Hacker News Reader

rotison Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel

Maybe we should use legion as a collective noun for vulnerabilities. Like murder of crows or school of fish. Would signal the urgency no matter the actual number or impact...

rotison LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features

Maybe it's just a secret cabal of rogue agents downloading LibreOffice for no particualr reason whatsoever? I mean there is a precedent already: those fellas hijacked some poor wiki.

rotison A CVE Dispute

In many (most?) companies it also takes nontrivial amount of time to patch potentially affected systems. In my company half IT department got recently an email that we need to urgently patch all Windows servers because of some critical CVE. I checked it. The description was maybe 3 lines and it said this affected domain controllers only. I raised this with security team and they said that in this case we don't need to patch everything. Now if we had to do this, it would force us to spend nontrivial time on unplanned patching. That this in itself disorganizes our operations can not be ignored. So comparatively me doing some legwork and checking the CVE was trivial effort and saved a lot of busywork for the department as a whole. That time we got lucky.

rotison Bug Blindness

Later on he gives an example of Blackboard software that was very disliked. So I don't see what was unique in his perspective either. To me this article is not very focused and feels mostly like rambling. The core idea that we get accustomed to bugs/quality in software we use is sound. Just the article needs streamlining or better a complete rewrite.

rotison If this is true, the hyperscalers are toast

Sure. I don't give a damn about them. But Phil Collins man. I love reviewing his body of work before I get worked up. Obvously we cannot cut him, because I need him. So how do you decide what to leave out?

rotison Incident with Github.com [resolved]

This site's trustworthiness when it goes for pre-aquisition data was disputed here already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086786

rotison Finding zombies in our systems: A real-world story of CPU bottlenecks

Reminds me of this story from Windows land by Bruce Dawson (and similar on his blog):

63 Cores Blocked by Seven Instructions: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/63-cores-blocke...

Looks like Linux isn't immune to these types of problems.

rotison Ask HN: Does anyone let AI agents play games just for fun?

So the AIs end up being silly like in this video?

10 AIs Play Mafia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhBtg-lyKdo

rotison Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers

I have problems reconciling this story with the Amazon one from few days ago. If we take both for truth doesn't that basically imply Amazon researchers got scared by the ‘Fix this code’ prompt first and then spooked the feds? Shouldn't we make fun of those researchers first? I don't know. I feel there lies a lie somewhere in the open.

rotison Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

Agentic engineering? Vibe coding? That is so yesterday. Chain-of-thought flow is where it is at now. You heard it here first folks. Early examples of such phenomena include Rube Goldberg machines

rotison Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

https://x.com/i/status/2053560589327180255

I sense a pattern emerging.

rotison The sigmoids won't save you

Are you suggesting intelligent design got us here?

rotison An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs

Not really convinced by the first graph (and following too). According to it on a 10 year old project developers only manage to spend 10% of their available time adding features because rest is consumed by maintenance? By 10 year landmark I would expect most of software to be mature, with less new features needed and most known bugs fixed.

rotison Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

Got it. Vibe coding is all about the end result, damned be the way we got there. So I assume agentic engineering must be the opposite here? Don't care what we will cook. If I get a calculator while asking for integrator that is the true agentic engineering.

rotison Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

Caring about what? I could slap an application and say I vibe coded it or I could equally claim I agentically engineered it. No one could tell the difference(if there is any) without seeing the code. The only thing you could say I used an LLM. And that is what is happening. Most of the code that is "engineered" we don't get to see. So who know what is really going on there and what is the actual result?

rotison Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

> my disturbing realization that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to converge in my own work.

