Hacker News Reader

prymitiveon New Vulnerability in GitHub Copilot, Cursor: Hackers Can Weaponize Code Agents

Once the world is all run on AI generated code how much memory and cpu cycles will be lost to unnecessary code? Is the next wave of HN top stories “How we ditched AI code and reduced our AWS bill by 10000%”?

prymitiveon WhiteSur: macOS-like theme for GTK desktops

I think that the default Gnome theme is fantastic, unique and very elegant. It has nothing to be ashamed of even when compared to macOS look and feel.

prymitiveon GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search

There is a huge wall of placeholder being replaced with issues when the issues tab loads, which is pretty annoying when you got used to the old UI. But it’s nice to see M$ can still deliver features without Autocomplete Integration forced in it.

prymitiveon Meta is killing off its AI-powered Instagram and Facebook profiles

Isn’t it as simple as management wanting to be first one across the release line, with the wishful thinking of “we’ll fix everything later”?

prymitiveon Show HN: Open-source private home security camera system (end-to-end encryption)

I have bought 3 Eufy cameras that were well reviewed and heavily advertised “no subscription fees, everything is local” as the main features. The hardware itself is fine but the software is rubbish, pure and total waste of every byte used to run it. Not only does it not work half of the time when I try to view the footage or connect to the live feed, but it also often misses motion that it should not - I would often walk in from of my house during perfect weather day and it would just not record any motion. On top of that the mobile app’s primary purpose is to show you ads of Eufy cameras, and they are everywhere in the UI, constant; every other feature is secondary extra that developers spend minimal time in between adding ads. Between unreliability and ads it’s all just so incredibly annoying to use. When you complain about the ads they will turn it down a notch, but not fully, the official response is that “they needs ads to pay for the app”, which is incredibly dishonest - it’s just Eufy product ads - you buy a camera, install the app that is required to use it, and you’re bombarded with ads trying to upsell you more of what you just bought because you using their product costs them. So instead of a simple subscription fee you have adware product with dishonest and misleading messaging, and an app that takes half a gig of space so it can show you ads.

I also remember reporting a bug that there was a constant “new” badge next to their referral button in-app, despite me clicking on it and reading it (which I though it would make the “new” badge go away) - support kindly explained to me that they have new referral program every week, which is bonkers because the only thing that changes is the date.

I did look into alternatives but didn’t see anything I could easily trust more after Eufy, so I’m looking forward to the future where simple open source software will cover this part of market, because private companies so far seem to just give you crap for as my $$$ as they can extract.

prymitiveon Logitech: 'Forever mouse' was just a (bad) idea

> a peek into provocative internal thinking on future possibilities

Is that a corporate slang for “how can these suckers pay us more without us giving them anything new?”

prymitiveon Dev rejects CVE severity, makes his GitHub repo read-only

Most of this behaviour comes from the desire by many companies to by compliant with a lot of security regulations. Which in many cases means silly rule like “you must run and action a security scanning system”. Because a lot of these scanners are just dumb wrappers running any piece of software that pretends to be a security scanner, and because the more rules does one have the more “valuable” it is, you end up with a race to scan the most. And that sadly translates into rules and reports like https://hackerone.com/reports/191220 - OPTIONS method can be used to check what methods does a web server accepts, therefore an attacker might use it to learn which methods to use for the attack. Except they can just try it with no effort. It’s this sort of “if you can see a lock then attacker will use that knowledge to know where the lock is” logic that must be followed by “let’s remove all locks so they cannot be attacked” response.

prymitiveon The problem with OpenTelemetry

I only learned about OT after Prometheus announced some deeper integration with it. Reading OT docs about metrics feels like every little problem has a dedicated solution in the OT world, even if a more generalised one already covers it. Which is quite striking coming from the Prometheus world.

prymitiveon iTerm2 v3.5.1 moves AI features into external plugin

It might be one of the first examples of a piece of code getting “cancelled”.

