News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

AndrewThrowaway

Re:Quad9 (DNS Resolver) to Exit France on Thursday October 22, 2026 @08:14PM (#50202890)
What about countries friendly with Turkey? I can easily imagine you being arrested in half of the world and extradited to Turkey because you are being criminally prosecuted in Turkey.
I was surprised how little power modern "DC inverter" AC uses. It basically becomes your "window fan" when the room is cooled.
I moved to a new apartment with all this stuff installed.

At first I thought exactly that - just why.

When days started getting warm in the beginning of the summer I started investigating and thought that it might actually be a good idea - you could turn AC an hour before you come home to find cool room.

When summer hit I actually found out that you just leave AC on all the time and it just keeps temperature at 22C or so and there is really no need for it to be connected. You don't want to turn that off as it is more economical to keep the room cool than letting it to get hot and then trying to cool it fast. It barely even showed up on my electricity bill at the end.

So all in all - really not needed.

My first idea was "who the hell needs connected fridges".

Then I remembered that both my AC and floor heating are connected.

A hacker could easily turn on both AC and floor heating and cause me a few euros of damages in my electricity bill.

Re:I am done with this shit on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @08:40AM (#49892211)
What could theoretically be an even higher level programming language?

Bytecode is obviously not human readable - lets make Assembly. Assembly requires very specific skills - lets make a language that is more human readable. This new language is way more readable but requires very specific skills like understanding computer memory. Lets make a language that takes care of it. Lets make a language that is not compiled but interpreted. Lets make a language where you can just simply write 1 + 2 and computer would just give you an answer and you don't need to define anything.

Lets make the language that is simply a natural language and computer interprets it an writes the program you need itself.

We are comparing because any programming language is just a try to make programming easier.

Re:Intellectuals Are Fucking Idiots on Monday September 28, 2026 @07:31AM (#49876428)
Biology and medicine clearly are not so soft because they can be tested by scientific methods.

Have you read the article? You have a science like "human behavior" where your experiments can't be reproduced. Simply because there will be so many variables or variation that your science is as good as a guess from somebody from the street.

Or again sciences where you just make models of some imaginary things like hidden meaning 10th century in literature. Your only test is another 10the century literature meaning searcher. You just clap each other on the shoulder and give each other phds.

Re:I am done with this shit on Monday September 28, 2026 @07:19AM (#49876318)
You would be surprised to find out that people were telling exactly the same thing about e.g. C when they came from Assembler and saw what a "pile of shit" was produced by the compiler.
Re:Intellectuals Are Fucking Idiots on Monday September 28, 2026 @07:14AM (#49876260)
Intellectuals in soft sciences are fucking idiots.

In physics/engineering and similar real life instantly shows how wrong you are. You can't really go far in your career believing something that is not true and tested.

In something like "relationship studies" you can live in your ivory tower for decades. Your only feedback loop is your own students and disciples who just want to live in the same ivory tower.

You can have some crazy theory like "human relationship output is dependent on socioeconomic outputs". And discuss that theory for decades, get your phd and stuff like that and your only judges are the same people in the same field.

Re:I am done with this shit on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @07:17AM (#49814327)
It is like inheriting Assembly codebase written by a compiler.

You will not edit Assembly in this.

Claude will have to edit it and Claude will not whine.

Re:OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe on Thursday July 16, 2026 @07:18AM (#48932982)
I think they lost their direction and at the same time customer appeal. When OpnePlus started it was something new, now I have no reason to choose OnePlus for some time already.
I clone some repo from github, open it with default code editor which happens to be Cursor. I am cooked. That is it.

It is the same as autorun.exe on some CD - I put some CD in my CD-ROM and my Windows are compromised.

You can argue that I should not clone unknown repos, I should inspect each and any file in the repo, look for git.exe or any other suspicious binary and etc. I should not put untrusted CDs or USB sticks into my computer.

However the reality of it is that it will not be the user who inspects USB stick in some contained environment, it will be security policy which disables autorun. Same as Cursor should disable this.

What is even more funny that AI agent spent A LOT of tokens while participating in this attack.
I wonder if Hans Reiser would have checked...
Re:Automation Without Understanding on Monday July 13, 2026 @02:15AM (#48888565)
But doesn't things like that happen with people? Take academy where some professor implicitly states "facts" or military or software development where some highly praised senior always has his last word...
Re:Life with Hazard Ratios on Friday July 10, 2026 @03:15AM (#48856736)
I think it was just cancer overall. One kills you lings, another kills you gut, heart and etc.

We know that smoke itself is really really bad for you. Open fire is bad for you.

Sitting around campfire with a glass in your hand and a guitar might be really really bad for you.

Re:Life with Hazard Ratios on Friday July 10, 2026 @03:03AM (#48856661)
Statistics and other lies.

