It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups, after all they made this choice. But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.
> A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there is no evidence its software was at fault.
If you work for Palantir, you are writing software that kills people. Software that, in this case, killed 123 children. What salary is worth that?
I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth [0]. I think about it nearly every day.
If you found this interesting, you may also be interested to hear about some related projects with similar goals/scopes: Miri[0], Kani[1], and Creusot[2]. There looks to be some significant overlap between Verus, Kani, and Creusot but I've not used any of them so I'll refrain from trying to differentiate them.
A bit unfortunate that so many of the interesting bits were left to ai. I would've enjoyed some commentary on why the custom TLS implementation was necessary. Oh well.
Update: found this explanation in a comment at the top of the (surprisingly short) Go file in the linked repo:
The target client is Netscape Communicator 4.51 (both the 40-bit export build and the 128-bit US build) with its clock set to the year 2000.
Go's crypto/tls cannot help: it dropped SSLv3 in Go 1.14, never accepted the SSLv2-compatible ClientHello that Netscape 4 sends, and never had RC4-MD5 or the 40-bit export suites. So this file carries its own tiny SSLv3 server-side implementation on top of stdlib primitives (RSA PKCS#1 v1.5, RC4, DES, 3DES, MD5, SHA-1). The server key is 512-bit RSA so that export clients can encrypt the premaster secret to it directly, without a ServerKeyExchange.
When you're one of the people who finds TUIs inaccessible, "accessibility" isn't just a downside to be considered, it's table stakes. I think they're fine for one off toys for individuals and small groups, but if you're selling a product to the public, it ought to be accessible first and foremost.
When you purchase a new laptop, you can choose a different manufacturer who may have a more durable product. When you have a framework, you're forced to buy the same component from the same company that made it poorly in the first place, if it's even in stock.
Like many others, I gave up on self hosting email when I realized Gmail and Outlook would always mark me as spam, if I even got delivered. DMARC and DKIM did nothing, I think the datacenter IP was just blacklisted. Ostensibly there are ways to get it unblacklisted but man what a pain the ass for the whole process.
Maybe I'm an outlier, but personally if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended. Using AI shows that you didn't care enough to even think about it on your own. When I see a business use obviously AI generated imagery, I think "I'll stay away from them, they clearly don't care enough to do things the right way." It's a sign of disrespect and a lack of care. I know my partner thinks similarly, as do most of our friends. I don't think creativity is going anywhere long term, though perhaps there will be an awkward adjustment period while older people catch up to the new social norms.
I think broadly I'm in agreement that the censorship via blacklisting threats was unwarranted. That said, I also think we should keep in mind that this isn't some public forum made for adults to have discussions, it's a public block game server. I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children. Personally I think there was potential for some kind of middle ground, but I'm also not mourning the loss of the obsidian nazi builds too hard. The paradox of tolerance and all that. The vast majority of the anarchy spirit is still there, it's just slightly less edgy. It's hard to discuss in good faith because the advocates for lack of censorship here are largely people who want to spam the N word in chat all day or their unwitting allies. Ultimately, whatever the outcome (and I think the current outcome is at least /ok/), I've made peace with the possibility of losing minecraft as a medium for totally free speech. It's just a block game.
I agree that it's worth reading the original source and encourage all to do so. My takeaway however was that the majority had a much stronger body of evidence than the dissenters.
Many of us work on Java monoliths that started in the 2000s when it was in vogue and we still have to keep them chugging along on Java 8. Personally I'm familiar with all the new features that have come out in the last few years, but for my actual work, java is literally stuck in the past.
For those unfamiliar, this implies they would have been able to override a presidential veto, so the administration backtracking is just saving the president the embarassment of a defiant congress/disunified party.
I'm not sure most systems programmers would agree that a language with GC is suitable for their work.
"No syntactic sugar" and "no macros" sounds like a recipe for boilerplate that will be offputting for many.
Please consider adding some code samples to the front page of documentation, as syntax can be important to people.
I disagree with some other details, but I do think that a low level GC language that doesn't have some of Go's particular warts (particularly nil and error checking) is worth pursuing.
Writing the initial compiler in Typescript is an interesting choice but I suppose that won't matter after it's bootstrapped.
Ultimately it's hard for me to take the project seriously at such an early stage but I don't think it's fundamentally flawed. Good luck
My understanding is that 50% of people in the state of Utah are mormon. I'm not saying there wasn't corruption, but it could very well be pure chance with those odds.
Even running a port scanner is enough to face disciplinary action at many US colleges. Taking down the network for the entire school for 15 minutes surely deserved more consequences than were doled out here. I'd encourage the author to focus their efforts and talents on something more constructive.
