Hacker News Reader

arcwhiteon How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance

Yeah as a non-American I can understand why it might be that way, but I think you should understand that globally this is not normal and is indicative of deep problems

If you're taking cameras in high schools because of school shootings as your baseline of normality, you probably need to calibrate a little differently

arcwhiteon How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance

Security cameras on the outside of a building to deter after hours crime is fairly normal.

Security cameras on the inside of a high school strikes me as deeply NOT NORMAL

Admittedly it's been many decades since I was at high school. I think some of your metaphorical frogs might be getting boiled here.

arcwhiteon How to Write with an LLM

Simply do not.

arcwhiteon OpenJev

You sure the answer should have been 1? As a human I'd say I don't have enough information to answer this confidently, but "argument effectively" strongly suggests soft skills to me

arcwhiteon Guess which of these LLM outputs is watermarked

Interesting, I did very badly, 3/10!

arcwhiteon I Remain a Skeptic

It's worth noting that the bun rewrite of rust is still not actually released to users, and has run to a total cost north of a million dollars now (factoring in tokens and CI costs)

It should still be taken with a grain of salt IMO

arcwhiteon What Happened to HackerOne?

https://m.slashdot.org/story/159162-- example circa 2011

I can think of 4-5 other situations from around that era (~2012) where people were at least charged and needed a lot of help to navigate the legal proceedings to avoid jail time.

In 2010 it was more than risky on paper.

2017-2018 is well into the established era and probably even the golden age of bug bounties when a lot of corporate and judicial thinking re: white hat cybersecurity had been shifted.

arcwhiteon Protopia

We can do both, adding some additional upper tax brackets and clamping down on tax evasion can go hand in hand with other reforms.

arcwhiteon Software is about people, not code (2020)

Two things can be true simultaneously. Neither function works without the other.

arcwhiteon Beating Castlevania with Antithesis

"So called because it is a Metroidvania game in a Castle"

OMG please

arcwhiteon How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/canny

It means shrewd.

E.g. we should keep our wits about us when someone is making big hyperbolic claims about LLM that they directly benefit from, because maybe they have a motive to mislead either themselves, or us

arcwhiteon Faulty Towers, vibe sickness, and the vibe bobsled

No it doesn't.

arcwhiteon DoD says soldiers over age 30 to be screened for testosterone deficiency

Everyone should have access to gender-affirming care

arcwhiteon Against Usefulness

The thing is you don't know that it's got actual future usefulness. You might think or hypothesize that it does, but for various reasons it may turn out to be a dead-end.

Almost every endeavour has non-zero potential future utility - even as a counterexample or lesson to learn from. I think that definition of "useful" is probably too broad to make an argument against, and so not a useful definition.

arcwhiteon Against Usefulness

Deep, paradigm-shifting research often needs decades of deep thought and experimentation, which will not yield weekly, monthly or even annual demonstrations of usefulness to customers or shareholders.

She writes as a VC (I think?) where her job is to allocate capital for shorter-term "useful" (read: profitable) outcomes.

arcwhiteon Why is there smoke from the boiler room? – Botanical Garden using Home Assistant

Instant turn-off, couldn't finish it. The moment I sense this style, now, I have to close the tab

arcwhiteon --dangerously-skip-reading-code

It doesn't do that though. Understand. That's not how LLMs work.

arcwhiteon It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

Mu.

arcwhiteon Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

She is indeed some sort of wizard

arcwhiteon Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

Huh? The bot can communicate with me freely as it sees fit. A "conversation" in telegram parlance is not time-limited, it's ongoing once established, so no it's not only inbound. It can awaken and ping me whenever it wants. This can also work if it's added to a group chat.

If you mean it's not outbound as in it can't message arbitrary random users out of nowhere, well yeah, and that's a very desirable trait.

arcwhiteon Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

Once a conversation with a user is established, telegram bots can bleep away at you. Mine pings me whenever it puts a PR up, and when it's done responding to code reviews etc.

arcwhiteon How to hack Discord, Vercel and more with one easy trick

Compared to what? What's your baseline for how much a user-interaction-required XSS vulnerability should be worth?

arcwhiteon How to hack Discord, Vercel and more with one easy trick

It's actually pretty on-par for most bug bounties. They used the same exploit on a few programs and got $11k total which ain't bad return on time.

arcwhiteon We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

There's generally no grey market for XSS vulns. The people buying operationalized exploits generally want things that they can aim very specifically to achieve an outcome against a particular target, without that target knowing about it, and operationalized XSS vulns seldom have that nature.

Your other potential buyers are malware distributors and scammers, who usually want a vuln that has some staying power (e.g. years of exploitability). This one is pretty clearly time-limited once it becomes apparent.

arcwhiteon The State of AI Coding Report 2025

I've seen code persist a long time because it is unmaintainable gloop that takes forever to understand and nobody is brave enough to rebuild it.

So no, I don't think persistence-through-time is a good metric. Probably better to look at cyclomatic complexity, and maybe for a given code path or module or class hierarchy, how many calls it makes within itself vs to things outside the hierarchy - some measure of how many files you need to jump between to understand it

arcwhiteon Anti-aging breakthrough: Stem cells reverse signs of aging in monkeys

Or do people stop changing their minds because they're worn down, their brains no longer as capable of making space and joy for new ideas?

Which these stem cells, if they pan out, very specifically fix

arcwhiteon Self-supervised learning, JEPA, world models, and the future of AI [video]

Not really - that 1GB is the seed for a procedural generation mechanism that has been finely tuned to its unfolding in an environment over 4 billion years.

DNA is the ultimate demoscene exe

arcwhiteon EPA to Stop Collecting Emissions Data from Polluters

A bunch of us in the rest of the world are making great strides in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions without it tanking our economies. Australia is, per-capita, one of the worst offenders and we're on track to reach net zero by 2050.

I think your position is based on very cynical premises. There is no reason to assume with high confidence that humans will obliterate each other in that next 50 years (especially if we do something about one of the major stressors causing conflict)

There is also no reason to believe that reducing greenhouse gas emissions over 15-20 years will cause "more" damage than the worst impacts of climate change? Can you cite sources on this claim?

It is still possible to mitigate the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change.

arcwhiteon Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown (2013)

YT's skateboard introduces the telescopic contact smartwheels pretty early on as a Courier essential.

I don't recall Hiro's motorcycle being much a part of the story, it might also have had the smartwheels but isn't discussed until later...

arcwhiteon The internet is already over (2022)

I would love mailing lists to be a thing again, but the experience of using email is just so bad for me. The sheer amount of unsubscribing I have to do to make it usable - not even taking spam into account - makes email a place I don't want to spend any time.