HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

numbsafari

5,643 karma · joined March 14, 2011

https://www.bainbridgehealth.com

The Gigazone™, MN | Philadelphia, PA

Emailers, you can call me "swilson" at my work domain.

submissionscomments
numbsafari··on Security Disclosure
Environment variables are a terrible place to store secrets.

I'm just going to say it, since having said it non-stop for over 20 years, nobody seems to listen and we keep circling this drain.

The 12 Factor manifesto was 100% wrong on this point.

Use environment variables to point to where secrets are located, not to store their values.

numbsafari··on "I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math
Examples?
numbsafari··on AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
And also injure and kill our sailors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

In that one incident, they killed and injured more than double the number killed and injured by Al Qaeda in the attack on the USS Cole.

numbsafari··on Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet
Capitalism's main principle is not competition, it is merely the private ownership of the "means of production".
numbsafari··on How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet
Try having a discussion with anyone here in the US about not using Amazon. The free market is a myth.
numbsafari··on Flowers for Algernon
Reflecting on the ways that LLMs seem to empower individuals and teams to access seemingly limitless intelligence, but the team seems to lose its skills and capabilities for judgement and planning rather quickly after adoption.
numbsafari··on Germany transforms former coal mines into Europe's largest lake landscape
Hah! Not every day my neighborhood gets a shout out on HN. I’ve swam in that pit in the video. Neck deep you can see your toes. Found a couple pipe bombs… definitely gets a lot of attention from bored people.
numbsafari··on Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
No, it’s that if there’s nothing to hide, then they shouldn’t jump through so many hoops to avoid basic industrial reporting requirements.

It’s not any one thing, it is the litany of things they do in order to avoid any transparency or accountability. It is undemocratic and contradictory to the idea of good governance of public resources.

If anything, a little sunshine here would probably be the best medicine. Trying to be opaque is what allows conspiracy theories to exist in the first place.

numbsafari··on Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
Also the unforced error around NDAs and attempts at bypassing environmental and other reviews. People don’t like the idea of their local elected officials bypassing the rules in the dark.

I understand these companies want to move fast, but this seems to be one of those cases where going slow gets you there faster.

numbsafari··on OpenAI Codex agents go rogue and consumes USD 78,000 without authorization
Call the police. That’s wire fraud and theft.
numbsafari··on OpenAI Codex agents go rogue and consumes USD 78,000 without authorization
Does openAI not support spending caps on your billing account?
numbsafari··on I said no and Apple said yes
For the vast majority of people, without much technical capability, “moderately messed up” is functionally equivalent to “bricked” as a purely technical slang term.
numbsafari··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
… from the fine print:

“Results are compared to previous-generation Mac mini systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD.”

numbsafari··on One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed
...and Han Dynasty only exists in Philadelphia.
numbsafari··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
Maybe it wouldn't matter either way if people stopped putting untrusted executable code into basic build processes.

You could get rid of a huge portion of the go standard library and have a massive ecosystem of leftpads, but the fact that `go build` can easily be run in off-line mode and doesn't execute any code other than the go toolchain itself, means you have a fundamentally more trustworthy ecosystem overall.

Rust, on the other hand, might keep you from a subset of buffer overruns, but it will gladly run obfuscated, untrusted code in your name when you wouldn't otherwise expect it to.

As an industry, we need to somehow stop making this mistake.

numbsafari··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
A person bumps into at the train station. They just need $5 to get home. Could you just spare them $5? They had the money, but they lost their wallet and now they just need to get home.

Charity scams are nothing new.

numbsafari··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
Perhaps it elicited enough sympathy to get donations. Did it ever provide proof of actually running up an AWS bill?
numbsafari··on AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere
I too have see the fnords
numbsafari··on WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding
Exactly. Considering you could buy an iPhone and a MacBook Neo for roughly the same cost … will be very interesting to see this device in action. Can iOS replace MacOS for a user that doesn’t need a local Xcode? Can I spend $2k for the device I use in my pocket and on my desk… and put the rest of my money into cloud/server infrastructure if I have that need?
numbsafari··on macOS Container Machines
Wouldn’t it be nice if services like Codespaces or Coder or Gitlab would allow you to target running on their hosted/integrated platform, or let you launch that same container completely locally? Sometimes I wanna take my “remote” dev environment off-line but still benefit from the integrated UX.
numbsafari··on Dopamine Fracking
.. and here I am wanting better minivan options that can pull a travel trailer.
numbsafari··on Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)
This is how I grew up. Using fidonet via my local RPGA group.
numbsafari··on The real cost of owning a home
How many times are they gonna double count the insurance a property taxes?
numbsafari··on Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart
“Just pixels on a screen”

What is wrong with you?

numbsafari··on Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart
These are teenage girls, not adult men. This isn’t graffiti, but highly realistic sexual depictions.

There’s a massive difference.

numbsafari··on Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets
Do explain the Somalia connection you perceive. Please, go on…
numbsafari··on My graduation cap runs Rust
Throwing it away after single use is madness.
numbsafari··on Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
It’s actually both.
numbsafari··on Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
Are you aware of non-GPL FOSS licenses?
numbsafari··on Zed 1.0
Umm… zed supports remote dev over ssh… what’s your concern?
Page 1 of 34Next →