>I firmly staked out my belief that “vibe coding” is a very different beast from responsible use of AI to write code, which I’ve since started to call agentic engineering

Disturbing? Really? I admit I don't do agentic and am going only by vibes, but for me agentic engineering is basically vibe coding in a automated loop with some ornamentals. They both stem from the same LLM root and positioning them as significantly different is weird and unconvincing to me. There may be a merit to this article (I gave up after few sentences), but I reject this specific premise.

rotison Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal

https://chatgpt.com/share/69f0dc83-ec70-83eb-896b-b258de2c9f...

https://claude.ai/share/ac4d2041-4328-4511-904a-ff8b1cbfc0bb

Looks like self-censoring to me. Grok has no problems answering, so it is not a technical limitation:

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_341d6428-ea7d-4b84-ad4d-8df9...

rotison The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

I don't have a problem with AI assistance either, but this undermines the point the article is making. For me it is like a priest preaching gay sex is wrong and then being caught in bed with a male prostitute (snorting cocaine optional). Leaves bad taste in the mouth.

rotison The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

He writes 2,253 candidates and 2,069 were disqualified. 184 were qualified, so 1 in 12 was considered competent.

rotison Why I Joined OpenAI

Asking ChatGPT about safety of someone traveling instead of asking that person is the nerdy thing to do. Somehow a hairstylist doesn't invoke image of a nerd in me. That is why I find this story implausible.

rotison Lead Limited Brain and Language Development in Neanderthals and Other Hominids?

Agreed. Lead main source in nature is galena, which is relatively nontoxic. It rarely occurs in metallic form.

rotison Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

The fire started on 26th September and news about it reached HN only now. I think this is telling how disruptive for South Korea daily life this accident really was.

rotison Just let me select text

Reminds me of one of the stupidest hacks I discovered (In my mind). In one of my previous companies we had many similar Lotus Notes databases and one of them didn't allow to copy text from it. You could paste, I'm sure. You could select the text. But not copy. Turns out you could DRAG the selected text to other window. This copied the text over. So being able to highlight a text may mean you can indeed copy it ;)

rotison Gemini in Chrome

I'm sceptical a layperson will understand or care what it means that their data will be used in training. If you are concerned about such things this heavily implies you don't want to share your data. Just don't agree to the terms and move on.

rotison 450× Faster Joins with Index Condition Pushdown

Exactly. This is a basic optimization technique and all the dinosaur era databases should have that. But if you build a new database product you have to implement these techniques from scratch. There is no way you shortcut that. Reminds me about CockroachDB and them building a query optimizer[1]. They started with rule based one and then switched to cost based. Feature that older databases already had.

[1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/building-cost-based-sql-o...

rotison Digital vassals? French Government ‘exposes citizens’ data to US'

Everything else aside moving to R and Python to escape the USA hegemony means you are still dependend on Python Software Foundation and R Fundation. First is American. Second is based in Vienna, Austria yet still has big American presence among its members. So you end up still dependending on USA. Same with most free and open source. Even if its authors may appear to be European, they may turn out to be Americans (Linus Torvalds) or work for US company anyway (Guido van Rossum)

rotison CO2 sequestration through accelerated weathering of limestone on ships

All that and who will pay for it? Politicians? They use taxpayers money. Companies? They will pass on the bill to the customers. So in the end same group will experience higher prices. I can't wait for all the poor becoming poorer.

rotison Chemical knowledge and reasoning of large language models vs. chemist expertise

Yes, this paper and many others will be forgotten as soon as they leave the front page. Afterwards noone refers to articles like these here. People just talk about anecdotes and personal experiences. Not that I think this is bad.

rotison Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

That's another issue I have with this article. It lists the risks, but does not provide any specific well documented examples. It (and many others privacy related) does not try to quantify them either. Driving a car, flying a plane pose risks too. Yet milions of people take the risk daily. Jumping from 10th floor is also risky and here somehow most peoply don't try it. People intuitively can evaluate the risks on their own and ultimately you cannot do that for them. If examples of negative consequences of their data being sold start appearing, they will stop using these apps by themselves. But I personaly think these risks are blown out of proportion.

rotison My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

The author defends mediocore code, yet wrote this piece:

https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/

Where he dunks on how SSH access works in VSCode. I don't know. The code and architecture behind this feature may well be bananas, but gets the work done. Sounds like a clear case of mediocority. I wonder how does he reconcile those two articles together.

For me this is more of a clickbait. Both of the articles. With that in mind, if I am nuts for being sceptical of LLMs, I think it is fair to call the author a clickbaiter.