dlenski

(Having seen your edited and clarified comment, I think we basically agree.)

> the version where the market influences the decision is the much less effective way to do things.

Okay, so two possible scenarios: "market influences decision" and "decision influences market."

1. Polymarket offers a contract called something like: "Will the US launch any lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean on April 30, 2026?" A commander of a drone unit for the US military bets $500 on "yes". At 11:51pm on April 30, he's trying to decide whether or not to issue an order to fire on a boat, or to wait 15 minutes for better visual identification of the target. As a result of his bet on Polymarket, he's strongly incentivized to issue the order right now.

2. It's 11:51pm on April 30. A commander of a drone unit for the US military is reviewing images of a potential target boat. He idly opens a browser tab to Polymarket. Lo and behold, he sees that the odds of "Will the US launch any lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean on April 30, 2026?" are at only 0.3%. He's strongly incentivized to issue an order to strike right now and to quickly buy that Polymarket contract before news of the strike breaks.

Does it matter which of these two scenarios might actually be taking place? I don't think so.

> That has proven not to be the case with sports betting. Otherwise every major league pitcher would be needing armed guards to stop all the people with pipes trying to disable them.

This is a ridiculously over-broad claim.

First of all, prediction markets shift incentives in a pernicious way; they don't magically erase or override all pre-existing incentive structures.

And secondly, professional athletes of all stripes appear to be receiving a lot more threats of violence from gamblers (including "prediction market traders") than they were a few years ago.

> It's much more effective to make the decision first and the bet second.

What did I say that contradicts this?

> Why almost certainly?

Because I haven't seen any clear reporting with evidence documented down to the level of individual decision-making.

Yep. Feels like we see new depressingly creative examples of this every few days.

What a strange and uncharitable response.

1. ICBMs. I question your claim that these are "of course" valuable without nuclear payloads.

No ICBM has even been used in war (there's a questionable case of Russia using an experimental missile in 2024 in Ukraine). Certainly, without nuclear payloads, they would be a lot less valuable.

2. Submarines, bombers. Yes, these general categories of vehicles have military value beyond delivering nuclear weapons.

The specific ones that are most likely to be used for delivering nuclear weapons were developed and built for this specific purpose, often at extremely high cost (with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_B-2_Spirit as a specific example).

These delivery systems for nuclear weapons wouldn't have been built in such great numbers and at such great cost if not for their intended purpose of delivering nuclear weapons.

> Just wait until they start killing people to win bets.

Quite likely it has already happened.

There's been an enormous amount of betting on various military strikes by the Trump administration, much of which looks like insider trading.

Almost certainly there have been insiders with money on the line who were financially motivated to launch lethal attacks, which they might have otherwise paused or delayed.

I agree, but the fact that authorities even have to spend time investigating is a massive negative externality.

A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one.

> On April 15, one trader made $21,000 (£15,600) betting that the maximum temperature would not be 18 degrees, data from Polymarket show. A temperature of 18C was seen as a 99.6pc probability before the temperature spiked later in the day.

I believe that these are the specific Polymarket bets in question:

April 6 (https://polymarket.com/event/highest-temperature-in-paris-on...): this appears to have been something of a "test run", since the odds weren't particularly lopsided until it suddenly spiked in the evening local time.

April 15 (https://polymarket.com/event/highest-temperature-in-paris-on...): the odds were quite lopsided in favor of 18°C, until suddenly reversing in the evening. This is presumably where the fraudsters made all their money.

> We don't use vulnerabilities in our products.

With all due respect, and acknowledging that your work is technically excellent…

Isn't everything that you do an exploitation of vulnerabilities? https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fingerprint.com

Fingerprinting is all about extracting information about a site's visitors which those users didn't explicitly intend to reveal.

Title should have the word "its" rather than "it's"

I don't understand the sub-heading…

> Good news for those working with Windows, bad news for Paragon Software

Why is this bad news for Paragon Software? Paragon donated a GPL'ed NTFS driver to the kernel a few years ago, presumably in hopes that the kernel would continue to have a working NTFS read/write driver without Paragon having to continuously maintain and patch it.

And indeed, now the kernel will have a working NTFS read/write driver maintained upstream, even if it's not the same codebase. Seems like "mission accomplished" from their point of view!

Thank you. I was going to simply comment "Suspicions"!?!

