News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pelican0

Re:Why are good developers so wary of agentic development? on Thursday October 29, 2026 @03:28PM (#50294511)
> The application ran, but the build was frequently red. It worked on their machine -

(hmm, ok, expected; agents are still not great at wide system-level changes)

> again you couldn’t make this up if you tried! A constant red build gives me the ick.

(cringe)

Can't tell if this choice of words is just generational language, or an active attempt to not sound like an LLM.

Fair enough, carry on.
> Become my ritual during a rebuild to turn DNS over HTTPS off because it fucks everything up.

Out of curiosity, what are some of those things it messed up for you? And what kinds of builds is it affecting?

From the article:

> Cloudflare has been part of a coordinated effort to deploy mitigations to protect the Internet, working with PHP foundation, OpenAI and Wiz among others. Cloudflare has developed and deployed web application firewall (WAF) protections since early October 2026, which were deployed about 9 hours ahead of public disclosure

Re:OpenAI discloses four more rogue incidents on Saturday October 17, 2026 @05:01PM (#50135086)
Why the slow drip-drip from OpenAI on these security incidents?

Those incidents are all from the same period earlier in the year, not recent. Drop the full investigation report once and for all.

It's almost as if they like staying in the "oh no!" news cycle.

The paper: "Magic state cultivation on a superconducting quantum processor" https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13908 (Dec 2025)
Yes, the labs did not secure their sandbox properly.

And yes, there should be an appropriate law response to the hacking incidents. If for nothing else, to 1) not set precedent of inaction, and 2) get full logs of what happened instead of relying on the labs' "kindness" to offer the information they want.

But also, the agents absolutely went rogue.

Anyone skeptical should go read the METR report [0].

The Hugging Face hacking incident was a shot across the bow. And in hindsight possibly the best thing to have happened in this era. If their security was tight enough, we would still be in the dark. So we (outsiders) should rejoice that it wasn't, that one time.

We can push for accountability for the labs, while also not be in denial of the power and nature of the new models.

[0] https://metr.org/hugging-face-incident-report-aug-2026.pdf

Re:Just say no to OpenAI and Anthropic on Monday October 12, 2026 @05:48PM (#50063517)
I asked GPT-6-Luna to summarize the article, and it "helpfully" included a third paragraph to point out that the author is opinionated and not neutral in his judgement.

Good times.

I don't think there is evidence in either direction (takeoff impossible vs inevitable).

But the "convex hull" idea always came across as wishful thinking and hand-wavy pseudo-science to me.

Here's a rebuttal [0] of it from Tim Gowers (uses another math metaphor, but still clear and the whole thread is worth a read):

>...the popularity of the idea that AI "merely explores the convex hull" mystifies me. Why wouldn't it be more like the subgroup generated by existing mathematical knowledge? (That's also a metaphor -- I'm not saying there's a group structure.)

>The convex hull metaphor suggests that AI isn't having radically new ideas and will eventually run out of things to do, whereas the group metaphor suggests the possibility of building up in small steps to something well beyond what you started with, with no obvious limit.

[0] https://twitter.com/wtgowers/status/2108090920864268679

Re:OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics on Thursday October 08, 2026 @09:04PM (#50014707)
I think it can both true that 1) OpenAI is being inconsiderate/harmful/<pick-whatever-adjective> with their math releases, and 2) there is now a treasure trove of mathematical results ready for the taking.

Yes, the situation sucks overall and mathematics as a whole is in a turbulent time now.

But it also sucks when mathematicians, who are considered experts on a particular problem, refuse to engage with breakthrough results about that problem. #2 above is still true regardless of where it came from or how hard it can be to absorb.

While reading "The Mathocalypse" post [0] by Scott Aaronson, Scott described his wife Dana's reaction to one of the newly solved results in her primary domain of expertise, on which she'd been working for decades.

After her initial shock, and annoyance with the format/style, she decided to start using Astra - for the first time - to help her understand the new result. And he reported in the comments that she had made a lot of progress understanding it in one day, and may be even excited to give a talk about it!

