News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

pstoll

Way to Know Your Customer, CashApp!

Her next lawsuit needs to be CashApp and their grotesque negligence on that front.

Re:Korea raises data breach fines to 10% of revenue on Friday September 18, 2026 @09:23PM (#49762419)
About f’ing time a government made this have real consequences.
Re:Cloudflare Quick Tunnels on Friday September 18, 2026 @09:19PM (#49762399)
Sure any centralization of infra is an obvious risk for a myriad of reasons eg DoS, manipulation, honeypots, etc.

But again my point applies - the chances they get enough people using it that it becomes a meaningfully worse security target than lots of other existing things seems … super low.

It’s a big world, people make many choices I can’t understand (nix? Haskell? Php? <flame wars to /dev/null>). Even if this product nailed it - the number of people who can use it is minuscule - yes even as we add Claude-enabled PMs to the software dev ranks.

Alt view with the old saying - “put all your eggs in one basket … and watch that basket!”

Re:Jemalloc 5.4.0 on Friday September 18, 2026 @12:35PM (#49756812)
Post-ZIRP reality of corporate self-interest being re-established.
Re:Cloudflare Quick Tunnels on Friday September 18, 2026 @12:20PM (#49756613)
You should be more than hesitant - don’t do it. They literally market them for quick demos. And not long lived production.
Re:Cloudflare Quick Tunnels on Friday September 18, 2026 @12:13PM (#49756512)
Reality check - you are not pushing “_a lot_” of traffic relative to any hyperscaler or large scale CDN. They push hundreds of Tbps sustained. You don’t peak at a few Mbps.

They can monitor extreme outliers. It’s not an issue for them.

Re:A misalignment of AI in mathematics on Friday September 11, 2026 @08:41PM (#49667379)
The women who made up the workforce of telephone switch operators would like to have a word.

Meaning - every new technology has both been perceived as a threa and often forced change in society. Agree maybe “it feels different” this time, but don’t you think everybody before us just said the same thing?

Also not clear if this is an actual called action.

Re:The linear algebra and calculus behind every model on Friday July 24, 2026 @12:22PM (#49037894)
wtf it's paywalled after the first little bit. was not expecting that from a "blog".

I'm looking for a place to direct people to see the math behind it, seemed like it had potential.

Re:Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP on Friday July 17, 2026 @09:28PM (#48954226)
Did they finally make a viable version of spanner for themselves?
Except that Mac ultra M3 they talk about is now only being sold in the 96 GB configuration. It’s no longer being sold in larger Ram configurations by Apple Apple because of the global RAM shortage. And you can not add memory after purchase because it’s integrated/soldered on.
Re:Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @10:40AM (#48832625)
Agreed on - it took a long time to get to the “so what is new here” vs the broader topic of distributed consensus. Stylistically would prefer more upfront “here is what is novel here”
Re:Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @10:37AM (#48832588)
TBH I’m doubtful of most people building their own crypto libs and distributed consensus implementations. But maybe cloudflare can pull it off. Good to see them pushing the state of distributed consensus.

Take aways:

* it’s not in prod yet. I suspect those many round trips are going to get expensive on median aka typical redistributed deployments. Curious to see how it goes once in the wild.

* they say it isn’t likely suitable for eg databases.

* they talk about formal verification, which is good and feels appropriate.

Looking forward to seeing more!

Re:Meta Down on Friday June 12, 2026 @02:04PM (#48507381)
“In the building” the building happened to be their secure data centers, not their offices.
Re:"Why not just use Lean?" on Monday April 27, 2026 @02:00PM (#47925007)
Feels like all the write ups that point out the short comings of eg Python for scientific computing.

Sure, except that once you have a community at critical mass around a reasonably good tool, that trumps most other things. Momentum builds. People write tutorials, explainers, better documentation, etc. it hits escape velocity.

Feels like Lean, with Terrance Tao as a strong proponent / cheerleader, is in that space.

Everyone who argues “but language X is better” … may not be wrong, but they are not making the argument that matters. Is it better than the thing everyone else knows and can use and has more people hours going into it to improve it?

Feels like a “worse is better” situation; or maybe “good and popular is good enough”.

Re:The coming PLG to SLG apocalypse on Monday March 30, 2026 @11:04AM (#47575257)
PLG. Any article I have to search for an acronym and don’t find it - nope.
And a group has published an independent working implementation today, nice to see:

https://github.com/tonbistudio/turboquant-pytorch

Good post but link at the end is broken.

“”” For the full technical explanation with equations, proofs, and PyTorch pseudocode, see the companion post: TurboQuant: Near-Optimal Vector Quantization Without Looking at Your Data.“

Re:TorchLean: Formalizing Neural Networks in Lean on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @12:48PM (#47236036)
And the lower precision float variants.
TLDR the recorded media isn’t end-to-end encrypted and they aren’t selling it but instead using it to train their own systems. What is new here?
Re:Msgvault: fast private email archive and search system on Monday February 02, 2026 @04:50PM (#46862161)
Ditto - completely appeals to me. I’m good starting with mail.
I’m the opposite - I much prefer a structured query language (ahem) for this type of thing. If I’m looking at someone’s (ie my own 6 months later) script I much prefer to see the explicit structure being queried vs “why are we feeling for foo or grabbing the 5th field based on squashed spaces as the separater”.

Nice use of CEL too. Neat all around.

Re:1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 on Friday December 19, 2025 @10:09AM (#46326673)
Yes only on that page, not the rest of his blog. Guessing he ansible’d it to redirect ;)
Re:12 Days of Shell on Monday December 08, 2025 @05:45AM (#46190810)
Neat idea à la regex golf.

But doesn’t seem to do enough shell escaping or correctly. Also seems underspecified, ie “find 5 lines starting with ‘the” doesn’t require a pipe to head -5.

I get what your saying but I think it’s not the best way to describe it - “GPL is property”? Hardly - it’s a societal common good that can be used by anyone interested in helping that common good.

Are parks “proprietary”? I can’t run my car dealership from one, so it’s …proprietary? No. So using the terminology of “proprietary” doesn’t do justice to what it actually is.

Re:A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z on Friday November 28, 2025 @10:25AM (#46079446)
Lol I was hoping for that too
Re:NoLongerEvil-Thermostat – Nest Generation 1 and 2 Firmware on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @04:46PM (#45816247)
It’s the “no longer evil” marketing without actually proving that “no longer evil.com” is in fact … from from evil.

I was assuming that I could point the nest data stream & control UI to my own hosted thing on eg my local NAS or docker farm. That’s what I think would warrant the moniker “free from evil” in this kind of strong privacy preserving marketing.

Proposal - every new thing needs a “here are the systems we consider and rejected” entry. I can’t find one on the docs here.

Founders care to comment on if you evaluated if Tremor (https://github.com/tremor-rs/tremor-runtime) would suit what you needed?

Seems to me that the lists of features (and use of rust) have a high degree of overlap.

My first inclination too tbh.

And then I saw Npm references and thought “in JavaScript?!” But at least it’s typescript.

In TypeScript, interesting. Not the obvious choice IMO but trying to keep an open mind.

Was that because of team expertise or particular aspects of TS you thought suited the domain?

Re:PyTorch Monarch on Thursday October 23, 2025 @07:47PM (#45688963)
“Service Adverbs - like ‘route’ and ‘fanout’”

Grammarians are going to be big angry here. Ain’t an adverb in sight.

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