HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

0xbadcafebee

24,934 karma · joined July 24, 2009

E-mail is <my username> at gmail

GCS/IT/SS/O d-(++)>--- s:- a C$ UBL++++$>+++ P+++(++++)$ L+++$>++++ !E !W+++()@>- !N !o K--? !w !O !M !V PS@ !PE Y-- !PGP !t 5 !X !R tv b- DI !D G e- h+ r y++*

The views and opinions I express on HN do not reflect those of my employer.

--

#OpenToWork - Information Systems Engineering (DevOps/SRE/Admin/Architect/Security/Programming/etc) and I only work remote

submissionscomments
0xbadcafebee··on Nurses Sound Alarm as 'Uber for Nursing' Apps Push to Deregulate Healthcare
Unfortunately it wouldn't fix anything. It would kill gig work because the model isn't sustainable with regular taxes and minimum wage (if it were, businesses would've already been doing that instead of independent contracting). It also wouldn't fix the income inequality that created gig work. People would be back to dying of thirst, without a thimble of water.

The real fix is to make it so their main job is hydrating enough, or the thing half the country hates the idea of (public fountains). IRS can't do either. Independent contracting is still a valuable mode of work, when the contractors are paid enough. So rather than ban forms of gig work, we need to provide good paying jobs and social services, and get the rich to pay their fair share.

0xbadcafebee··on Nurses Sound Alarm as 'Uber for Nursing' Apps Push to Deregulate Healthcare
Physician salary is only 9% of total healthcare cost. The rest of the labor pool is administrative - clerks, management, etc.

Physicians also make 2-3x more than physicians in other countries. Why? Their education cost is also 2-3x higher than in other countries.

Hospitals and procedures are expensive, in part because of insurance. Insurance is high because our society is too litigious. It's also expensive because of consolidated private healthcare systems that can control and mark up prices due to lack of competition.

Other countries spend half what we do on healthcare. And their people are often healthier.

0xbadcafebee··on Nurses Sound Alarm as 'Uber for Nursing' Apps Push to Deregulate Healthcare
The entire 'gig economy' model is exploitation. It only works because of income inequality. It requires a large pool of workers who don't make enough money to support themselves (due to insane healthcare and housing costs, and low wages and benefits) and thus will take any money they can get, despite the poor pay, long hours, and lack of benefits. It's taking a person slowly dying of thirst and offering them a thimble of water in exchange for knitting a sock.
0xbadcafebee··on Zinc creep in cable spelter sockets brought down the Arecibo telescope in 2020
Any bends or crimps in the wire create localized stress points which fail early. For crazy high loads you don't want any of that, so the zinc method is the standard. But I think this particular implementation will be rethought.
0xbadcafebee··on Zinc creep in cable spelter sockets brought down the Arecibo telescope in 2020
The pictures on page 25 seem to show how this socket design fails. First because they didn't evenly distribute the wires in the socket (seriously??)... And second, the shear on the zinc from the compressed wire bundle is essentially a narrow rectangle in the direction of the cable with almost all the force concentrated in a narrow forward bit, not really distributed evenly through the socket, because of the wire ends splaying outward and not being equally distributed. I guess the idea is the rest of the zinc towards the back provides a counter force on the front part, but there's a whole lot more zinc in the back pulling on a smaller amount in the front. The tight bundle and the conical shape is great for a tight install, but doesn't help distribution of load. Compare to the Golden Gate Bridge wire termination (https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2RY9PKW/golden-gate-bridge-plans-i...). The zinc creep is definitely bad, but it seems made worse by an uneven distribution of load in the socket, in addition to all the other problems...

tl;dr once the outer wires break in the socket (in part due to zinc creep, but also potentially more load on them), the "glue" keeping the wire bundle connected to the socket is broken, the former wedge keeping the core in place becomes a straight line, and you have a core ready to pop out.

0xbadcafebee··on Memdoor: A team of 5 Qwen3.8-27B models beats Fable 5 on LiveCodeBench Hard
So someone used a small model with many requests & a massive amount of tokens, to eventually beat a large model with a single request & tiny amount of tokens. .....Cool? Were they not expecting that to work?
0xbadcafebee··on TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8
The most terrifying part of this is all the devices that might be affected. Ignore servers and desktops. Linux 4.4 came out nearly 11 years ago. While most Linux devices' firmware is actually more ancient than that (Linux 2.x and 3.x isn't uncommon), any device that did ship with Linux 4.4+ is going to get hacked, because nobody patches those devices. Any smart device in the world that isn't a server, desktop, or microcontroller, is probably running Linux.

