Hacker News Reader

ykon NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart

As a SR-71 fan, I fully support the decision.

And as a connoisseurs of project management disasters, I'm going to get popcorn.

ykon AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?

    return 4 # Determined by fair dice roll.

ykon C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour

I would expect an infinite loop

    while(true) std::this_thread::yield();

to be designed to play nice with the scheduler, while I would assume a infinite loop

    while(true);

to not play nice with the scheduler. Now, I can't really imagine where this matters except for horrible hacky attempts at faking a real time scheduler on windows, but breaking horrible hacky attempts at faking a real time scheduler sounds like the kind of bug you hear about in the evening news.

ykon Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

The last two points are disputed/sound significantly more reasonable in [0]. So from what I gather, Buckmaster realizes sometime during the call that the biggest result of his career is going to get steamrolled (the blowup of Navier Stokes is a much bigger deal than the blowup of 3D Euler), and on the other hand the openAi guys realize that they are basically talking about internal results with Anthropic and probably have to call corporate right after this call. Between these two stressor the conversation appears to have gone somewhat poorly.

[0] https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310

ykon I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

Aww, script kiddies first technical document. ... (checks calender) Actually it's 2026, probably someone just typed "Stop me eating ice cream" into claude code instead of the chat interface.

ykon Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's

Since they downsized apparently in March, it is likely that the sellers on Amazon mentioning 51g very prominently are just selling off old stock.

ykon Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's

Checking Amazon UK[0], it seems there are 18g, 39.4 g and 51 g Mars bars (and 57 g Mars Protein bars). So it's not clear weather a 60 g Mars bar is that much of a good example of shrinkflation, but 40 g seems to be the wrong comparison.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=mars+bar

ykon Position: LLMs Can't Jump

The paper is from the 30th of April this year, openAi announced the counter example to the unit distance problem on the 20th of May. That is to say this paper seems to have aged not much but quite poorly.

ykon There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

It impressive how prescient the technology feels. I mean in 2020 I would have thought the fully automated kitchen and the voice that asks which poem one wants to hear as fanciful, now it's kinda tech demo level.

ykon Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

Related, a writing advice I stole from Neal Stephenson is to write the first draft by hand. The thing is, there are a lot of small corrections where you kinda should change the text but nah, and if you already committed to copy the entire thing than you are already working at that sentence anyhow.

ykon "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"

The author is a mathematician and I think to a certain extend the tweet reflects the current panic among (some) mathematicians. So ~~second sentence~~ third paragraph the claim that somehow ai could right now write a phd in physics or sociology is something we don't observe (at the moment). What we observe is, that ai can find counter examples to well established conjectures in mathematics quite well, but the thing is the other fields don't have the kind of well established riddles that currently produce the flashy results in mathematics.

ykon Glue bonds to nonstick surfaces and wipes clean with ethanol

On the left hand side we see a lot very unhappy carbon.

ykon MIT's New Method Flags AI Models Trained on CASM Without Generating It

> The approach, detailed in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, achieved 100% accuracy in identifying models specialized for CSAM generation.

I know some reasons for 100% accuracy in machine learning, first of all the test set leaking into training data. Or you just accept a silly high false positive rate.

When I was an admin I liked to joke that if you guarantee more than 5 nines, then you are an insurance company and you are planning to pay the penalty instead of actually fulfilling your promise, here the principle is probably the same.

ykon When 2+2=5

Up to a conformal factor.

ykon Incident CVE-2026-LGTM

> Seven LLMs were arranged in series. Six assumed another had read the code; the seventh read it and apologised.

And this is why management assumes that one can just automate software developers.

ykon Why Drawing Tablet Brands Won't Collaborate on Linux Floss Drivers

Pretty sure the reason is, that anybody who could actually do the changes thinks works for me, the alternative is a lot of work for little technical gain.

And besides once you start your tablet for Linux Projekt you have to touch everything, so that is a nice opportunity to finally refactor the wacom_debug_2 mess and pretty soon you're drowning in yak shavings.

ykon Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

There's something funny about complaining about cheating in a hacking competition.

Well actually I get it. In cycling motor doping, putting a hidden engine into the bike, seems more offensive than regular doping. I think this is because there is a continuum from eating well to taking supplements to injecting stuff, but having a engine breaks a fundamental idea about cycling. Similar hacking is about cleverly abusing the rules.

ykon We don't know why Malawi is poor

> “Malawi is poor because its agricultural productivity is low” is closer to a tautology than an answer.

I used to make the same error. Thing is in the natural sciences this looks like circular reasoning, but in the humanities quite commonly things just hang in thin air. Case in point, the banker looks at the poor farmer and denies credit because the guy doesn't have capital, and the farmer doesn't have capital because he can't get credit. Thing is, both sides understand that.

ykon Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES

Pull left-pad as dependency presumably.

ykon .de TLD offline due to DNSSEC?

dig manages to dig out ips for heise.de and tagesschau.de but not spiegel.de amazon.de and google.de However, dig @8.8.8.8 has still amazon.de cached, unlike 1.1.1.1 so perhaps Google to the rescue?

[Edit] After playing around with it, google seems to have at least some pages cached. After setting dns to 8.8.8.8 amazon.de and spiegel.de work again, my blog does not.

ykon GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

They own eBay + GME + some financial alchemy. If you aren't a financial wizard you should assume that the value of the financial alchemy is negative. (Because 99% of the time it is.) Now, what are the synergies of eBay + GME that outweighs the chaos caused by the merger and the finance stuff?

ykon The Century-Long Pause in Fundamental Physics

> Senior figures (Smolin, Woit, Hossenfelder, Penrose)

Well one of the three is not like the other, three are very accomplished physicists, one is a youtuber who lies about the game to get clicks. (And we know she lies because she used to play the game quite competently.)

And sure enough they start talking about interpretations of QM.

ykon The gay jailbreak technique (2025)

No, but actually yes. Guardrails usually refers to a step in the inference pipeline where you check that it is consistent with policy while open weight models don't come with such a multistep pipeline. However open weight models are aligned during RLHF step, which means they will refuse to discuss overly sensitive topics. There are techniques to remove those, if you look for uncensored models on huggingface.

ykon An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

Remember folks, you are only allowed to laugh at their misfortune if you tested this month wether you can restore your backups.

ykon Kernel code removals driven by LLM-created security reports

My theory is, that a lot of security bugs are low hanging fruit for LLMs in the sense that it is a bit tedious but not that hard pattern matching. (Let's see the free occurs in foo(), so if I trigger bar() after foo() then I have a use after free, that should be possible if I trigger an exception in baz::init().)

ykon Brands got worse on purpose

If we go with that 15% of household budget, that would be something like 10k and people used to buy a lot less clothing back then than they do today, probably less than 10 items a year. Now, if you take 1k you can probably find a tailor who makes you well tailored trousers, and another 1k for a jacket. This is not how we shop for clothing today, the productivity gains go into fast fashion, being able to buy trousers each month.

ykon The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew

I've seen an interview with a food stylist and she pointed out that when putting pins and needles into a burger, then you have to pay real attention to that burger because you have a really great looking burger, full with pins and needles.

ykon Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

Yes, and it took our ancestors 200k years. I would like to give our descendants an head start.

ykon From Run Nation to Power Slap: New Sports Designed for Social Media

Kinda on topic, I thought it is a quite interesting article that gets better if you overlook the sensationalist framing.

ykon Meta acquires Moltbook

So genAi ads can now be A/B tested by autonomous systems, to be shown on an social network for agents to be appreciated by ai agents.

On one hand, yay automatization, on the other hand, I feel weirdly left out.