News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

blharr

Re:Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy? on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:15AM (#50333969)
Because you can't possibly prove it won't happen in the future...

Easiest rule in security is to just disable unnecessary services. If you are never using the WiFi, you might as well disable the hardware completely

It may be trivial to prove again and again, but it is even more trivial to just disconnect it

The last point is pretty much exactly what you both seem to be saying. Families making less than median wage with kids who have proven their superiority over those circumstances get charged nothing.
Re:Retired decorator's Pokémon cards sell for £1.5M on Sunday October 25, 2026 @10:59PM (#50238529)
Except very few of the cards that are so expensive are even used in the card game for real battles. And the shiny / fancy ones have plain counterparts that would do the same thing in a battle.

The value is purely artistic. Which is its own value, to be fair. But people aren't buying these expensive cards to use them in the game. They just want them for the art (or simply the rarity)

IQ doesn't measure writing _at all_ does it?
The power isnt really decentralized when you see that the internal AI models are superior than anything you can self host, and the right to use those can be stripped away at any time.
I really doubt they're doing it in some kind of "AI has feelings" sense as the article seems to imply.

I'd instead imagine that if you throw abusive language at it for long enough, the model will start to reply back in that same manner. Anthropic would face backlash from out of context screenshots of "look what Claude is saying to me" and this somewhat reduces that risk.

Re:Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion on Sunday September 20, 2026 @03:45PM (#49779345)
>software companies were using their internet bandwidth to distribute their software

If I understand the description correctly, microsoft still does this!

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-...

Re:English: A vs. An on Sunday September 20, 2026 @12:57AM (#49772606)
This is covered exactly in the post right under that sentence. Why just restate it?
Re:A misalignment of AI in mathematics on Friday September 11, 2026 @06:43PM (#49666416)
>they weren't trying to scoop a mathematician they were just trying to scoop a competitor

Well. Obviously, yes. But in doing so they still DID scoop out a mathematician in a very unethical way.

In doing so they showed that they basically have a huge gun they can point at X work you care about and develop, and can cut you across the finish line. And take credit for it. Obviously this already _existed_, but is just much more significant because even a rumor can be converted into a complete takeover of a discovery.

> They're not interested, not the kind of entity that can care about theoretical mathematics. These dudes take home 7-8 figure salaries, they solve a Millennium Prize problem then pretty quickly move past it.

I get your point, they don't really care about solving all the maths problems. But they're still going to solve them for clout and profit motives. Up until it stops wow-ing people... at which point they will have likely decimated the frontier of the field.

And this is kind of the root of the entire concern. They will move into the forest and completely steamroll all the problems, then declare victory and move on, leaving only pavement and asphalt behind.

Re:.gitignore Everything by Default on Saturday September 05, 2026 @09:44PM (#49582550)
Git becomes a lot easier to understand once you learn its "hidden" interactive flags

Like git rebase -i as well

Re:Being Ambitious and Being a Dad on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @07:55AM (#49360311)
> I recommend to stop being condescending

Said in perhaps, the most condescending way possible

Re:Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with? on Friday August 14, 2026 @01:41PM (#49302068)
You can prune a plum tree but you can't plum a prune true
Re:Seven books I keep close because I love them on Friday August 14, 2026 @12:57PM (#49301411)
"Let my soul die with the Philistines" being the literal translation?
Re:How AI text watermarking works on Friday August 14, 2026 @11:58AM (#49300566)
Sure but with how many people who use AI without disclosing that they are... and the profit incentive it'd only need one person to make a chat focused on non-watermarking that makes it trivial.

Im pretty sure said services already exist, making it so your writing doesnt sound or look like AI... but the real problem is surprisingly that we don't even care if the output is AI

Its weird to me that this is supposed to be THE end goal. Having an agent that does "everything" for you sounds like no paradise. It sounds depressing.

Maybe there is value in expending effort and actual creativity.

Re:Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @12:43AM (#49178658)
Sure, but why doesn't said business partner just give a requirement to the AI to do the business partner's own job? Since it is hypothetically superhuman at fulfilling requirements at such a point...

