Hacker News Reader

crummyon Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview

Curious if people think LLMs will lead to more secure or less secure software in five years.

crummyon Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

this is a hack I have used and am proud of:

if you use Caddy as your reverse proxy (instead of nginx for example which does not do this), when requests come in and your service is missing because it's being deployed, Caddy waits for a timeout before giving up. this means that visitors during the brief deploy period don't see errors - they just get a slightly longer wait, which often is not obvious depending on how long your service takes to boot.

crummyon Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused

I recall chrome used to let you reveal passwords with a simple button press in the UI. I think their conclusion at the time was if an attacker had local access there was no point in pretending they were hidden.

crummyon Ban the sale of precise geolocation

Seems there’s an opening for an ElonJet-like tracker that operates on this data.

crummyon Nowhere is safe

Makes you wonder why poor people don’t just start their own companies.

crummyon OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio

Haven’t tried it, but here is one: https://github.com/MarconLP/snapify

crummyon Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls

or network effects are keeping people on a worse platform?

crummyon A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

All of the concepts SOMA explored were already familiar to me, but the experience of exploring the through the game was so much stronger than reading about them in a text book. Such a strong, lasting effect, I wish I could play it again for the first time.

crummyon What 81,000 people want from AI

Yeah I want to know how many people are using AI for social purposes; to provide the role of a friend. But I don’t know what category that would be under.

crummyon Mozilla to launch free built-in VPN in upcoming Firefox 149

> "If you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold"

This must apply to Firefox itself, right?

crummyon Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain

I never understood this quote. I happily gave up the freedom of driving without a seatbelt for security, what does that say about me?

crummyon Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age

People want age restrictions on social media; this seems like politicians enacting the will of their constituents

crummyon Medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are fiction

> While the instructions for authors for Paediatrics & Child Health has at times indicated the case reports are fictional, that disclosure has never appeared on the journal articles themselves.

Sounds like they were asking authors for fiction, so probably plenty of them are.

crummyon I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

Presumably you might also get better rates for a mortgage, to be fair.

crummyon GitHub Copilot CLI downloads and executes malware

Isn’t the news that “curl whatever” will prompt the user for confirmation but “env curl whatever” won’t?

crummyon President Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems

Should humans tolerate contracts that say “you may not use this thing in this particular way”

crummyon A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

I just set up an iPhone and it asked me if I was (roughly) a child, a teenager, or an adult. So some of this stuff is already here.

crummyon I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk

Won’t that require an act of congress? How likely does that seem?

crummyon I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk

On the other hand, pretending the government is acting in good faith is probably acting in bad faith at this point.

crummyon Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

So... Should the bus stops be even closer together?

crummyon Claude Sonnet 4.6

Opus is supposed to be the expensive-but-quality one, while Sonnet is the cheaper one.

So if you don't want to pay the significant premium for Opus, it seems like you can just wait a few weeks till Sonnet catches up

crummyon Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

Do you think Americans have to be paid or manipulated into making anti-ICE statements on social media?

crummyon Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

I used to overwrite c:\windows\notepad.exe with Metapad. At some point Windows security made this a pain though!

crummyon I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

Agreed. "Free mobile game" almost certainly means "malicious gambling app" at this point.

crummyon ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data

The FBI was investigating the daycare fraud in February 2025. Unfortunately, some of the investigators got moved off this investigation to do anti-immigration work instead, reported by NYT last week.

crummyon ICE tells legal observer, 'We have a database, now you're a domestic terrorist'

The right complains that "fascist" gets thrown around on by the left so much the terms loses meaning, but soon you'll be able to say the same about "domestic terrorist".

crummyon JSDoc is TypeScript

> For packages typed with JSDoc, CTRL/CMD clicking on a function will take you to actual code rather than a type declarations file. I much prefer this experience as a dev.

ok i didn't think about this, that's an underrated benefit