prymitiveon Volkswagen Group brings electric car for EUR 20k

It’s not really a car by law. At least in the uk it’s classed as a quadricycle.

prymitiveon Air Canada Must Pay Passenger Damages over Chatbot's Bereavement Discount Lies

The most annoying thing about chatbots on websites is that they are the first thing you see. You open a page and before you can even try to navigate anywhere you get a pop up asking “You look lost. What seems to be the trouble?!”

prymitiveon Google has another secret browser

Reminds me of this classic gem: https://imgur.com/BULPmCI?r

prymitiveon Ask HN: Any alternatives to Duolingo without gamification?

I feel your pain, it was getting worse and worse over the years and now it’s just trying to game as much “engagement” as possible. Feels like screen time is the only metric they have.

I switched from Duolingo to Busuu for my Japanese learning and it’s so much better. They did add leagues to it too but you can just ignore it.

prymitiveon Anker/Eufy exploiting privacy conscious consumers

And I’m saying I’m not surprised because of their other practices.

prymitiveon Anker/Eufy exploiting privacy conscious consumers

Eufy app, which you need to be able to use your camera, is just a platform to show you ads and try to sell you more eufy products. If you complain to the support they will turn it off, mostly, so they’re perfectly aware how annoying it is for customers. Eufy has zero respect for paying customers.

prymitiveon Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to introduce persistent user tracking

If a company could charge you more for something then they are already doing it. Companies don’t ask themselves “what’s a fair price for x”, instead they wonder “how can we get more money out of our existing customers”.

prymitiveon I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

I made the mistake of buying Eufy camera and the app is basically an sales channel spamming you with ads on every occasion. If you contact support and complain about it they will disable popus for you but the app is still full of spam and animated icons inviting you to buy something. They clearly have zero respect for customers.

prymitiveon Syntax is the last thing you should design

Quick, name a language where I can do something simple like mention "Whenever this function is called, make sure there is enough free memory (at least ---- MB) before actually calling it; if there isn't, first swap out any objects from memory to disk, starting with the ones that had been used the longest time ago, and after the function has finished running, swap those back into memory."

Why would you need a language for that? Isn't memory management what a kernel will do for you, including this specific scenario (the swap back to memory part will be done if pages are needed in memory)?

prymitiveon [dead]

I feel that when people read this kind of stories they immediately connect it to Trump, but the sad truth is that this is not something new and have been happening under previous administration too. The big difference is that previous administration didn't encourage it publicly, did not issue any executive orders for it, but that didn't stop border control from acting this way. The first thing you learn about US visa is that it doesn't guarantee US admission. Don't take it as an attempt to downplay the issue, I just think that it's important to put it in the historical context as this behaviour isn't really new.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-... http://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/us-deporting-valid-visa-... http://redbus2us.com/news-us-cbp-deports-14-students-many-st... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/north-america...

prymitiveon French historian Henry Rousso held for 10 hours and threatened with deportation

I wonder if those stories that started appearing in the media since the Trump ban order are really showing a true change in US border control actions, or are they just a hot topic so both travelers and media are more eager to report on that. It is likely that those kind of detentions were happening for years, but they didn't got much news coverage. After all if you don't like Trumps policies you will happily read about related stories as it confirms what you already believe in.

Googling for some data yields some results, but those seem to be big immigration numbers, rather than incidental short detentions for random travelers, so it's hard for me to draw any conclusion. Examples: http://cmsny.org/immigration-detention-behind-the-record-num... https://www.ice.gov/removal-statistics/2016

I think it's best to not get carried away just because a few people got detained. It seems a bit too little to call it policy shift for border control officers, at least as long it stays just incidental issue. FUD is always quick to spread and hard to fight against.

prymitiveon More UK technology visas granted after fears of worker shortage

[...] government organisation that processes applications for the special visa, has been granted the right to endorse 250 immigration visas this year, 50 more than it had originally been allocated

250 visas will "secure access to overseas talent"? Is the tech market in UK so tiny? In contrast US of A issued 85k H1B according to http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/12/technology/h1b-cap-visa-fy-2...

