HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

robomc

434 karma · joined May 8, 2010

submissionscomments
robomc··on Doomscrolling ourselves to death
This is one of the things about the novels he describes too, and their impact on empathy. Like, you can explain to someone in 3-4 sentences that slavery is cruel but that's not the same as inhabiting a characters circumstances for 500 pages.

It's a natural instinct for engineers, to think you should always convey information in the most efficient way possible, but it's actually not how real understanding tends to occur in the real world. You need a lot of noisy carrier signal and time and context etc.

robomc··on I wanna live an NPC life
This sort of a anxious hyper-vigilance is exactly the sort of main character bs you should let go of though. Spend some time with your kids or whatever. You actually can't plan and prepare for a hypothetical war with russia.
robomc··on I wanna live an NPC life
It really isn't that though. If you're disparaging normal ass people with jobs and families and lives as "NPCs" you probably should try ignoring your thoughts and feelings a bit because they're probably part of a some low level grinding psychosis.
robomc··on I wanna live an NPC life
wtf are you talking about. Being a blacksmith isn't pure escapism.
robomc··on Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?
In this context it would presumably mean not casually deleting your customers' data.

When people say a company is unserious they almost always mean that they're not thinking about, and taking seriously, the work that their customers do. This seems like a classic example of that.

robomc··on Fable and the end of the free lunch
> It can result in a key insight that helps you strategize more effectively, a novel approach that saves a huge amount of time, a feature design that is lot more user-friendly

My brother, that's my job.

robomc··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
I assume they are just passing off AI prose as their own and don't want anyone to be able to tell. Which is surprising for someone who's been blogging for a thousand years. But I don't really see any other reason for this amount of heat and FUD.
robomc··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
This is moronic. This is like being mad that the slot machine you think is lucky is occupied.
robomc··on 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout
Do employers in the US look at your university marks?
robomc··on Chartreuse, a case study in how scarcity and authenticity can drive desirability
Yeah you can buy it in pretty much every liquor store on earth, it even comes in those little single-slurp mini bar bottles, in tiny bottle stores in broke ass towns at the edge of the world.
robomc··on The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)
My favourite aspect of DK, which isn't changed by this argument really, is that people who reference it very often believe it said that low skill people are MORE confident in their abilities than high skill people, when the authors never claimed that. Which is kind of like doing a DK yourself when trying to deploy the DK findings.
robomc··on 'Crush this lady': how eBay harassment campaign led to $56M payout
i don't even understand the benefit of cheating on a college course, unless you think you're going to fail
robomc··on Karpathy’s Pelican
Yeah that seems like an enormous problem with this example.
robomc··on Is The Economist Always Wrong?
yeah imagine thinking biden was too old and infirm
robomc··on I am worried about Bun
"I have a vague concern, so I'm now using a shittier toolchain. You shouldn't do it though." is a weird post format.
robomc··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
Yeah the really misleading part of the screenshots in this article is that it doesn't show the "resize cursor", which basically makes this a non issue.

Also, for anyone reading this who hates the general aesthetic, go into Accessibility and hit "reduce transparency". This has been a desirable setting for last few OSX versions.

robomc··on Shai-Hulud compromised a dev machine and raided GitHub org access: a post-mortem
> If the cloud service you’re using doesn’t support OIDC or any other ephemeral access keys, then you should store them encrypted. There’s numerous ways you can do this, from password managers to just using PGP/GPG directly. Just make sure you aren’t pasting them into your shell otherwise you’ll then have those keys in plain text in your .history file.

This doesn't really help though, for a supply chain attack, because you're still going to need to decrypt those keys for your code to read at some point, and the attacker has visibility on that, right?

Like the shell isn't the only thing the attacker has access to, they also have access to variables set in your code.

robomc··on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
He's using it correctly, in its secondary sense of "belonging or appropriate to an earlier period, especially so as to seem conspicuously old-fashioned or outdated."
robomc··on Valve is about to win the console generation
It's not a deal breaker for me, but it doesn't sound like a recipe for "winning the console generation".
robomc··on Valve is about to win the console generation
no but the headline is "valve is about to win the console generation"
robomc··on Valve is about to win the console generation
Yeah I mean... can I play Fortnite, BF6 or the upcoming GTA on steamOS?
robomc··on AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
This. And when a service goes down it's a lot easier to explain to your client/boss that "half the internet is down" than "our boutique solution is broken so it's just us actually".
robomc··on Ortega hypothesis
To me this kind of sounds like the other side of the same thing. Lunchpail scientists accumulate data within an area of research made interesting by a landmark work by a big name. Future big names make breakthroughs by drawing together a lot of the lunchpail work. etc etc
robomc··on Amazon fined $2.5B for using deceptive methods to sign up consumers for Prime
I found out recently that I've been paying for Prime Video since 2020. I think I did legitimately sign up for it. That's not my complaint.

But it's fairly scummy how it doesn't seem to send you any email, the payments have a very vague generic coding like "AMZ2318971239", and the actual subscription management is super buried. I only noticed it, after years of using Amazon a fair bit, when I went deep into my account panes looking for something else.

robomc··on That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus
You're right, it could be the sensible most likely thing AND the far-fetched thing.
robomc··on How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos
> because researchers from Kudelski Security most likely tried different static analysis tools and they didn't work the way Rubocop did.

Yes but that's kind of the point - they say this issue that takes you directly from code execution to owning these high value credentials was only present on rubocop runnners but isn't it a bit coincidental that the package with (perhaps, since they chose it) the easiest route to code injection also happens to be the one where they "oops forgot" to improve the credentials management?

It just seems very convenient.

robomc··on How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos
From the CEO's response:

> On January 24, 2025, security researchers from Kudelski Security disclosed a vulnerability to us through our Vulnerability Disclosure Program (VDP). The researchers identified that Rubocop, one of our tools, was running outside our secure sandbox environment—a configuration that deviated from our standard security protocols.

Honestly, that last part sounds like a lie. Why would one task run in a drastically different architectural situation, and it happen to be the one exploited?

robomc··on Being Full of Value‑Added Shit
The tennis example is weird though. I don't think people who are bad at tennis go around claiming they're great at tennis, do they?
robomc··on Being full of value‑added shit
So we're just posting third party blind item gossip on here huh.
robomc··on Reviving the joy and honor of working with your hands (2015)
> It’s all part of the sharp decline in vocational education — shop class — in this nation that began in the 1980s as blue collars became unfashionable and the emphasis shifted to a college education.

Yeah that's what happened. They became "unfashionable", rather than hopelessly precarious due to structural economic changes.

Page 1 of 6Next →