Maybe my net worth is too low but I just don't see a value proposition. I don't want daily emails from LLMs and if I need updates on my investments any more often than quarterly (at most), I should probably seek safer investments. I am a bit interested in budgeting tools, but I want them to be completely deterministic. For me at least, financial planning is pretty uneventful and time spent optimizing expenses more than I already have would be better spent seeking a higher paying job.
Another quick thought - so long as we live in a world where children in need of adoption exist, I hope we can make adopting more normal too. If you're in a position to become a parent, why on Earth would adoption not be the default? It seems much better for everyone involved. The fixation on breeding and having children whose genetics perfectly match your own is strange and mildly alarming to me.
There's many reasons why this piece wasn't made for me, so I don't want to begrudge anyone, but I wonder how much we can do to alieve this as a society by normalizing childlessness. I never wanted to have kids, but if I did, I doubt I would've been willing to endure what the author did for it. You can (and honestly I think most people should) live a long and fulfilling life without having kids. Myself and so many of my peers were raised in households that really were not good places for children. I'm of course grateful to exist and indebted to my mother for her countless sacrifices, but it pains me to think about how much happier she might have been if she didn't feel compelled to become a mother. I hope someday having children becomes the exception rather than the norm, because it doesn't feel like something that should be taken lightly. I hope that finding out you're infertile can be met with "Oh, okay. I guess I'll do something else then," the same way that folks with imperfect vision can't be pilots or astronauts and those with tremors can't be surgeons. I'm glad IVF is available for people who want to pursue it, I just want to live in a world where no one has kids "by default" without truly accepting the toll it will take.
While I agree the name change has not (yet) been made with the proper authority, I'm quite partial to the name and prefer to use it despite its prematurity. I think it does a better job of communicating the types of work actually done by the department and rightly gives people pause about their support of it. Though I'm sure that wasn't the administration's intention.
For context, lobste.rs has been struggling lately with a high uptick in posts on the front page that were either clearly vibecoded themselves or just about vibecoding something small, while the userbase is polarizing itself into two groups: one that dislikes ai for usually ethics-related reasons and makes anti-ai comments on every post that mentions it, and a smaller but still present pro-ai group that tries to discuss using coding models in good faith. Imo it's something of an identity crisis for lobste.rs.
I realize that this comment comes off as pro-ai, but I mostly agree with the first group that a lot of these posts are low effort and annoying. To me "This weekend I used Claude Code to poorly copy someone else's markdown editor here's Claude's story of how it did it" and similar is about as interesting as "I copied a bunch of code snippets I don't understand from stack overflow, here's all the links to them."
Somehow or another, HN has done a better job of keeping up a greater variety of content on the front page so it's not as much of an issue for me here, though it does still happen on e.g. days with big model releases.
The article is nearly useless for users of the software who want to know how their data may have been affected. The researchers' website is more descriptive, especilly wrt specific findings.
I have no problem with experienced senior devs using agents to write good code faster. What I have a problem with is inexperienced "vibecoders" who don't care to learn and instead use agents to write awful buggy code that will make the product harder to build on even for the agents. It used to be that lack of a basic understanding of the system was a barrier for people, but now it's not, so we're flooded with code written by imperfect models conducted by people who don't know good from bad.
There were always musicians who were better than you. If that didn't stop you, why did AI? Were you only making music to be the best? Surely you knew that was extraordinarily unlikely. If you like making music, then make music and like it.
That's really cool. I was looking at them and thinking "I could probably make these with vanilla html/css but it'd be pretty tedious." Perfect use case for AI. I need to work on developing a reflex for it.
"From" other countries is overly broad and I assume not what you intended. I am actually interested though in the idea of legislating how frequently home owners have to actually be within range of the home, for example. A friend has had a hell of a time with a landlord in Malaysia who's never seen the property.
At least in my case, I'm pretty sure I can afford to own all the music I listen to. I only listen to 5,000 minutes per year of mostly the same few hundred songs. I've spent 8 years x 12 months x 13 = $1248 on Spotify in my life so far, so even at $.99 per song (which is above average if I buy albums), I'm losing money
Imagine all the incredible fan works that could spark careers and businesses if e.g. the original star wars trilogy were public domain, or how many indie dev studios could get started by riffing on pokemon. But alas, fans of both franchises continue to make works but can't profit from them and need to pray that Disney and Nintendo won't send lawyers after them if they get popular
Attracting the ire of the music industry seems like a huge, unnecessary risk. I wish they had performed this as some kind of other entity to try to keep the ebook archive protected from the fallout. I fear this will not end well.