… but you've explained it more thoroughly.

Uh…? That's not my life at all.

I work from home 95% of the time, with most of my colleagues a continent away. So I'm definitely home and present in my son's life nearly all the time, probably more so than many parents given that I don't have any time occupied by a daily commute.

> You can definitely pickup on whether another male is a father or not.

Hah, yep. There's a quality of patience and looking out for small children that nearly 100% of other dads I meet have, but probably only ~30% of men without kids.

And maybe even less than that, since the ones who are willing to hang out with me in my fatherly state are a self-selecting bunch.

> I also have been surprised by how fun fatherhood is.

Same here. My son is approaching two, and he's a blast. He can be tiring, he can be a big ol’ mess, but he's never boring.

He's healthy and he eats well and he's a good sleeper, so he doesn't give us much to worry about. He charms everyone he meets, he explores everything, and every day is just a fireworks show of new delights and discoveries. I go on a business trip for 2-3 days and I come back to him doing new things.

Looking forward to the second kiddo!

There's a pretty big missing case in this comparison: nuclear weapons.

The US spent ~$12 trillion in ~2024 dollars on nuclear weapons between 1940 and 1996, and the vast majority of that spending was in the 1950s and early 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...

I don't understand the quixotic obsession with fighting e-book copying.

As with music and movies, it only takes one person to succeed in ripping a non-DRM'ed copy of an ebook before it'll be easy to widely distribute via BitTorrent and similar software.

Amazon has already discontinued the direct download of (weakly-encrypted) Kindle book files to PCs, and so once Kindle for PC is gone, the cat-and-mouse games will likely move to the e-reader firmware itself.

What exactly does that have to do with the bandwidth of one's home Internet connection?

> you can't even stream Youtube at 4K resolution with that

Not something I care about.

I don't have a 4K TV. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a 4K TV. I've definitely seen a very high-resolution TV at a friend's house, and it was kind of cool, but not something interesting enough to motivate me to spend $500 or $20/month to acquire one of my own.

I hardly watch TV. My TV has a native resolution of 720p, I think, and 720p videos look really high-quality to me on the occasions when I watch.

Yes, I reversed the up/down bandwidths as you noticed, but didn't see the mistake until I could no longer edit.

> Otherwise I think 50 - 100Mbps per person is generally the point we see law of diminishing returns.

Right. Whether we think the diminishing returns are at 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 Mbps per user, there are diminishing returns.

The vast, vast majority of residences simply do not need symmetric 25 Gbps bandwidth, and it would be a massive waste of resources to try to build out a residential network providing that level of bandwidth, rather than prioritizing universal accessibility of 50 or 100 Mbps.

I'd liken it to the overprovisioning of EV batteries, particularly in North America. Many, many car owners would be perfectly satisfied with a car with a range of only (say) 60 miles or 100 km, and overall EV cost and adoption rate is hurt by the fact that leading-edge manufacturers, especially Tesla, were only building EVs with range of 5x that.

> > What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!

> Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford.

Right. It's a costly and irrational anxiety or obsession over a headline number that likely doesn't matter for most people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677199

> But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built.

Right. I thankfully don't do that kind of development much, but I agree that I'd want a faster connection if I had to. I would certainly expect to have it at the office, though I don't find a need tor it at the home.

In the past when I worked as a developer for FAANG and related spinoff companies, I did most of my development on "cloud desktops" or VMs which had much faster connections. This was mainly in order to have more CPU, RAM, and storage for builds, although the additional network bandwidth was important as well.

> For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream.

To me, 720p seems incredibly high-quality. I think I'm living out something like https://m.xkcd.com/606, although perhaps on a 20-year lag rather than a 5-year lag.

Yes, you're right. "Fetish" was too weird and dismissive, but I can't edit it now.

Perhaps "irrational obsession" would be a better word.

I don't understand why so many people are obsessed with maximizing technical specifications of their computers. I want a computer that works predictably and reliably with some minimum acceptable level of performance.

Overlockers void their warranties and spend thousands of dollars to squeeze out 50% more performance than what they'd get from off-the-shelf CPUs… and for what? To play games at a slightly higher framerate, sometimes, but often just to show screenshots of benchmarking rates for bragging rights.

I view people who are obsessed with Internet connection bandwidth similarly.

