Hacker News Reader

praptakon Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

Somehow a powerful state army destroying homes and killing civilians is not "terrorist". It's only "terrorist" if the weak try to respond in kind, using means available to them. It's almost like "terrorist" is a propaganda term used by the strong against the weak who try to resist.

As the saying goes "war is terrorism with a bigger budget".

praptakon The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent

The problem with the tragedy of the commons is that everyone knowing it will happen is not enough to prevent it from happening.

praptakon Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

The optimal level of cable regrets is non zero.

praptakon The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

Terrorism went from "kill one person to scare millions" to "stir shit up to cripple the adversary with the costs of prevention".

praptakon Enshittification Is Coming for Everything

https://archive.is/L1DPH#selection-1889.0-1889.54

praptakon Web Security is Too Hard

Monkey see, monkey do: https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/all-my-clients-wanted-a-car...

"It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind. A website without a chatbot in 2026 risks feeling unfinished, like something's missing. Even if what's missing is a half-broken widget that most visitors dismiss in three seconds. The chatbot has become a social signal, not a tool. A way of saying: we're keeping up."

praptakon The Fall and Rise of Screwworm

Releasing the steriles blindly is not enough, you gotta monitor the pest too. This is prohibitively expensive in rainforests and other areas with poor infrastructure.

Okay, maybe you could release the flies in large enough numbers not to need monitoring but I guess it would also be prohibitively expensive.

praptakon Extinction-Level Capitalism

Big AI is intertwined with these two via data centers, isn't it?

praptakon Dopamine Fracking

This is alienation as described by Marx. If you optimize a thing, at some point it becomes separated from its nature.

praptakon Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it

> First you need someone to be physically in there

Bluetooth works fine through walls.

praptakon The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

There's a good article about it. Saying no is a budget. In other words you don't have enough veto power to stop all bad projects so you need to be strategic about spending this budget.

https://lalitm.com/post/why-senior-engineers-let-bad-project...

praptakon The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon

The problem with this kind of armchair economy is that you can argue both ways.

"End of ZIRP and the raise of just-say-no engineers": with capital being more expensive companies need to invest it wisely, therefore the need the judgement of the just-say-no engineer to avoid blowing it on unnecessary stuff.

praptakon I bypassed AWS API Gateway auth with a trailing slash. Got $12K bounty

Appending stuff to bypass blacklists is eternal.

My first job, decades ago. I couldn't update something on my laptop because client's gateway blocked `http://foo.com/update.exe`. Guess what, `http://foo.com/update.exe?` worked as a bypass.

praptakon Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

It's pretty stupid that big customers like Railway are not somehow protected from this.

praptakon Halt and Catch Fire

When I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army.

This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.

praptakon The AI Backlash Could Get Ugly

"In absolutely no way am I scheming on how I might leverage it to shut down whole industries"

I don't think even the ultra rich who own the technology are directly scheming to do that. But they do accept it as a side effect of them getting more money and power.

Yes, the technology is a tool, it's an impressive tool but we cannot ignore who wields it and what they incentives are.

praptakon Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

As a Polish IT worker I feel that we enjoy hardwork too much. I'm talking here about "kultura zapierdolu" [0] which is what we call the specific Polish version of culture of unhealthy work/life balance.

[0] https://lubimyczytac.pl/ksiazka/5124728/czesc-pracy-o-kultur...

praptakon Knitting bullshit

I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion.

I'm specifically thinking of a print magazine that was designed to make you feel like you are a smart reader of science articles, without any useful information about the actual science or technology.

praptakon What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

There is no party capable to take responsibility on the other side of the handover protocol.

praptakon The gay jailbreak technique (2025)

Maybe tell it to output rhyming slang pig Latin.

Or, since you are in a terminal anyway, rot13

praptakon It’s Toasted

You could make a similar noble call for everyone to just stop using cigarettes in 1950.

It would not work. What ultimately worked were laws designed to curb tobacco use combined with public education campaigns.

praptakon Men who stare at walls

> Let me know of any resources that helped you (anyone)

For me it was "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa. A meditation textbook which tells us what to practice, how to practice and why. Especially useful if you need the finer points.

praptakon An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

If you also add "don't break the previous rule", you should be 100% safe.

praptakon XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?

You still need to explain why this case creates a positive feedback loop rather than a negative one. I mean left/right fuel intakes in cars and male/female ratios somehow tend to balance at 50/50.

praptakon XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?

I wonder if you could measure the difference in power consumption.

I mean, not for zeroing because we know from the TFA that it's special-cased anyway. But maybe if you test on different registers?

praptakon Louis Zocchi, inventor of the d100, has died

The internet reports that D100 is impractical to use but it's cool if your game design calls for a relatively rare "ritual value".

praptakon Too much discussion of the XOR swap trick

Xor swap trick has perfect profile for underhanded C contests. It generally works until a specific condition triggers its failure. The condition is "the arguments are aliases", so for example XOR_SWAP(a[i], a[j]) when i=j.

praptakon Viral victory: Iran is beating the land of tech bros in the social media wars

Iran messaging: we got attacked by mad apes but we are cool and funny and we carry on unbothered

USA messaging: UNGA BUNGA BIG EXPLOSIONS

praptakon Germany Power Prices Turn Deeply Negative on Renewables Surge

> Heck you could build some large bodies of water and boil them from time to time.

Some suppliers already do that. When a power plant also supplies the city heating, it makes sense for them to put the power surplus into pre-heated water which they can store and later distribute to the buyers of the heat.

Obviously this needs some huge and well insulated tanks.

Here's an article (in Polish) about one built in Warsaw, 10TJ capacity: https://globenergia.pl/najwiekszy-wodny-magazyn-ciepla-w-eur...

praptakon The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes

I remember playing a version of this game on ZX Spectrum but I cannot find it on the internet. I remember it had bees that you had to avoid and a boat which you were able to untie so that it floats down a stream.

Anybody remember this one?