Hacker News Reader

rwmjon The first drink-driving conviction may have happened in London

> it would not be until 1904 that driving licences and vehicle registration numbers were introduced

A fun fact is that for many years, to get a driving license you just had to apply at the Post Office. There was no test at all. My grandmother obtained her license this way in the 1930s, and drove on the same license right through til she became too unwell to drive in the 1990s, and never took a test.

rwmjon Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/

rwmjon Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

We're running a migration from VMware to Red Hat Openshift Virt for one customer right now which is over 150,000 VMs. That's a big one, but five figure number of VMs is very typical.

I gave a 5 min lightning talk about this a couple of years back: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/

People talking here about Proxmox make me laugh.

rwmjon Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

VMware are shipping VDDK to backup vendors directly (and only to backup vendors).

rwmjon Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

The problem is how you access the disks that are sitting on a VMware server. VDDK allows you to connect and read them (in raw format, in fact) at a reasonable speed, and also understands sparseness and change block tracking.

rwmjon The ColorChecker, photography's most important 24 squares, turns 50

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_chart is even better if you want to just know about the subject.

The Viking Mars Lander had an early colour chart (three times over, for some reason) as shown in this NASA photo: https://www.msss.com/mars/pictures/viking_lander/22a158corr....

rwmjon .name Termination

I think this says more about how the cookies security model is stupid. They should always have been scoped to the single, exact name they were set from and nothing else. Websites would have had to be designed a bit more thoughtfully.

rwmjon Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets

Arrest them, take away their cars. Repeat until they do "give a shit".

rwmjon Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets

From the article:

> The introduction in 2011 of “zone 30” areas on a limited number of residential streets and along school routes resulted in a 30% reduction in fatalities and serious injuries

This benefits everyone.

rwmjon Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets

The really big thing in Japan is you're not allowed to park ("litter") your car in the street. In fact you can't even buy a car unless you can prove you have somewhere on your own land where you can park it. It makes a big improvement to walkability and general attractiveness of neighbourhoods.

rwmjon The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great

Those people will stop really understanding anything because they defer all their writing (and so thinking) to machines. They will get stupider and stupider.

rwmjon Six curl CVEs after OpenAI and Anthropic came back with zero

We had a few AISLE-generated security reports, and the signal to noise was reasonably good.

The most notable bug/exploit their scanner found was: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/libnbd/-/commit/e50bbd2681117c2dd8...

The tool basically had to chain two exploits together to reach this. It also came up with a patch to fix which was fairly sensible (but I ended up editing it further for clarity).

rwmjon The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks

Is it though? Brute force searching generally scales like 2^n. LLMs on the other hand can obviously be trained, and even though training is massively resource intensive, it's not 2^n.

rwmjon A CVE Dispute

There was a recent article in The Economist about people fighting employment disputes with AI (https://archive.ph/mi3zu). On the one hand, democratizing the system, on the other hand filling it with massive quantities of legally questionable slop.

rwmjon My hobby of building miniatures and taking pretty pictures

I like this London miniature artist: https://slinkachu.com/work Kind of the Banksy of very tiny guerilla urban art.

rwmjon A CVE Dispute

The incentives here are really bad at the moment. Traditionally, your name on a CVE against an important project like curl have a certain cachet in the community. You might even leverage that to get a raise or a better job, so money was definitely part of this.

Now lots of people are throwing code against LLMs and then copy/pasting whatever comes out into "security" reports.

We decided for our projects that any LLM-generated security reports are simply copied to the public list. Everyone has access to LLMs so presumably if one LLM instance found it, then all users of LLMs have already or shortly will find it. We'll fix them if they're important, but the signal to noise is pretty bad.

I think this will, eventually, result in more secure services as the low hanging problems are found and fixed. But unfortunately I don't see the flood of LLM-generated nonsense ending any time soon.

rwmjon Creepy Crawlies

I had to take down my cgit repository a few months ago. The load was causing other VMs on the same machine to become unusable.

rwmjon Creepy Crawlies

It's a social problem, technical solutions aren't going to work. To solve social problems you need the law to get involved. It should simply be illegal to install malware on someone's TV and use it to hijack their internet connection, and the punishment should be the same as for any theft of service, including imprisonment for people who do it.

rwmjon California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

It's kind of weird though. Is VxWorks (a proprietary embedded OS used on some of the Martian rovers) going to require it in case some underage Martians try to use Facebook?

rwmjon Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

They're in the single market already.

rwmjon Nvidia projects $673B in sales as AI demand widens

I posted this article a few days ago which goes into a lot of the details of the recent round of proxy borrowing that Nvidia went through with several large banks: https://www.sascha-steffen.de/updates/nvidia-500bn-ai-financ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447878

rwmjon Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card

You can do that, but the card is far more convenient and journeys are cheaper too.

rwmjon Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card

Wait, the balance is stored on the card? I'm fairly sure the balance is shown in the JR app too, so presumably that cannot be the case. [Update: or maybe not? I opened the app now and it's asking me to enable NFC and hold it up to the card.]

Anyway I love my Suica. I got it a good decade or more ago, I have a few thousand yen on there, and it's always ready for me when I go back to Japan. Useful on the Metro, trains and in shops. Easy to top up at the plentiful, dedicated top up machines. I also loaded Shinkansen tickets on it last time and travelled "ticketless".

rwmjon [dead]

I'm a paying Economist subscriber and even I cannot read the link :-(

rwmjon Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

Can someone explain how this works? Huggingface serves enormous files and therefore presumably must pay huge cloud fees. As the dot com joke goes, they make a loss on every transaction, but don't worry, they're going to make it up in volume.

rwmjon France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026

Not The Onion

rwmjon The Quest for a Hangover Cure

https://archive.ph/o3DKV

rwmjon Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

I assume only because Meta have forgotten about it or haven't got around to closing it down yet.

rwmjon X sends in the lawyers to shut down open source project

Also sotwe.com although you need to filter your javascript pretty heavily to use it safely.

rwmjon The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI

It's going to be a horrible job though, the equivalent of fixing Y2K bugs in Cobol code except with code bases that even more vast and unintelligible.