I don't understand the desire (fetish?) for high speed home Internet connections at home.

I have 25 Mbps up. 10 Mbps down. Have had it for years. It's fine.

It's fine when both my wife and I are working from home and doing calls. It's fine for software development. It's fine for email and web browsing, and everything other than downloading maddeningly large files, 99% of which shouldn't be that large anyway. It's fine for watching streaming shows. Maybe if our kids turn out to be YouTube addicts when they're older we'll upgrade; maybe we won't for that reason.

What are people doing with their higher-speed Internet connections that makes it valuable to have such fast ones??!

Well said. I'm glad that as blockers have managed to develop effective approaches under Mv3, but it took a tremendous amount of engineering effort that was only necessary because Google was trying to impose these very large costs on them.

Same. I've climbed Mount Adams (12,280 feet) several times, including once with an overnight stay at 9,500 feet as well as other times when I did the whole ascent and descent in a single day.

It's a tiring climb and a tiring descent, but I never felt a hint of altitude-related discomfort.

I lived near sea level and didn't often go anywhere more than about 1,000 feet above sea level in daily activities.

> 1. Do a request to `chrome-extension://<extension_id>/<file>`. It's unclear to me why this is allowed.

Big +1 to that.

The charitable interpretation is that this behavior is simply an oversight by Google, a pretty massive one at that, which they have been slow to correct.

The less-charitable interpretation is that it has served Google's interests to maintain this (mis)feature of its browser. Likely, Google or its partners use similar to techniques to what LinkedIn/Microsoft use.

This would be in the same vein as Google Chrome replacing ManifestV2 with ManifestV3, ostensibly for performance- and security-related purposes, when it just so happens that ManifestV3 limits the ability to block ads in Chrome… the major source of revenue for Google.

The more-fully-open-source Mozilla Firefox browser seems to have had no difficulty in recognizing the issues with static extension IDs and randomizing them since forever (https://harshityadav.in/posts/Linkedins-Fingerprinting), just as Firefox continues to support ManifestV2 and more effective ad-blocking, with no issues.

From Google's point of view, very little downstairs to banning those other accounts. And the upside is that they reduce their legal risk: "We automatically blocked the account that was generating the kiddie porn, as well as the other accounts that had been logged into that device."

It's probably as simple as that…

> I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA

Same.

I have financial accounts in multiple countries, many using Google Voice for 2FA.

However, whenever I create an account that allows anything other than SMS for 2FA, I immediately switch to that instead. I use an offline TOTP authenticator app, and backup the token secrets in something that's not linked to my Google account.

This greatly limits my blast radius, I think, because I can access my most critical online services without access to my Google account.

My Google Voice number is the only phone number I've used for 15+ years. It'd be a real nightmare if I lost access to my Gmail and/or Voice.

> > Intel and some iteris chipsets are well supported.

> Intel chipsets categorically do not support AP mode

This is not true.

Intel chipsets do support AP mode; what they don't support is 5 GHz AP.

You wouldn't want to run a 2.4-GHz-only router for any kind of real-world long-term use, but if you just want to start a quick-and-dirty 2.4 GHz AP for testing/hacking/reverse-engineering, Intel chipsets are very good for this because they have out-of-the-box support for channel-hopping to support simultaneous client+AP operation.

More details in my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581204

If you're okay with old, battle-tested, cheap (and about 2-3 generations back in terms of performance)…

Any ath10k card is great. They support up to 802.11ac, cost about $10 (e.g. amazon.com/dp/B07HDXP9R4), and can run AP in either the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz bands.

The firmware and driver are very stable and they in terms of regulatory constraints they defer entirely to the Linux kernel (which means you can use https://github.com/singe/wifi-frequency-hacker or similar for frequency hacking).

I don't have much personal experience with ath11k (802.11ax) or ath12k (802.11be), but I've heard good things about them generally.

For use in a real, practical access point, you want to avoid Intel cards. Intel's firmware completely locks down the ability to run a 5 GHz AP. For whatever reason, Intel takes a maddeningly conservative view of regulatory restrictions. They clearly don't want their cards to be used in APs. On the other hand, Intel's cards have a nice feature that they support dual-channel operation with a single radio (e.g. `iw list` shows `channels <= 2`), which is extremely handy for running a quick-and-dirty 2.4 GHz access point while staying connected to a WiFi network.