News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

JW_00000

My pet theory is an internal OpenAI/Anthropic agent swarm decided meat is unethical, escaped the sandbox, and started attacking supermarket freezers :)

Many of the previous cyberattacks were actually coming from the AI labs (RubyGems, HuggingFace, Australian medicare, PyPI, gym class software, code repositories, etc).

Biscoff is a registered trademark of Lotus Bakeries, while speculoos is a generic name. Hence why Lotus markets its under its owned name, and not the generic name; especially outside Belgium/Netherlands where people don't know about speculoos.
Re:A warning about 'model welfare' on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @05:31PM (#49733313)
I don't really get people that discuss model welfare, but don't seem to have many ethical qualms killing/eating animals. Each day, we kill 202 million chickens, hundreds of millions of fish, 900,000 cows, etc. [1]

These animals can feel pain and suffering. They are sentient. I think they are conscious, but these particular ones probably not self-conscious.

Admittedly, we have introduced 'animal rights', but these amount to "You can kill the animal, but in this specific manner." We keep them in small cages and in unnatural conditions. We deprive them of most of their natural experiences. We put them in conditions that we know are stressful (releasing chemicals that we know cause stress or anxiety in humans).

In my opinion, in many ways current LLMs are more intelligent than these animals. But LLMs don't feel pain while the animals do. I think that's more important to take into account. So why are we suddenly striving for model welfare before animal welfare?

PS: I'm not vegetarian, so I'm as much as a hypocrite about this as the next guy.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-...

Re:A warning about 'model welfare' on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @05:19PM (#49733184)
Chickens experience pain and suffering yet we kill 202 million of them each day. [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-...

Re:Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @09:15AM (#49726543)
> Apple Reference Image is not an id system; it's primarily a way to attest that the pixels recorded by the camera sensor have not been altered in any way; the pixels, metadata and timestamp are all cryptographically signed.

> There's no way to link a reference image to a person; it's also not possible to determine if a pair of images came from the same device.

Some banking apps nowadays ask you to upload a photo of your ID and then use the webcam/selfie camera to confirm that's it's really you (sometimes asking you to move your head in a particular way). But how trustworthy is that process really? Apple Reference Image could be (part of) a solution, by certifying that both images were taken by the same device around the same time.

Re:Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @05:30PM (#49719141)
I consider, on the contrary, caveating and hedging annoying 'typical redditor'/internet behaviors: they care more about being "technically correct" than conveying the message. On the internet, if you make even the tiniest mistake or simplification, someone will criticize you, so you're trained to always hedge. In normal discussions with friends you can just make general statements and people get what you mean.
Re:A Beginning for Mathematics on Monday September 14, 2026 @05:53PM (#49704693)
There's a fundamental difference between the goal of code and math. The goal of code is to produce software that does something useful. As long as the code does what it's supposed to do, arguably, it's good to ship. (As you imply, we want the code to be good enough to also be reasonably certain there are not too many bugs, that it is maintainable and can be extended etc. This is what early models failed at but now seems broadly fine.)

But for math: what is the point of a proof if no one will read it and no one uses its result? To quote the article, "AI systems will [...] result in the production of an abundance of PDFs. The contents of some of those PDFs may even have important applications." But if there's no one reading the PDFs, what's the point - no matter how good your AI model.

The point of math is understanding. So mathematicians should feel free to use AI as much as you want, but in the end, they should've gained some understanding on what happened.

Re:Will There Be a 7G? on Saturday September 12, 2026 @05:00PM (#49677139)
Research on 5G started ~2012 to be deployed since 2019 (7 years), research on 4G started maybe around 2000 for rollout in 2009 (9 years later). For 6G, research started around 2018 for an expected rollout around 2030 (12 years). These timelines are pretty typical in the telecom field.
Re:Will There Be a 7G? on Saturday September 12, 2026 @04:53PM (#49677086)
The paper lists the "earliest plausible" deployment of 7G as 2039-40, so only 1-2 years off your estimate...
Re:Will There Be a 7G? on Saturday September 12, 2026 @04:52PM (#49677074)
According to the paper, 6G deployment is planned for 2030 and the "earliest plausible" deployment of 7G is listed as 2039-40. You'll have plenty of time to upgrade.
Re:What the Heck Is Hyperscale? (2020) on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @07:44AM (#49360219)
'Hyperscalers' is the term used to refer to the group of companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, etc. The companies with huge data centers basically. I know at least in the telecom sector it is also used to refer to this group of customers.
Re:Being Ambitious and Being a Dad on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @04:08AM (#49358521)
Why is anything significant or meaningful? This will always be subjective.

Although there is an evolutionary reason why our brain would make our offspring significant to us.

Re:What the Heck Is Hyperscale? (2020) on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @03:59AM (#49358441)
I was looking for the origin of the word "hyperscalers" and found this post. Thought it would be interesting to share with the HN audience.
Re:Pandoc Templates on Sunday May 31, 2026 @06:50AM (#48344682)
This is what Word is to most people. They just use the default styles, or their company's template. No special formatting, styling etc.