That seems like a much healthier attitude towards these new results.

Yes, everything else sucks about this messy period. But there are still diamonds (in the rough) in this drop that perhaps should be looked into. If the author is too busy, perhaps one of their students can take a look? Someone will, eventually.

[0] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10169

Re:Blindsight (Watts Novel) on Sunday October 04, 2026 @03:43PM (#49957132)
This is a book that I'm glad I read, but that I will never recommend to anyone.

Some ideas are nice and new, especially knowing the author's particular science background. But the purple prose was exhausting.

> ... SNI which is a dead simple means of implementing censorship

Could you elaborate? What's "SNI", and how does it relate to censorship?

Re:Ask HN: What're You Reading? on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @05:54PM (#49901239)
Don't miss out on his "The blabber", a novella in that universe with an adorable character.
Re:Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games on Saturday September 26, 2026 @01:58PM (#49858934)
Nice. The best part about this kind of development using models is when you have them write instructions for themselves / other models :).
Re:Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games on Saturday September 26, 2026 @01:35PM (#49858738)
Makes sense, good use of the tools at hand. And the SKILL.md files, also generated similarly?
Re:Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games on Saturday September 26, 2026 @12:53PM (#49858329)
Very cool work!

Did you write the skills (text, and code) all by hand, or are those prompt outputs?

Re:Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @03:08PM (#49820991)
For someone who is not familiar with that person/channel, what is that way to understand circuits?
They slow down model releases, but don't slow down research and model development. They're not suddenly going to tell their army of researchers to go home. (In fact they can then focus/spend more on research, instead of the engineering needed to keep churning new models for production.)

This protects them from continuous model distillation by inferior models. So they only release a new model when a 3rd competitor catches up to their public production models' capabilities.

And the public gets a new model in 6 months or a year instead of every few months. But the new model would be a (1) gigantic leap in undisputed capabilities, (2) catastrophic in terms of job losses/replacements worldwide and they've had a year to prepare for the politics of it, and (3) the public would have access to the "tiny/medium/..." models while the big money/gov clients get the real super juice hidden behind the gates.

> This is the coolest thing on HN that I've seen in a minute.

Off-topic, but what is up with the increased use of the phrase "in a minute", presumably to mean "in a long time", lately?

I've only started encountering it in the past year.

Did it get popularized by some celebrity, tv show, influencers, etc?

Re:An Update on Wayback Machine Access on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @03:55PM (#49718004)
Is it established that the scraping scourge of late is primarily driven by AI companies? Anyone aware of any relevant studies?

Beginning to think that the difficulty to browse most websites nowadays due to throttling, is yet another negative externality of AI development that society is forced to bear.

Is there a clear definition of what Alignment is in OpenAI's perspective, and what the model user can expect of it?

It's one thing if to them it means "it will do what you want following your intentions to the best of its abilities" vs "we will not let you do something dangerous with it unless you're one of us, and that's it".

Re:Claude is no longer available for minors on Friday September 11, 2026 @04:35PM (#49664963)
related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65...

> Many companies now routinely attach Prop 65 warning labels to any product of theirs that they think might possibly contain one of the 900 listed chemicals without testing to see whether the chemical is really present in their product and without reformulating their product, because it is cheaper to do so than to run the risk of being sued by Prop 65 enforcers.

Re:A misalignment of AI in mathematics on Friday September 11, 2026 @04:22PM (#49664812)
Given the existence of this technology now and the incentives of the AI companies, both of which are not going away; what's a good future here?

A major part of the complaint is that there's no conceptual understanding and building of new ideas coming out of the AI proofs, thus defeating the purpose of the original pursuit.

If in 2027 the AI models start producing, with every mathematics or science breakthrough they make, well-written documents tailored for human understanding, with intermediate concepts, expositions of failed-but-once-promising paths, etc. Would that be good alignment with the mathematics community?