HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

0xWTF

628 karma · joined February 2, 2020

submissionscomments
0xWTF··on Azure's Weakest Link – Five Full Cross-Tenant Compromises
Glad to know the frozen middle exists among the hyperscalers. High confidence you can swap the entire leadership team and nothing will change.
0xWTF··on Northflank Breached
Until there's a exploit for Palo Alto, Juniper, Cisco, F5, <pick your defender>.
0xWTF··on New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6
I have an M1 Air 13" and M2 Air 15", and M4 Air 14" and and M4 Pro 14" with nano texture.

I love them all. The M4 Air 14" is from work, so kinda limited in what I can do. The M4 14" Pro is kinda chunky after the Airs. The M2 15" is ideal except on a plane. The M1 13" is great as a personal device on work travel. If only I could not work...

0xWTF··on New iMac with M6
I really loved target display mode. It made me so happy
0xWTF··on New iMac with M6
That's funny. If only LG could do proper design.
0xWTF··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
> I don't want to give US labs the results of my DNA tests

My friend, you realize that if you have had blood drawn for a genetic test, there is a very decent probability that the sequencing was done by a Chinese lab operating in the US, right? The Chinese probably have more US genomes that the US does.

https://pandorareport.org/the-gryphon-scientific-biosecurity...

Also, illumina used to ship products with hardcoded S3 access, so purchasers of used equipment could gain access to sequencing information generated by the original owners. Too many links to cover all of it, here's the Gemini summary:

https://share.google/aimode/4JLsHpeRCWlVqU8qT

0xWTF··on Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwrote
With bad dentists (1) and bad debt underwriters on the HN front page, I love that subjective diagnosis remains challenging and topical.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50050553

0xWTF··on Do dentists know what they're doing?
If you find medical diagnosis to be problematic, may I recommend the following article? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41282362/ The leed is buried in the abstract, but the name of the analysis is pretty informative: Cases and Observers Needed to Evaluate a Subjective Test (CONTEST)
0xWTF··on Is 'Attention' the Essence of Intelligence?
This is the core insight, some in the original grad student author's own words:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-attention-the-essence-of-i...

"Sentences with pronouns such as “it” in them illustrate the challenge that attention overcomes. Consider: “The animal didn’t cross the street because it was too tired.” And: “The animal didn’t cross the street because it was too wide.” To translate these sentences correctly into French, an AI model must determine that, in the first one, “it” refers to the animal, which is a masculine word in French, so the translation should use that form of the pronoun, il. But in the second sentence, “it” refers to the street, a feminine word that requires a different pronoun, elle. How can the machine figure this out?"

"Bahdanau remembered doing translation exercises when he was learning English in school. To write each next word of his translated sentence, he’d have to glance all around the source text to figure out what should come next. “Literally you have your source sentence on the left and your writing on the right, and you’ll be, like, turning your head, left-right, left-right,” he said. “That process is what I expressed as a neural mechanism.”

That simplicity seems to me the real tell that this is the real insight. The author does a good job of walking the ready past a long list of distractors and conjuring a sense of a path to an insight, and then, there's the insight - a simple encoding of a simple task: "What is the next word? How do I figure that out? Left-right. Left-right"

0xWTF··on Apple HomeView
Multi-user personalization is a disaster on iPadOS. Google Home basically nails it but has a lot of edge case shortcomings in that last 20%. Hopefully Apple is laying the groundwork for a more comprehensive approach.

I would love an iPad that magnetically attached over the top of this thing and immediately gave me the same multi-user OS interaction of HomeView and the bigger screen of the iPad. Which I could then take with me as needed. Seems like a few magnets and a screen-sharing function away.

But also, why in the God's hell does this thing not have wireless charging and a battery? Who in the hell has a 30W USB-C riser coming up out of the middle of their kitchen island? A) has kitchen B) has kitchen island C) has kitchen island with power D) has kitchen island with concealed power amenable to random chargers. This seems like a very bespoke audience.

Looking forward to version 3, shortly after Apple Vision Pro version 2.

0xWTF··on Gemini 4 Argon
How is Claude Opus 5.5 beating Gemini 4 Argon on benchmarks but everyone here is calling Argon a step change? I need to come up with my own benchmarks ...
0xWTF··on Identity Management for Agentic AI [pdf] (2025)
Uh, not sure I agree with your terminology - one does not authorize who you are. You authenticate yourself, certain tokens authenticate your identity with varying levels of strength (e.g. within a corporate enclave, you may have elevated authorizations if you are authenticating from a corporate device).

Authorizations are what are granted to an authenticated identity, typically with a specified scope and duration.

0xWTF··on Identity Management for Agentic AI [pdf] (2025)
OpenID came out of Six Apart, the developer of Movable Type blogging software (They lost the betamax war of blogging to Wordpress) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID#History
0xWTF··on How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent
The fact that policy changes were made should be noted. Among those policy decisions, did India make its own transformers, conductors, and SCADA, (i.e. Indian companies) or did they buy from outside? Seems like it would be better for them to source their own transformers and conductors if they can. I wonder if they'd be better off developing their own software though? Quick Google search suggests that they source from international suppliers like Schneider and Siemens.
0xWTF··on Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless
For those interested in pricing transparency, check out https://www.dolthub.com/repositories/dolthub/standard-charge...

and the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care - https://www.dartmouthatlas.org/

0xWTF··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
Hi, your friendly, local pathologist here. I'm the kind of doctor that diagnoses liver diseases, cancer, lots of infections, inflammatory processes, benign tumors, and runs the lab that a lot of other doctors use the results from to inform a lot of their other decisions.