As part of the Software Building Code (that we don't have, and desperately need), one of the things we should have is mitigation for these abandoned internet safety risks. Here's how I would define that section:

  Section 4    Connections to Public Internet
  Section 4.1  Device Support
    Devices connected to the public internet WILL require one of the following:
      a) Guaranteed LTS support for a minimum of 10 years
      b) Guaranteed rolling release support for a minimum of 10 years
    Devices without this support are not permitted to be connected to the public internet.
  Section 4.2  Vendor Responsibility
    When releasing devices, vendors must determine whether this device is certified for
    public internet use. Support must be maintained according to S4.1. Failure to comply will
    result in fines of up to $5,000 per affected device.
  Section 4.3  Installer Responsibility
    Any device connected to the public internet which is not certified for public internet
    use is in violation, and will be subject to fines of up to $500 per affected device.
  Section 4.4  Device Owner Responsibility
    Any installed devices will be replaced once they reach their End Of Life period,
    or after 10 years, whichever comes first. Installed devices in use that exceed this
    period are in violation, and subject to fines of up to $250 per affected device.
(These fines are tiny compared to the fines for things like fire code violations, but enough money that a company, contractor, or individual would rather fix their device than pay the fines)
0xbadcafebee··on Malware uses LLMs to rank victims by how much they're worth
All the extra code isn't really the problem, it's the insanely easy to attack "programming language package ecosystems", like NPM, PyPI, etc, compared to something like the Linux package ecosystem. But this is a much less common problem than malware and phishing. Supply chain is more of a concern than it used to be, but thousands of people get infected with malware or phished every day, versus relatively few supply chain attacks that get caught fairly quickly.

For your own user security, my suggestion is to stop using SaaS wherever you can. None of them are secure, and exfiltration is child's play. All SaaS I've worked for had terrible security.

Malware typically depends on two things:

1) Unpatched software. OS, apps, routers, etc. Always keep everything up to date on patches. 0-day exploits are rarely used because it burns a valuable resource. If you can use an OS that has very little malware (like Linux, MacOS) it reduces your risk. Malware also tends to lurk in certain spaces on the internet (porn sites, pirated media, shareware downloads, malicious ads), so staying clear of them also reduces your risk.

2) Persistent credentials. Most malware (at least when I was looking at it years ago) isn't very advanced/persistent. An advanced persistent threat may sit on your machine indefinitely until you login using credentials, but they may not use those credentials immediately. Sign in and out quickly (don't "stay signed in") and always use MFA, ideally a second device. Secured Android and iPhone devices are ideal for checking bank statements etc... but you must be vigilant not to install untrusted apps from App Stores (anything not from a major company), as they are more likely to infect you than your browser on normal/safe websites. If you can, try to use virtual credit card numbers, and use a credit rather than debit card for purchases.

Phishing largely depends on clicking a link in an email, but also SMS "alerts" and browser pages that look like OS pop-ups. To defend against these, use a password manager to generate random unique passwords everywhere, use MFA everywhere. For login, set up and use 1-click-login and passkeys, especially for the most important logins (bank, email). Don't share or reuse passwords or API keys for more than one thing; not only does it reduce the impact, but it helps you identify where the compromise came from.

I personally play "fast and loose" on my Linux desktop and don't run things in isolation. But if you want rock-solid security, the only real option is running applications in dedicated VMs, and only mounting files needed for that application. Don't depend on containers or sandboxes for security. If you want a "lightweight" alternative to VMs/containers, you can have multiple user accounts on your computer, lock each user account down (no reading/writing from other user accounts), and either login to different ones for different tasks, or run apps as that user and have them display in your current user's desktop.

0xbadcafebee··on Northflank Breached
> probably pretty good protections

In my career I've seen maybe two companies have pretty good protections. Both had government contracts so they had no choice. Otherwise there's no reason for companies to secure their stack. They make money easier without it.

The buildings are on fire because they're being built out of straw because it's cheaper. Only a government regulation to build out of brick is going to stop the fires.