One interesting point the article touches - there was a study concluding that if you quit smoking at 40 your life expectancy basically equalizes with people who did not smoke in their life. It is an encouraging message that it is never too late to quit. Then again it also sends a different message - you can smoke as you wish in your 20s.

Just yesterday I saw an article on Instagram that they are putting smoked meats and sausages and similar products in the came cancerogenic category as smoking. Which again one one hand states that meats are very bad for you. On the other hand it makes smoking not so bad as you would think? Because people are eating sausages and meats cooked on open fire for thousands of years?

Some guy on Diary of CEO states that rice are basically a poison because they are pure sugar. If you want to live healthy you should definitely drop the rice out of your die. Then again a billion of people eat rice every day. What gives?

We want to have all this information because we want informed decisions in our lives. If we are analytical we even want formulas and graphs just like in this article. What we don't want is to give things to chance and genetics.

Different breeds of dogs have life expectancy difference of ~50%. People of course are not so different in their size but we need to always keep this in mind. You can live as healthy as you like but you always have a ticking bomb in your DNA. What I still am not getting is how much living healthy impacts the outcome versus the genetics. It might be a hopeless fight to e.g. stop eating the brisket if your lungs have an expiry date of 55 years.

Re:AI changes the economics of software rewrites on Thursday July 09, 2026 @03:52AM (#48842345)
Coding, programming and engineering are all a bit different concepts. Coding as in typing in the code might be solved. Engineering? Doubt.

What is definitely not solved is knowing what you want and what user wants and what the end result is supposed to be. To write the code you need the specs and to write the specs you need to know what you want. And that can only be answered by years of therapy.

Re:AI changes the economics of software rewrites on Thursday July 09, 2026 @03:37AM (#48842224)
Exactly. Is it LLMs fault or yours to believing in it so much.
Re:AI changes the economics of software rewrites on Thursday July 09, 2026 @03:20AM (#48842108)
If you gave some junior dev a large codebase and just told to "refactor it" you would get a terrible result.

If you gave junior dev exact tasks what to do where you will get better results.

Just like with LLM.

Re:AI changes the economics of software rewrites on Thursday July 09, 2026 @03:18AM (#48842096)
"It is not LLMs fault but you not knowing how to write a prompt". I know I know. But just giving all codebase and saying "rewrite it" is a no go. If e.g. going one class after class LLM will be exceptionally good at keeping the patterns and logics.

I mean it is a tool and you need to understand how the tool works. When there is too little context, where there is so much context so that you are poisoning it, when you are allowing the tool to do patch-on-patch and etc.

And I personally get a lot of news from Facebook and Insta, never used Twitter. So who is to choose what social media is good and what should be banned.
Re:Saying goodbye to Agile on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @02:01AM (#47775233)
If AI fails, you wrote the prompt wrong.
Re:Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50% on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @03:28AM (#46883083)
If you look at dog breeds the difference between longest living (~15 years) and shortest (~10 years) is ~5years or 50% of the lifetime.

However we still struggle to appoint the very same to humans. In popular sciences and general understanding we still give so much attention to food and exercise and lifestyle and etc.

As if somehow changing the diet and exercise plan of Chihuahua you could make it into Doberman.

Of course, you play with the cards you get. Diet and exercise help. However you should still be aware about the game you play.

Re:Heathrow scraps 100ml liquid container limit on Tuesday January 27, 2026 @03:13AM (#46776946)
I believe the "theater" is needed precisely for this - to catch bad actors. There could just be a long queue with some blind dog and scary looking guy at the end. What it still does is makes a bad guy sweat, plan against it and etc. You just can't have free entrance for all. However you will never prevent state actors or similar with any kind of theatre because they will always prepare for it.
It looks like I am sharing all of my data with US Army!
Doesn't then a person with half a trillion have that ability? At what point does the ability start?
If you take any ancient or not so ancient civilization or kingdom, all the wealth including land and people's lives belonged to king/imperator which was appointed by god or something like that.

Isn't is exactly the same with the system we have now?

The question we have to ask is about 99% of population of peasants who work 8h a day same as they did in Mesopotamia. Do they have a living standard, healthcare, possibility to have social bonds, possibility to retire. Basically all the things to have a life.

If peasants are able to have all this, I really don't care if some King of ours has 20 trillion or 50 bazillion. In money or in gold.

Re:The f*** off contact page on Monday December 08, 2025 @04:37AM (#46190293)
I had to go back to the page to check that it actually uses pixel font. To each its own I guess. For me the font was barely noticeable.
Re:AWS Multiple Services Down in us-east-1 on Monday October 20, 2025 @08:58AM (#45643386)
It is like discussing zombie apocalypse. People who are invested in bunkers will hardly understand those who are just choosing death over living in those bunkers for a month longer.
Anecdotal story. Once I stumbled into Korean restaurant in China Town in NYC. I just ordered something like lunch. I was alone. They kept bringing plates after plates of various dishes. I was ashamed to leave so much food. Paid like 11 dollars but it was in ~2015.

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