coldpie
coldpie on Hacker News
Tech company execs are among the stupidest people on Earth. Another article went around recently where the former CEO of Yahoo couldn't think of three positive words to describe her own child[1]. It's baffling that these people who probably put their pants on the wrong way around 50% of the time get as much airtime as they do. Truly breathtakingly stupid people.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/style/marissa-mayer-ai-as...
> Who ever thought it was OK to control freezers over the internet should be hung.
I've got really bad news for you about how many critical systems are connected to the Internet.
Your NAS is not critical. The plan if your NAS gets compromised is to say "dang" and wipe it and re-download all your movies or whatever. You can connect that to the internet.
Stuff like your town's water, transportation, and medical infrastructure and employee and student data are critical. Your car's drivetrain and safety features are critical. Your home's HVAC can be critical in certain times of year. These things should not be connected to the Internet.
So if someone said "what are they doing?" about someone some distance down the street, you would find that objectionable? I can't really think of a less awkward phrasing. "What is that person doing?" "What is he/she doing?" Those both seem like unnatural ways to phrase the question. What would you say in this scenario?
For 50 years, computer security has largely been built on the theory that most targets aren't worth the relatively high effort to compromise, so it's not worth it to spend the money on security. We're now reaching a point where the effort to compromise is dropping close to 0, which means we've got 50 years of insecure software to reckon for.
The advice today is the same as it has ever been, though. Always assume that any networked computer is or may become compromised. Do not do anything critical on a networked computer, because it is or may become compromised. You can still use computers, but assume that a bad actor may take control at any time, and plan for that eventuality.
For example, if you are hooking up a networked computer to your town's water supply system, ask yourself "what would happen if Iran got complete control of this system?" If you're putting your school system's students' mental health data into a networked computer, ask yourself "what would happen if all of this data became public?"
No, I'm afraid you really are stuck in a culture war. As the above poster said, "they" truly has been a gender-neutral singular or plural pronoun for hundreds of years.
For example, someone two blocks down the street is doing something weird. "What are they doing?" is a perfectly grammatically normal reaction to seeing this.
Excited to say we are doing exactly this up here in the Twin Cities. The local transit agency has been planning a bunch of BRT routes and implementing about one every year or two. Often they have dedicated lanes for much of the route, and they typically have wait times around 7-15 minutes depending on time of day. BRT is extremely affordable and efficient and fits quite nicely into legacy car-based infrastructure, too.
It appears to be quite successful in terms of ridership, too (warning: local news website, but you can get all you need from the URL slug): https://www.fox9.com/news/6-months-in-minneapolis-e-line-nea...
Don't forget your local library. They've often got decent selection especially if you're in a denser area.
It's ok to delete things.
Those peons deserve to go to jail just as much as the ringleaders do. Perhaps they can get reduced sentences by testifying against the higher level criminals.
I think most of that is true for games shipped on cart, too. Games often ship broken or missing features which are patched in at launch. Official physical media has not been a reliable method for future accessibility for at least a decade now. It's way past time to start using other methods of preservation.
I believe that is largely true even if they shipped a game on the cart. Many games ship broken, and they also change many times over the course of their life. I don't think official media can be considered any part of a future accessibility strategy for at least a decade now. Game keycards don't change that fact in any way.
> Game keycards keep the appearance of physical ownership without delivering what people expect from a cartridge.
How's that? Can't you buy & resell them on the used market? That seems like the only thing a physical cartridge gets you, and not shipping the outdated-on-day-one bits on the cart saves some money, too. Seems like win-win?
It is going to take decades to clean up the mess of just the last 2 years. So, so, so many people need to be in jail.
These uses of cat aren't useless.
It improves readability. One reads shell commands from left to right, following the logic of each step in the pipeline individually. It makes sense to start with a file, then pipe that to command 1, pipe that to command 2, etc. It makes less sense to start with command 1 into which we put the file and then take the output of command 1 from before the file and put that into command 2 etc.
It also improves future editability. If you wanted to change the input to command 1, you go tweak the bit to the left of command 1 instead of having to hunt down where the < is stuck in the middle somewhere and potentially remove it and replace it with something off to the left anyway depending on whether it's a file or the output of some other command.
Using cat as the first step into a pipeline is almost always the right thing to do!
Man, few things have made me feel like more of a philistine than reading Moby Dick earlier this year. I read a lot, but I've never considered myself a "literature guy" and wow Moby Dick cemented that. I did finish it, but I thought it was just an awful read, absolutely boring from start to finish. About halfway through I was just skipping pages and pages and pages of filler descriptions and incomprehensible 20-page-long speeches. I absolutely hated it, among the worst books I've ever powered through to the end.
It's definitely a "me problem," obviously people who are into literature and analysis get a lot out of it. But in future I'm gonna stick to my dumb sci-fi books where people talk in comprehensible sentences and things blow up, lol.
If you follow the provided link, you'll see that the objection is about copyright, not quality:
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177411620801633&w=2 As someone who has certainly had his work sucked up into LLMs without consent or compensation, this seems like a reasonable stance to me.
> People didn't care. So I don't care anymore.
Yeah. Enjoy the rest of your day off. Winter's coming, maybe go hit a park for a few hours or play a new video game or something. Or take some time to learn a new skill or something. Not your fault if the company can't provide the tools to do the job, go find something better to do.
You can download the attachment and take a look at the patches. Wine already supports FreeBSD and macOS, so it's not tooooo crazy hard to add another BSD/Unix to the pile. Looks like there's a few Unix APIs that have drifted, so the patches add some #if OpenBSD style stuff to avoid using some symbols that don't exist on OpenBSD. The gs register stuff is by far the most complex bit. IIRC that register is used for thread-local storage on Windows, but for other purposes on other OS's, so handling access from win32 binaries to the gs register is a big problem when porting to a new OS.
On the whole it looks well written to me, especially with how complex & low-level these areas of Wine are. Good work to the author. I'd encourage them to try upstreaming it if they're interested. Some of it looks a little hacky, which upstream will object to, but maybe they could get some help cleaning it up, which will avoid having to maintain a diff and result in an even better port.
Edit: Oh, looks like they already talked with upstream https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=179241414029592 It's not a huge diff to maintain, so maybe that is the better route. Great work either way.
Remember Firesheep? It used to be the normal thing to use plain HTTP over open wifi networks. Literally anyone else on that access point could read your whole network session, cookies and all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep
I think you need to work on your reading comprehension and anger management skills, friend.
> I’m so happy I quit tech a year ago.
What do you do now? I'm also looking to get out of this industry, but it's tough to voluntarily give up the pay.
I maintain a browser extension to nuke the endless stream of boring AI noise articles:
https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn/ Sometimes it misses articles with less clear titles, like this one, and you gotta nuke 'em manually.
They've been doing test runs here in Minneapolis for more than a year. You're right that it's a challenge, but I bet they'll do fine after a couple years of refinement.
Facebook is a zillion dollar company, so they get to decide what will happen.