0xbadcafebee··on We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
I don't think they're purposefully bloated, any more than literally all software today is. It all is bloated, but I don't think anyone set out for that. Despite that, the bloat is now the business case. If one of these AI CEOs announced "our main goal is to make tiny models for consumer devices", their stock would crash.
0xbadcafebee··on Chained PHP2Shell exploit roots 25 servers, including US Government servers
I get that logically you would think that a very wealthy company would improve their technology once they had the resources to do that. But companies do not run by logic. They run by humans, making human decisions, motivated by almost every conceivable thing except logic.

> When you're a startup, expediency and funding prevent this, but by the time you're selling "solutions" and baking designs into ASICs you

.... are still run by the same startup people who think "working like a startup" was a good idea in the first place.

Right now I work with a bunch of people who came up working for startups. They are responsible for the products that make the company the most money. They are still on PHP 7.4.

0xbadcafebee··on Chained PHP2Shell exploit roots 25 servers, including US Government servers
Everything is enabled by default in Linux, it's just their way. Privilege escalation exploits for Linux are found every year. If you can RCE a Linux box, assume you can also get root.
0xbadcafebee··on We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
This is strategic. By making it so consumer grade hardware can't serve it, you have to pay them for access to it, and that funds the server hardware market, which keeps the AI market afloat. If they made smaller models, we would all be running local AI in a few years, nobody would pay them, and they would go bankrupt (and a worldwide recession would begin). It's going to be up to us (FOSS community) to train and publish our own small models. (Also because the US and China are going to make releasing open weights illegal or highly regulated soon)
0xbadcafebee··on We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
Of course you can use it for commercial purposes. You just can't serve it as an inference SaaS. https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B/raw...
0xbadcafebee··on We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4
Open weight is still the correct term because it's not a licensing thing, it's an availability thing. OpenAI/Anthropic are Closed weight because you can't download them at all. Open Source is different because its original use had to do with licensing requirements. Not every phrase with "Open" in it is going to have the same requirements.

When it comes to words, popular usage defines (and redefines) the meaning.

0xbadcafebee··on Termic: Open-source cross-platform Conductor alternative
I use this tool every day at work to run different official agent harnesses with subscriptions. The features are plentiful and very useful, upstream development is fast, they accept changes quickly, stable/reliable operation, lightweight. Best of all: it's just a traditional FOSS project, they're not trying to sell you something.

It is created with AI, but I have had no issues using it for months. I'm kind of amazed at how good it is.

0xbadcafebee··on Introducing LFM3: Every Modality for Specialized Intelligence
It's a model designed to be tiny and still functional, unlike other larger models that are just scaled down and then run into problems (doom loops, intelligence/reasoning failure, tool call failure). You use it when you want a fine-tuned tiny model processing text/audio/video on multiple platforms. (I don't work for them but this is my takeaway)
0xbadcafebee··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
I love how nobody asks me to give evidence or examples. You don't want to find out you're wrong.
0xbadcafebee··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
The US is far more hostile than China, also relies on slave labor, and is so increasingly authoritarian that our country's domestic & foreign policy now resembles a 3rd world dictatorship.

Doesn't matter though. The big mistake was allowing manufacturing to be exported from the US to begin with. Nearly any advanced technology we use or wish to produce is now dependent on China. They control not only the advanced manufacturing process, but also the refinement of rare earths (we can mine it but not refine it) and have cheaper labor. Not only can't we make tech without them, we can't sell it at competitive prices. Things will soon get worse as robotics and vertical integration makes Chinese products even cheaper and better quality. And we can't compete on robots because China controls that production chain too.

The smart play would be to build up our own green energy sector to gain cost savings, while investing in its manufacturing, so we can eventually compete and support ourselves (which Biden and Obama passed funding for). Trump eliminated all that when he came back, because the oil companies wanted more profits, they literally don't believe climate change is real, and they have no idea how diplomacy works. We could've had cheap battery, wind, and solar manufacturing in the US. Not anymore.

0xbadcafebee··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
> and have fun doing it, for better or worse

Like how "the boys" in engineering would made jokes about having sex with the female office manager in the middle of meetings. It was only a great time for certain people.

0xbadcafebee··on Cross-request KV cache exposure in the GLM-5.3 Workers AI model (155 responses)
I kind of forgot about the shared tenancy attack model. I think I was assuming/hoping the software was magically isolating my tokens, when in reality that's impossible for shared tenants. There's whole classes of attacks on things like shared cache, before we get to the LLM-specific features and potential bugs. Enterprises with highly sensitive data should really be on non-shared hosts.
0xbadcafebee··on GPT-6.1 Terra
Fwiw, if you have to explain your product's name to the customers who just want to use it, that's a sign the products are confusing.