If you really want to learn about this stuff, Robert Weinberg's The Biology of Cancer is where to start. It introduces concepts starting where a high school student could understand and carefully walks through the history of our development of knowledge until, by the end, the pithy chapters are helping novel concepts for real science flower in your brain all on their own. It's the best book of biological science I have ever read. 10/10, will read again.

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393887655

0xWTF··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
I have to say, as a middle-aged physician in the military, the dynamics of hiring terrify me. I interviewed to get into college, medical school, and residency. At all other times I have been gainfully employed. I hear about people studying for weeks or months for job interviews. What do you do to study?
0xWTF··on Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school
Meanwhile, we've got un-tethered humanoid robots that apparently accept "attack person" as acceptable input.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t1sBBvHSXc

0xWTF··on Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school
> I worked at times in a JTAC capacity

glad to see you're alive and functioning

0xWTF··on How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?
How to admit you're in finance without admitting you're in finance?
0xWTF··on Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography
Hot damn. I've described this concept before, obviously not to this level of detail, but leaving this comment in here in case I can find my old comments. A bunch of people have poo-poo'd my proposals, but glad to see a serious actor really executing it. Probably no one at Apple ever read my posts, but it sure does feel good to see something executed. Hopefully it sticks.
0xWTF··on Most people prefer traditional architecture
> That is condescending, makes normal people feel unheard, and then when someone does hear them on the innocuous subject

And that is why all the pollsters were caught flat-footed by Trump in 2016. The people who did feel unheard learned to not respond.

0xWTF··on DoD poised to move all classified workloads off Anthropic
So, still using Anthropic is the way I read this.
0xWTF··on Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
Which was written as a call to action. The Valley should remember how trade is kept free, especially all those electronics moving Eastward across the Pacific. Worth reading Mahan if you're confused.
0xWTF··on Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons
The difference between nukes and bioweapons is energy level. Body counts are on the same order of magnitude. Bioweapons are just way easier to make and much harder to detect.
0xWTF··on Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026
Pulled out relevant details of the 5 cases

1) Chikungunya - "the platform tunneled traffic through US infrastructure to evade our regional blocks, and used a zero data retention (ZDR) service to hide content."

2) bird flu - "accessed Claude from an unsupported region via US virtual private server infrastructure, using a privacy-email provider with an auto-generated username. The researcher pursued this work in a credible institutional context, and interacted with Claude over the course of several weeks, exchanging thousands of messages. In these exchanges, the researcher leveraged Claude’s knowledge of the scientific literature to assist the researcher in study planning and design, data analysis, and the interpretation and prioritization of experiments."

3) orthopoxvirus - "randomly generated email address shortly before use and operated through anonymizing US infrastructure, with operator logins traced to proxies shared with a banned account farm. It was not a single user: it was a reseller relay serving more than a dozen unrelated customers, which exchanged over tens of thousands messages with Claude in a matter of days. The grant itself was one customer’s run entirely on Opus 5 in about an hour, in which the user used Claude to draft the application end to end including the central hypothesis, experimental design, dosing, statistical plans, and contingency strategies."

4) atlas of venom toxin peptides - "the atlas contained scaffolds for both analgesic and paralytic targets: it could, therefore, be used to generate both novel therapeutic or harmful compounds. The latter are derived from toxins that are export-controlled under the Australia Group common control list due to their dual-use potential as incapacitating agents. The researchers themselves showed awareness of the dual-use nature of their work, citing journal articles that referred to the dual-use nature of protein design. Moreover, international compliance assessments for this location raise concerns about the specific class of toxins that the researcher pursued and specifically the use of AI/ML for bioweapons applications in the context of this class of toxins. In this case, we learned from information shared with Claude that the researcher’s outputs also were part of a state-supported research program."

5) computational redesign of toxins - "described state priority research under a national public research program. As a part of this research assignment, the work covered a bacterial toxin subunit and a protein of the hemorrhagic-fever virus that is on the World Health Organization R&D Blueprint priority list of diseases with the greatest epidemic and pandemic threat. "The researcher co-wrote quarterly progress reports with Claude. Notably, the identity of the bacterial toxin and viral proteins were intentionally obscured, and the researcher specifically directed Claude to keep these descriptions deliberately low fidelity."

0xWTF··on Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons
link?
0xWTF··on Top Pentagon Official Contracted Personal Lawyer to Handle Minerals Deal
That has only been the case since 2008. Obama had no choice but manage the fallout of the Bush admin's record-setting-for-the-time fuck-ups.

Reagan followed a fairly positively stated agenda. Clinton pursued a fairly positive agenda. George the 2nd followed a fairly positive, if misguided, agenda. And then it became a reactive shitshow.

0xWTF··on IBM Bob
So much for the "THINK" motto.
0xWTF··on I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked
This is eerily suggestive of a vulnerability Hank Paulson hinted at in his 2014 book "Dealing with China"

"Every nonelectric cooler comes with 25 years of free real-time monitoring. On a visit to the company in the spring of 2012, I watched as technicians in Broad Air’s space-age control room checked on the performance of its units in locations as diverse as the Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport in Spain; Qualcomm headquarters in San Diego, California; and Fort Stewart, the U.S. Army base in Georgia [emphasis added].

"Zhang says that 80 percent of his clients are repeaters. “If you bring long-term benefits for your clients, they will choose you.”"

Page 1 of 6Next →