News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

z3c0

Re:Never Complain, Never Explain on Monday November 02, 2026 @11:21AM (#50339156)
I'll hand it to you, "Trump is awful because he was a Democrat, and Democrats are de facto awful" is one I haven't seen before. That said, within my own anecdotal experience, "God Bless Trump" signs are pretty common in the Bible Belt, and that certainly is a sentiment born of authoritarian times.
Re:Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews' on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:38PM (#50308314)
I'll be angling hard towards abandoning Proton (and no longer recommending it to others) so long as Yen remains CEO. Hopefully, the larger company realizes the threat someone like him poses to their image AND quality of service.
Re:Anthropic S-1 on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:31AM (#50243372)
I believe what they are singling out is that pulling Claude's trigger results in a bullet firing from Anthropic's servers. Liability is less confusing with firearms, and investors care about liability, like, a lot.
Re:Quad9 (DNS Resolver) to Exit France on Thursday October 22, 2026 @03:59PM (#50200214)
Playstations, like most network-ready devices, support custom DNS resolvers.
While "useful service" may be generous wording, in my own experience, when given the option between "pentesting" and "ransom+patching", most corporations would prefer the third, cheaper option: do nothing.
HN is less hackers than it is pedantic VC lackeys training for their aspirational role as a wealthy-and-opinionated Twitter personality.
I agree with you in the broad sense but self-hosted services like forgejo support mirroring to GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.
They're being downvoted because Trump has more than a few supporters here.
[delayed]
Re:Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance' on Saturday October 03, 2026 @06:48PM (#49948532)
"Digital effects" have always been a grey area for unreasonable search-and-seizure. This was an infamous moment for the late Antonin Scalia, who, iirc, argued that the constistution couldn't reasonably be addressing this matter, as the Founding Fathers had no concept of digital effects when defining "documents and effects".
I'd say the biggest indicator towards crime is self-absorption and lack of empathy. Apparently, HN comments are great place to devise a corpus upon.
Re:OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says on Thursday September 24, 2026 @07:19AM (#49829061)
Decades worth of hackers missed the opportunity to say "It wasn't me -- my computer did it."
Re:Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video] on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:03PM (#49648730)
I expect because it's overly reductive to the point of falsehood. Two sufficiently complex systems will likely exhibit enough parallels to form a useful analogy, but that does nothing to reflect the ways the systems aren't alike.
Re:GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven on Friday August 28, 2026 @06:42PM (#49485128)
I'm not outside of enterprise and have worked hands-on for over a decade with AI-driven customer workflows. The cost of accessibility audits are NOT higher than AI R&D or third-party B2B contracts for vaporware touting to do the same.

Sorry if that assertion stands opposed to your value prop.

Re:GLM-5.3 is now open-weight on Friday August 28, 2026 @06:23PM (#49484982)
Because they would have to reveal their training regiment, which likely formed the basis for versions 4 and 5.

Or did you just mean the weights? If so, the open models distilled from GPT3 should mostly suffice. That's what good "open weights" are.

Re:GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven on Friday August 28, 2026 @06:15PM (#49484899)
Research and fallbacks would certainly be better. An 85% design, 15% algorithmic solution is probably the sweet "pobody's nerfect" spot, but a company using AI to solve accessibility is like selling rape whistles -- in a perfect world, your market is nonexistent.
> Even the Citizens United decision did not set the bar for civil damages to be awarded for a civil rights violation to a 'corporate personhood'

I'm almost upset at the notion only being invoked. Let's hope we don't see such a precedence emerge, especially around a company touting to be selling "intelligence".

Re:GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven on Friday August 28, 2026 @05:26PM (#49484432)
Using AI to close gaps in accessibility is like adding treads to your vehicle because society is too lazy to pave roads.
Re:Stop Making TUIs on Saturday August 22, 2026 @07:56AM (#49398830)
Yeah, the holier-than-thou vibe-coder is a new cliche I'm not enjoying.
Re:Every Model Cheats on Friday August 21, 2026 @09:21AM (#49387695)
I have seen it do exactly that, in a "hands thrown up" fashion.

Note the levels of "thinking" that occur on NOT assertions. Those streams typically keep things on track. It's not that saying "don't use the Internet" will cause it to rebuke cos misalignment (a childish concept made by laymen, I'll add.) It's that the odds of it later "forgetfully" spewing in a thought stream, "wait, I have't checked the Internet" goes up substantially.

Saying "using only offline methods, do xyz" limits those odds considerably.

This isn't opinion or anecdote -- just how the model works. The additional guardrails to keep the model on track are bolted on via finetuning, hence the increasing jankiness.

Re:Every Model Cheats on Friday August 21, 2026 @08:29AM (#49387103)
Correct. Simulating a train of thought with contextual token streams, a thought does not make.
Re:Every Model Cheats on Friday August 21, 2026 @08:28AM (#49387095)
It'll work up to a point, but pay attention to the thought streams when asserting what NOT to do and you'll see the turmoil it creates in the context.

Your prompt is more of a linguistic linchpin that allows you to coax out needed patterns. You place your pins on what you want to contextualize for the task at hand, not on what you don't want to contextualize.

Re:Every Model Cheats on Thursday August 20, 2026 @01:45PM (#49377784)
It's also worth noting that saying "Don't cheat" just added "cheat" to the context. Prompting what "not" to do is folly, because there's no decision making occurring. Telling the model to perform the task locally is logically the same as telling it to not use the Internet, without every mentioning the Internet.
Re:If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible? on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @12:09PM (#49363456)
[delayed]
And whether or not what replaces it is any better. Historically speaking, widespread democracy is still a recent development.
Also, analytics are not limited by JavaScript and browser APIs. Getting your attention isn't so valuable without knowing how to do it a second time.
Re:Who manages the agents? on Saturday July 11, 2026 @04:17PM (#48875456)
I'm struggling to imagine aliens resurrecting a data center and countless hackneyed python packages so they can spew a language they don't even know. Not that it wouldn't be useful to their linguists, of course, but still a very optimistic analogy for LLMs.
Re:98% Isn't Much on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @09:09AM (#48817262)
When measuring and reporting models to the non-saavy, I usually reframe them into odds. One failure for every 49 successes is a scary failure rate when operating at a large scale.

This is largely why I don't condone LLMs in operational pipelines. Your workflow? Fine. The company's? Hell no.

Re:Markets are competitive if and only if P = NP on Friday July 03, 2026 @02:01PM (#48777911)
> Artificial intelligence, by expanding firms' computational capabilities, is pushing markets from the competitive regime toward the collusive regime, explaining the empirical emergence of algorithmic collusion without explicit coordination.

Wow... this is quite fascinating. It has been theorized for a little while that widespread AI could form accidental trusts due to optimization around one-another. This seems to be taking it a step further and arguing that if P!=NP, then markets are certain to trend towards collusive.

I miss "predictive analytics". Too boring and honest for marketers though.

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