Tiny/2026-11. Medium/2026-6. Big/2026-10. XL/2026-01. It may not be sexy, but people know exactly what it is and what to use.

0xbadcafebee··on Anthropic S-1
The price is a factor of a great many things. Cost of inference, desire for user growth, market competition, investment recoupment, revenue numbers for S1, tier/rate balancing, etc.

They cannot follow the Uber model because of scale. You could keep getting tens/hundreds of millions from investors, back when there was lots of cash floating around. But you can't keep getting hundreds of billions of dollars. There are only so many dollars. The world is tapped out of private capital. That's why they want an IPO - so retirement and pension funds are forced to buy their shit stock, and feed them more money. But again there is only so many dollars.

Anyway it does not matter. Subscriptions are the most effective way to extract wealth from customers. This has been established so clearly that every business in America now has a subscription. Your fridge, TV, car, hell even car washes, now have subscriptions. Not because they didn't make money from you before, but because it's the ideal way to make even more money off you. There is no reason not to use subscriptions. No AI company in their right mind would end them.

The question of how much value you get from the subscription is different. They have already adjusted both price and rate limit a dozen times. They will keep adjusting it... but the subscriptions are here to stay.

0xbadcafebee··on Anthropic S-1
"Subsidies" don't stop because it's not "a subsidy". It's a subscription service.

Like Netflix, Comcast, T-Mobile, etc, etc. There are millions of subscription services in the world. They all "subsidize" higher-usage users with plans for lower-usage users using a fixed price plan and rate limit. The profit comes from lots of users who don't hit their cap. The higher priced plans are actually more profitable.

This is called a tiered usage-based subscription business model.

0xbadcafebee··on Anthropic S-1
Unfortunately it's now extremely likely that our governments will manipulate markets to keep frontier domestic AI afloat. They are financially and militarily dependent on domestic AI now.

Chinese models are being banned, will continue to be banned by USG. Even the Chinese govt is restricting external access to models now. It starts with banning Govt access to International AI, but will continue to consumer and business access.

0xbadcafebee··on AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework
I know a guy who's done systems work for 30 years. He's good at getting promoted; goes around "getting things done" and leaves a huge mess. Hasn't learned anything new, just knows enough to be dangerous. Wouldn't pass a test for a role his title indicates. But he'll get hired for it today, based on a resume.

No formal testing means no formal education which means a lack of important detail. You know how you learn the details on the job? By screwing up the job. You gonna let Eddie The Trainee Surgeon work on your brain after leaving a medical school with no grades?

0xbadcafebee··on Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
The US has always been a bit backwards. We're the least progressive, most conservative, most plutocratic democracy. The system was designed to stymie structural reform. We had a few periods of "social reform" but a lot more enforcement of status quo by a wealthy elite class. Ironically it's supported by the voters, who're easily manipulated by a lack of political choice (which is reinforced by the structure). In 2 years it'll end the way the Roman Republic ended.
0xbadcafebee··on AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework
So, the guy who does brain surgery on you... you want him to have taken some electives he was interested in, passed for having a pulse, then sent off to work in the operating room? Or, should he be required to have gotten at least 80% of questions right on a test of his surgical knowledge?
0xbadcafebee··on AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework
The machine can't do your work. It can automate some of it, but the work isn't done until a human has verified it, and may need to fix it, modify it, etc. That's why we still teach. And we must verify people learned, through tests, practice, etc.

Don't believe the crazy lies that AI can replace your job. AI can't replace anyone's job, because it lies, cheats, hallucinates, can't learn from its mistakes, and can't be held liable.

0xbadcafebee··on AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework
I don't see the point of universities at all anymore. They were originally places you went because you couldn't learn a thing anywhere else. Now you can learn anything, anywhere.

Example: If you want to learn to do something with your hands, it normally needs to be taught in person, so you can try to do it, fail, the teacher tells you what you did wrong, shows you how, you do it again and it works. But this can now almost entirely be done with AI. A YouTube video shows you how. You practice it on camera. An AI watches the video, tells you where you went wrong, and shows you specific clips to improve. You do it again until you get it right.

The piece of paper you get from a University doesn't need to come from "A University". Any organization that can give you a test in person can see whether you do the thing right or not and give you a certification if you do.

So really all we need now is an AI Khan Academy and independent testing/certification.

← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →