Hacker News Reader

px43on GLP-1s are breaking life insurance

The important part is the short term gains, and the people making them jumping away on a golden parachute before the long term consequences kick in.

px43on Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

For some people "free" means "autonomy", and copyleft licences do a lot to restrict autonomy.

px43on Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

There's a lack of clarity, but it seems likely to me that a majority of this traffic is actually people asking questions to the AI, and the AI going out and researching for answers. When the AI tools are being used like a web browser to do research, should they still be adhering to robots.txt, or is that only intended for search indexing?

px43on Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)

He was 14 when he wrote that.

px43on AI is not our future

[flagged]

px43on Gemma 3n preview: Mobile-first AI

What phone are you using?

px43on Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

It kind of does matter if it's real, because in my experience this is something OpenAI has thought about a lot, and added significant protections to address exactly this class of issue.

Throwing out strawman hypotheticals is just going to confuse the public debate over what protections need to be prioritized.

px43on Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy

What's a "trim" in this context?

px43on Show HN: We made an MCP Server so that Cursor can build anything from API Docs

ChatGPT 4.5:

Ooh, a binary puzzle—fun! Let’s decode it:

01111001 01100101 01110011

In binary, each byte (set of 8 digits) represents an ASCII character. Let's break it down:

01111001 = y

01100101 = e

01110011 = s

So, it spells out "yes"!

Got any more mysteries to solve?

px43on Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

Language evolves. As much as we are training computers to understand us, they are training us to understand them.

The level of precision required for highly complex tasks was never necessary before. My four year old has a pretty solid understanding of how the different AI tools she has access to will behave differently based on how she phrases what she says, and I've noticed she is also increasingly precise when making requests of other people.

px43on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon

It was entrapment because federal agents posing as crime bosses were threatening Ross that if he didn't hire the hitman there would be serious consequences. He was manipulated and forced into the position he was in.

px43on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon

I'm not convinced that you looked at the article you linked.

> That’s because he was the Silk Road employee implicated in an elaborate, and fake, murder-for-hire scheme, created in part by a corrupt Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent.

px43on Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com

> Cursor does not have a bug bounty

Shouldn't this alone be considered criminal negligence at this point? Cursor isn't some random open source project. It's a company that has funding, and subscriptions. Hell, I pay Cursor for a monthly subscription. Pretty incredible that they have no bounty program.

px43on Chuck E. Cheese's animatronics band bows out

I went again recently (less than a year ago) for the first time since the 90s and the animatronics stage was still fully functional. Apparently very few locations are left with working stages, and I was impressed that my local stage had continued operating. They also serve alcohol now or something.

It felt a bit more open, one giant room, but I might just be remembering more walls because I'm taller now than I was when I was 10. Definitely no ball pit though.

px43on Show HN: Cut the crap – remove AI bullshit from websites

Isn't this an advancement in communication though? People can put out a message in whatever language or style they prefer, the machine translators translate it into an overly verbose AI vomit, and readers condense it back down into the exact kind of personalized language they're wanting to consume.

px43on A Brazilian CA trusted only by Microsoft has issued a certificate for google.com

What is CT here? Central Time? Connecticut? Maybe Certificate Transparency? I guess that last one might make the most sense. Abbreviations are hard.

px43on Bitcoin creator is Peter Todd, HBO film says

Oh hey Greg :-D Did you watch the movie yet? Was fun.

I'm definitely still team Dave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman

Last time I talked to Peter was in 2019 and he was making fun of me for spending Bitcoins continuously since 2011, and said Bitcoins are supposed to be hoarded like gold or something, not used as money. Definitely not the attitude of someone who supposedly burned the million Satoshi coins (which was a claim from the movie, I guess some leaked IRC transcript or something). I wouldn't be surprised if the leaked transcript came from Peter himself. He seems to get off on weird deception plays like that.

px43on Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years

Maybe that's something. Maybe goodwill would be more effective when laundered through existing family connections. Surely someone in the midst of the famine has family in the US. Maybe support groups should be working directly with family members in wealthier countries, and then resources hand delivered to family members living in impoverished areas who can then distribute the resources through their local networks. Rather than just drop shipping a bunch of boxes full of food or whatever.

Let the heroes be local heroes, not just some abstract alien organization that no one has any social connection to.

px43on Nationalpublicdata.com hack exposes a nation's data

    $ wc all-ssns-sorted-uniq.txt
    272535129  272535131 2997533927 all-ssns-sorted-uniq.txt

272,535,129 unique SSNs in the leak, so like 82% of the US population. Somehow I'm not in it, but lots of people that I know are.

Also, super important, but address history is in the leak, so all those sites that ask you about your address history to authenticate you need to knock it TF off right now.

px43on All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)

At some point I saw a design for a machine you could park at the Lagrange point between Mars and the Sun that would collect solar power and spit out a magnetic field strong enough to deflect enough of the solar winds that we wouldn't need to worry about that.

px43on Physicists may now have a way to make element 120

It's called the "Island of Stability" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

px43on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts

Trump also very publicly ordered the extra-judicial execution of US citizen Michael Reinoehl, after which he murdered by US Marshals in Lacey, Washington. He brags about this all the time, even in the first presidential debate in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an...

px43on RegreSSHion: RCE in OpenSSH's server, on glibc-based Linux systems

This bug seems to be exploitable due to a memory corruption triggered by the race condition, it's the memory corruption that rust would protect from.

px43on Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM

No, TTF is fully turning complete. Maybe I should have specified that in the original post. WAV is just "vibrate speaker this way" over and over again.

px43on Should people who quit get unemployment benefits, too?

Including taking classes in your desired field IMO, not just being actively engaged in two hiring processes at least once a week (which is what my state mandates for UEI).

px43on Mitochondrial signal transduction (2022)

My understanding is that only happens to a point, then new fat cells are generated, which will then just deflate/inflate when weight is lost and regained again. I think it's one of the reasons that losing fat is so much harder than gaining fat.

px43on Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM

If you think that's bad, until very recently, Windows used to parse ttf directly in the kernel, meaning that a target could look at a webpage, or read an email, and be executing arbitrary code in ring0.

Last I checked there were about 4-10 TTF bugs discovered and actively exploited per year. I think I heard those stats in 2018 or so. This has been a well known and very commonly exploited attack vector for at least 20 years.

px43on Cyber Scarecrow

Obviously this should be an open source tool that people can build for themselves. If you want to sell premium services or upgrades for it later, you need to have an open/free tier as well.

Also are you aware of the (very awesome) EDR evasion toolkit called scarecrow? Naming stuff is hard, I get that, but this collision is a bit much IMO.

https://github.com/Tylous/ScareCrow

px43on Cyber Scarecrow

Many torrent sites have stronger reputation vetting than Microsoft code signing certs.

px43on Feynman’s Razor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor

> In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions.

I'd say maybe the rule here allows one to eliminate the useless parts of an explanation, thus simplifying the process of coming up with explanations for complicated things.