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  • Hacker News 20

  • Hacker News: Best Comments 8

    • New comment by Fiveplus in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"
      We have officially reached the logical conclusion of the feature-bloat-to-vulnerability pipeline. For nearly thirty years, notepad.exe was the gold standard for a "dumb" utility which was a simple, win32-backed buffer for strings that did exactly one thing...display text. An 8.8 CVSS on a utility meant for viewing data is a fundamental failure of the principle of least privilege. At some point, they need to stop asking "can we add this feature?" and start asking "does this text editor need a network-aware rendering stack?"
    • New comment by eykanal in "Waymo exec reveals company uses remote workers in the Philippines"
      Er, this was reported by waymo themselves nearly two years ago: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
    • New comment by JKCalhoun in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"
      I'm 61 (retired when I was 57). I too began with BASIC (but closer to 1980). Although I wrote and published games for the Macintosh for a number of years as I finished up college, my professional career (in the traditional sense) began when I was hired by Apple in 1995 and relocated to the Bay Area. Yeah, what started out as a great just got worse and worse as time went on. I suspect though that to a large degree this reflects both the growing complexity of the OS over that time as well as the importance of software in general as it became more critical to people's lives. Already, even in 1984 when it was first introduced, the Mac had a rich graphics library you would not want to have to implement yourself. (Although famously of course a few apps like Photoshop nonetheless did just that—leaning on the Mac simply for a final call to CopyBits() to display pixels from Adobe's buffer to the screen.) You kind of have to accept abstraction when networking, multiple cores, multiple processes become integral to the machine. I guess I always understood that and did not feel too put out by it. If anything a good framework was somewhat of a relief—someone else's problem, ha ha. (And truly a beautiful API is just that: a beautiful thing. I enjoy working well constructed frameworks.) But the latter issue, the increasing dominance of software on our lives is what I think contributed more to poisoning the well. Letting the inmates run the asylum more or less describes the way engineering worked when I began at Apple in 1995. We loved it that way. (Say what you want about that kind of bottom-up culture of that era, but our "users" were generally nerds just like us—we knew, or thought we knew anyway, better than marketing what the customer wanted and we pursued it.) Agile development, unit tests, code reviews… all these weird things began to creep in and get in the way of coding. Worse, they felt like busywork meant simply to give management a sense of control… or some metric for progress. "What is our code coverage for unit test?" a manager might ask. "90%," comes the reply from engineering. "I want to see 95% coverage by next month," comes the marching orders. Whatever. I confess I am happy to have now left that arena behind. I still code in my retirement but it's back to those cowboy-programmer days around this house. Yee haw!
    • New comment by nine_k in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"
      > * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly* Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover". A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won. A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.
    • New comment by atomic128 in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"
      Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that. This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species. Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect) into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per day by December 2026. Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.
    • New comment by stego-tech in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"
      This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordingly. It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) and pivoted to the social arguments instead (“here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”). Folks vibe with the latter, less with the former. Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.
    • New comment by legitster in "Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist Credit Card Number"
      So I don't think I actually have a problem with businesses handing over their customer data if there is a valid warrant or subpoena. That's the system working as intended. The main crux of the problem here is that the DHS has been granted a wide berth by congress to issue administrative subpoenas - i.e. not reviewed by a real judge and not directed at criminals. In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly. But the reality now is that ICE is doing wide dragnets to make arrests without any judicial oversight and often hostile to habeas corpus. (Also, my understanding is that when banking is involved, it may also fall under the Banking Secrecy Act and Know Your Customer Rules - a whole other privacy nightmare.) I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem, but the real problem we need congress to act on is abolishing these "shadow" justice systems that agencies have been able to set up.
    • New comment by digiown in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"
      This is really a human right issue. No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device, especially not for interacting with the government. It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does. So much for sovereignty and consumer protection. No monopoly Google can build is as good as the government forcing you to accept their terms.

Weather

  • Wetterochs Feed 1

    • Wetter - Tauwetter und lokales Hochwasser
      Hallo! Am Mittwoch und Donnerstag regnet es zeitweise bei Temperaturen um 10 Grad. Der Südwestwind ist in Böen stark. Bis zum Freitagmorgen sollen Regenmengen zwischen 22 mm in Bad Windsheim und 40 mm in Plech zusammenkommen. Außerdem liegen aktuell in der Fränkischen und in der Hersbrucker Schweiz noch teilweise mehr als 30 kg Schnee pro Quadratmeter. Daher gibt es auch eine Tauwetter-Warnung des Deutschen Wetterdienstes für diese Gebiete. Regen und Schmelzwasser können so also z.B. in Plech zusammen auf 70 Liter Wasser pro Quadratmeter kommen. Aufgrund der eher niederschlagsarmen Vorgeschichte dürfte das aber für ein größeres Hochwasser nicht reichen, weil viel Wasser in den Karstböden versickert. Wo sich das oberflächlich abfließende Wasser lokal sammelt, kann es aber schon auch kleinere Überschwemmungen geben. Im Steigerwald sind die Mengen zwar geringer, aber dafür versickert dort das Wasser im Boden nicht so schnell, es läuft im Verhältnis mehr oberflächlich ab, so dass auch dort mit kleineren Überschwemmungen gerechnet werden muss. Tagsüber scheint am Freitag die Sonne und es gibt nur noch vereinzelt Schauer. Maximal 10 Grad. Der Südwestwind ist in Böen weiterhin stark. Kaltlufteinbruch am Samstag, die Temperaturen sinken von +5 auf -2 Grad. Zeitweilige Regenfälle gehen in Schnee über. Ob das zum Aufbau einer Schneedecke reichen wird, ist unsicher. Die Niederschlagsprognosen springen da hin und her. Der in Böen frische Wind weht aus Nordwest. Am Sonntag wechselnd bewölkt, niederschlagsfrei und maximal nur 0 Grad. In den Nächten zum Sonntag und zum Montag Frost bis unter -6 Grad. Am Montag kommen neu atlantische Tiefausläufer zu uns und bringen erst Schnee und dann Regen mit einem Temperaturanstieg auf +4 Grad. Die aktuellen Prognosen deuten auf starke Behinderungen durch Schnee und Eis am Montagmorgen im Berufsverkehr hin. Im weiteren Verlauf der nächsten Woche nasskalt mit Regen- und Schneefällen bei Temperaturen zwischen 0 und 5 Grad. Wetterochs Bitte unterstützen Sie die Wetterochs-Wettermail durch eine Spende!

Development

  • CSS-Tricks 1

    • Approximating contrast-color() With Other CSS Features
      The new contrast-color() function is not fully supported yet. But can we still implement it in a cross-browser friendly way using other new CSS features? Approximating contrast-color() With Other CSS Features originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

AI