EDIT: I forgot that UK is still part of EU, so there's a massive amount of people from outside the UK that won't need any visa to work there.

prymitiveon Uber launches 'urgent investigation' into sexual harassment claims

It's yet another source claiming that Uber is a dysfunctional organization. At this point it's hard for me to expect they're going to rise to the challenge here. The "urgent investigation" is likely to be focused on "can we force employees to sign NDAs when they leave?", everything else is likely to be the good old game of "let's pretend we're doing something while people forget about this".

prymitiveon Is Cloudflare a honey pot?

I think that "someone is going to notice" is a fair assumption when you look at the rate of log messages on https://blog.cloudflare.com/more-data-more-data/

prymitiveon Why we should all have a basic income

At the heart of the communist was the belief that the entire country with all its people can be managed and orchestrated. This translates to a very static universe, where you are born, given an assignment and are suppose to stay in the same place until you die or the state changes their mind. Everything was a number in a spreadsheet, how many doctors given are will have, how much bread you need to bake and how much toilet paper shoul be produced. The last one turned out to be the symbol of communism failure, they did some math and decided X amount of toilet paper should be produced, but sadly people wanted more. Huge shortfall of toilet paper began and it started being a valued asset. Such over-planned world doesn't really work well with human ambitions, it doesn't really matter if you job is meaningful or not, having very little choice will likely cause stress and make you unhappy. To make things worse promotion was only possible if you were a party member and was seen as valuable and loyal. The whole thing was more than just automatically giving people jobs, it's been about total control, job creation was one of the tools. I don't think it's easy to directly compare it with UBI if someone wants to make such analogy. UBI doesn't restrict you the same way, it might even be seen as opposite - liberating people from being forced into low paid jobs where you generate very little value and it's hard to progress your skills and income.

prymitiveon The jobs that really smart people avoid

Who are those mythical "smart people"? I keep hearing about their habits all the time. Are they related to "successful people" in any way? Discovery doesn't have any documentaries on them yet.

prymitiveon RustgreSQL

My motivation is primarily I don't want to learn all the over-complicated details of C

I don't understand this statement. Is he saying he want to contribute to postgres, but he doesn't know C well enough, so he kindly asks the team to consider the idea of a rewrite in Rust to make it easy for him?

prymitiveon How we made our React-Rails app 5x faster

Is it just me or is every story titled "10 tips on making X faster" or "how we migrated from X to Y and reduced number of servers from 10k to just 2" or "how we speed up Z by 400000%" is really just a story of "how we made our project better by stopping, checking what we really need to do, researching how to do it and then investing time to actually do it right"? There is hardly ever any new ground breaking wisdom, new revolutionary algorithm or amazing new tool, it's all about knowing what you're doing, which usually takes a few tries.

prymitiveon Dirty cow – privilege escalation vuln. in the Linux Kernel

Everything is a brand now. Will we see agencies focused on handling CVEs social media accounts?

prymitiveon Minnesota woman broadcasts police stop and shooting on Facebook Live

After reading a few comments on how to behave when police stops you and how to tell them you're carrying gun I can't shake the feeling that this country is trapped in some sort of a deadly staring contest, if you blink you can die. You have armed people trying to police a nation where everyone can have a gun, and many do. With this sort of tension on a daily basis things will go wrong, someone will make a mistake, which seems to be what is happening every week. And then people see the news, get scared and buy more guns, because they feel in danger, and later you read more comments on how they should calmly explain that they had a gun when police stopped them.

prymitiveon Ask HN: What should I do with my old laptop?

How about recycling it? We won't need another wind turbine if people stop looking for excuses to keep old and less power efficient devices up & running.