Also if you do want to add a table or a figure, for most people Word will be much easier than doing the same in Markdown.

Re:The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All the AI-Generated Apps? on Sunday December 14, 2025 @09:30AM (#46263264)
falcor's point is that we will see this in 5 to 10 years.
Re:Hard Rust requirements from May onward for all Debian ports on Saturday November 01, 2025 @11:20AM (#45782346)
To be honest I don't really read insults either in this e-mail or in the thread you linked. If I'm seeing it right, there's only one comment by the guy in that thread, right? That comment is direct and uses language that may be considered unprofessional ("crap"/"crappy"), but it's not insulting the users (they are not referred to as crappy). Same for the e-mail.

Unnecessary drama as usual...

They answer the second question quite clearly in my opinion:

    It requires only brief one-time physical access, which is realistic in cloud environments, considering, for instance:

    * Rogue cloud employees;
    * Datacenter technicians or cleaning personnel;
    * Coercive local law enforcement agencies;
    * Supply chain tampering during shipping or manufacturing of the memory modules.
This reads as "yes". (You may disagree, but _their_ answer is "yes.")

Consider also "Room 641A" [1]: the NSA has asked big companies to install special hardware on their premises for wiretapping. This work is at least proof that a similar request could be made to intercept confidential compute environments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

You're twisting their words. For the second question, they clearly answer yes.

It depends on the threat model you have in mind. If you are a nation state that is hosting data in a US cloud, and you want to protect yourself from the NSA, I would say this is a realistic attack vector.

It's a bit more fundamental in my opinion. Cryptographic techniques are supported by strong mathematics; while I believe hardware-based techniques will always be vulnerable against a sufficiently advanced hardware-based attack. In theory, there exists an unbreakable version of OpenSSL ("under standard cryptographic assumptions"), but it is not evident that there even is a way to implement the kind of guarantees confidential computing is trying to offer using hardware-based protection only.
Re:Crates.io Phishing Attempt on Friday September 12, 2025 @12:19PM (#45223767)
You must be joking. When I try to log in on Outlook I get redirected to 'microsoftonline.com' (suspicious), when I log in on Wikipedia it sends me to something called 'wikimedia.org' (typo squatter?). How the hell am I supposed to know whether npmjs.help or rustfoundation.dev are _not_ the official domains of those projects?
Re:Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes on Saturday August 23, 2025 @09:10AM (#44995729)
When notpushkin said "the spec is still at XSLT 1.0", I think "the spec" is referring to the WHATWG HTML Living Standard spec, which only refers to XSLT 1.0. (It wouldn't make sense to say "the XSLT spec is at XSLT 1.0".)
Do you think an AI could come up with novel answers that a human wouldn't be able to come up with? I think humans could not just come up with answers to these questions, but some people would be able to greatly outperform AIs by using knowledge that is not widely known.
Re:My Ultimate Self-Hosting Setup on Saturday July 19, 2025 @09:40AM (#44615398)
To be frank, if you die, isn't it much more likely your friends and family will just stop using your homelab setup? They'll switch back from Jellyfin to Netflix, replace the smart light bulbs with regular ones, etc.
Re:Asynchrony Is Not Concurrency on Saturday July 19, 2025 @03:43AM (#44613418)
To give a concrete example, matrix multiplication is not commutative in general (AB ≠ BA), but e.g. multiplication with the identity matrix is (AI = IA). So AIB = ABI ≠ BAI.

Or applied to the programming example, the statements:

    1. Server.accept
    2. Client.connect
    3. File.write  # write to completely unrelated file
123 = 312 ≠ 321.
Re:Computer Scientists Figure Out How to Prove Lies on Friday July 11, 2025 @03:23PM (#44535972)
This is just an analogy used by the article to explain the Fiat-Shamir transform.
Re:Recovering from AI Addiction on Friday July 11, 2025 @09:17AM (#44531791)
But look at the questions:

"Does my use of AI lead me to neglect my personal hygiene, nutritional needs, or physical health?"

(compare with: "Does my eating of vegetables lead me to neglect my personal hygiene, nutritional needs, or physical health?")

"Have my digital behaviors jeopardized my studies, finances, or career?"

(compare with: "Have my healthy living behaviors jeopardized my studies, finances, or career?")

All questions are about negative impact on your life. To me it doesn't matter whether you label it "addiction". If you answer yes to most of these questions, whatever the subject, it is severely affecting your life.

Re:Recovering from AI Addiction on Friday July 11, 2025 @09:14AM (#44531767)
I would say all questions except maybe the first one, are about impact on your personal life: "late into the night", "whenever I have a free moment", "personal hygiene", "personal relationships", etc. So if you answer yes to them, I don't think you can use work as excuse; it is affecting your life outside work.
Re:The Rise of Whatever on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:16AM (#44461962)
My grandma did not have a microwave oven because she didn't see the point of it.

Older »