are suitable for mass deployment across an entire workforce, precursor aims to be a launchboard for general purpose secure and trustable computation. Even at mass production prices, precursor would likely still cost more than 100$.

70rdon Intel plans spinoff of FPGA unit

Good at what they're being programmed for is a bit of tautology.

FPGAs being selected for performance per watt was only a fairly recent phenomenon, when they were deployed on semi large scale as password crackers/cryptocurrency miners.

Their real strength is ultimately real time processing (DSP or networking), with reconfigurability often quite valuable for networking applications. For DSP applications it's usually because a MOQ of custom silicon can't be justified.

70rdon Moving my Blog off of Linode and back Home (Sort of)

Huh?

I quickly scrolled through and he does mention a move which could explain the tree change.

This is a pretty generic homelab, there's communities built around the hobby on reddit or lemmy.

It's 10k+ of equipement at retail but people in IT often get inside deals on old equipment that's being upgraded.

70rdon Everything you always wanted to know about mathematics (2013) [pdf]

Some software has PDF reflow, like koreader.

70rdon PC Engines EOL

https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64

Those boxes are at higher price point, but far exceed the apu lineup in features/compute.

70rdon Use GNU Emacs

Remember to contribute money/time if you love and use emacs!

Microsoft recently cancelled PayPal for Github sponsors and Tarsius lost significant amounts of income (that was already below minimum wage)[1].

A small contribution, the price of a coffee a week, which for successful developers is very little, goes a long way in supporting open source that doesn't have extensive corporate support like chromium/linux/docker.

https://magit.vc/donate/ https://liberapay.com/hlissner/donate https://liberapay.com/bzg/ (org-mode maintainer) https://www.patreon.com/sanityinc (MELPA) https://github.com/freetonik/support-emacs-community-devs (other good list)

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/11cezoq/magit_mainta...

70rdon OsmAnd 4.3 for Android devices

Geocoding is a non-trivial problem, and OSM's engine,Nominatim [1] isn't great.

[1] https://nominatim.org/

70rdon IRS Free File: Do Your Taxes for Free

What exception? If you are a citizen and intend on returning to the US (or even intend to renounce) you should be in good standing with the IRS (FBARs and annual filings). You owe the difference between locally paid taxes and federal taxes, and can claim overpayment as tax credits.

Most low-earners don't bother with this and use the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion Act [1]. Don't forget about FBARs if you have more than 10k across foreign banks accounts.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...

70rdon The ThinkPad TrackPoint tried to build a better mouse (2020)

Some folks over at r/ergomechkeyboards have done this (for example https://redd.it/yhioec). Also probably worth checking out https://www.reddit.com/r/trackpoint_builders

70rdon Memory loss: Expert advice for improving memory and concentration

Gwern's fairly comprehensive blog post [0] could be a good starting point.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/Modafinill

70rdon Memory loss: Expert advice for improving memory and concentration

It's available as grey-market generics shipped from India (in the US). That said, it is Schedule IV.

It's fairly well tolerated and widely prescribed for narcolepsy, and used off label as a 'nootropic', or cognitive enhancer.

Ironically enough, the rate of adverse effects might actually be comparable to Advil, and modafinil has a noticeably lower median lethal dose.

70rdon Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

Would you say Kagi has escaped the Google SEO deterioration? Google has essentially gotten so bad for me that DuckDuckGo, without noticeable improvement, is now on par with Google.

70rdon Bike Frame Stiffness

Yeah, I'm kind of flabbergasted to be honest, total failures like that are rare for metal tubing.

70rdon My DIY ergonomic travel workstation with aluminum and magnets

You can find bespoke assembly services with a lot of the vendors, it will usually run around 100$ extra so 300/400 for the keyboard which altogether isn't that bad compared to prebuilt ergos like the Ergodox.

These tend to be location specific but try to find regional resellers of the PCBs.

Also worth checking out r/mechmarket, i.e. https://redd.it/wvf9dz

70rdon Tillitis Key – Mullvad spin-off inspired by measured boot and DICE

An interesting approach to vendor-independent attestation was outlined in [1]. Basically the bitstream is fed into a physical unclonable function (PUF) which is used to derive a key to decrypt the rest of the bitstream. For attestation, one could simply store the secret part of an asymmetric key in the encrypted bitstream (for challenge-response).

[1]: An Autonomous, Self-Authenticating, and Self-Contained Secure Boot Process for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, https://www.mdpi.com/2410-387X/2/3/15

70rdon Vitalik: Ethereum Merge Just Finalized

There's a tradeoff between decentralization and throughput. In the extreme, only people owning entire datacenters could operate a full 'node' that would be processing 1 000 000 TPS.

Slowness is not the mechanism, ETH had ~13 second block times before the merge. Bitcoin is slow because the difficulty is targeting longer block times, not because of inherent need for slowness. Difficulty is only required so that adverserial agents (with less than 51% of hashpower) can't rewrite the chain and change transactions.

70rdon The Ethereum merge is done

Scarce energy does not secure PoW, the value of the mined currency does, in the same way that scarce supply does not secure the gold standard, it's the value of gold (the 'fiat' shared illusion that it's a reserve).

I can fork a PoW chain with a difficulty bomb so that the difficulty is 1000x that of mainnet for any given hashrate. Energy is still scarce, you can't double spend energy on my chain and the 'real' one. Yet my chain isn't secure, because no one will recognize it as canonical: the rewards it yields aren't worth expending effort for.

I think you're confused about what the chain is securing. It's not who owns what, it's who spends WHEN. Distributed consensus of ownership does not require PoW/PoS, these were invented to solve double spending/censorship attacks that were a problem in P2P networks.

You can't attack a chain to muddle the past, only the present. A successful attack on ETH won't change who holds ETH, it will only prevent agreeing on who receives it.

70rdon On the use of a life (2020)

Hard question to answer without specifying topics. The usual way is to find an introductory textbook on the subject, find the papers and authors referenced for results and theorems and work forward through the literature. This will give you both historical perspective and develop your knowledge at a gradual pace.