PMs seem pretty easy to replace. In fact, given any single role to fixate on, it's probably replaceable

Re:P[drive failure]: how reliable is your NAS? on Sunday August 02, 2026 @08:40PM (#49149916)
The no capitals is really hard for me. Especially given the font "i" makes me think of the imaginary number and I get mentally derailed even though I know it's not. Or maybe it's just eyestrain

I understand why you might for stylistic reasons, but a toggle would be nice!

And similar to the low quality of developers...

If you are even thinking about writing clean and testable code, having clearly defined API boundaries, and keeping a repeatable build process, you are probably already significantly above average.

If you are even trying to save, invest diversified, and manage risk as you age... you're probably doing better than like 80% of your peers financially

"Solved" (heavy quotes) because instiutionalizing dozens of millions of people with no improvement is a massive crime in and of itself.

That's like those stories of LLMs saying "I fixed the vulnerability in your app" by deleting the project entirely

"The model refuses to follow my specific word detail prompts" and "The model refuses to perform hacking attempts" are on the same side of the model refusing to do something baked into it though.
Re:Factories Are Just Rooms on Friday July 03, 2026 @03:20PM (#48778895)
Some would say "Gang of four" and "Design patterns" and "OOP" are all marketing BS
Re:Factories Are Just Rooms on Friday July 03, 2026 @03:19PM (#48778884)
It seems like this is a description: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party
Re:Suspicious Discontinuities on Sunday June 28, 2026 @02:25PM (#48710016)
They can, but what would make them think their initial misunderstanding is even wrong? While some might think "surely the system isn't like that..." many would default to "of course they want to steal my money" etc.

Not to mention the amount of misinformation that can get passed around

Re:Suspicious Discontinuities on Saturday June 27, 2026 @12:24PM (#48699557)
I think because the gradient is simply too confusing for laypeople to understand.

Even for a simple system like US social security that has a gradient. For every $2 you make over the limit, you lose $1 in benefits. I've heard countless times misconceptions of people thinking they'd be losing money (as in literally having less money net) by working.

Re:The annotated PyTorch training loop on Friday June 26, 2026 @01:51PM (#48689683)
I think the methodology is interesting, but you can probably design a similar, and probably better loop for "diving" into a topic and going through examples than is presented.

I have to imagine they just asked Claude to dive into a topic and generate example problems along the way.

As for the content... a lot feels like knowledge overload and concepts are introduced without explanation or "why". It basically says "here is a training loop" and never answers my immediate question of "...for what?" It also introduces random concepts like setting the seed that don't look like they're even in the final training loop it provides.

As a comparison, Pytorch itself has docs that go over the entire training loop as well. And it explains why you're loading the data its loading. With examples that run instead of being scattered on.

Re:AI children's books, body horror edition on Thursday June 25, 2026 @10:41PM (#48681762)
Slop aimed towards children has practically _always_ existed. The "100,000 whys" naming reminds me of an old "700000 games" CD

AI slop is just a more complete reimplementation of the "shovelware" from the 90s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shovelware

Re:PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s on Thursday June 25, 2026 @06:00PM (#48679787)
That license IS any copy left license, but nobody will trust a random fork is my understanding.

I can agree though that the network effect of "everyone else uses X" is pretty unfortunate and has led to a lot of other issues too, so yes very disappointing

Representative democracy was supposed to be the solution for this. i.e. "I dont know what the best way to do age verification should be, but it's probably important"... and then voting for the candidate that has shown ability, intelligence, and a good nature to look at the issue in your best interest and handle all the edge cases without screwing you over.

What we've lost is the integrity of this system entirely. No candidate can truly be trusted to implement an age verification system without first getting a check from big tech

What was complicated about the setup? Its a plug-ins folder... add it in and boom you are ready to go
Re:Where every major LLM stands politically on Thursday June 25, 2026 @04:58PM (#48679100)
Im not sure OpenAI or Anthropic are necessarily better? Or even opposed to this

Older »