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with··on An MCP for Telling the Time?
the MCP equivalent of is-even (https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even) on NPM
with··on [dead]
it's incredibly low effort and very high yield. it only keeps boosting their SEO. they have enough human traffic to where they can totally get away with it too
with··on App Review Shenanigans
the only way I can describe the modern Apple App Review process is "silly". necessary, but very silly. I was rejected AND had my account terminated for having Firebase Remote Config in my app, and they thought I was hiding features from their review. when I sent evidence they immediately lifted the suspension.

It's just a hobby for me (just $100/month in IAP revenue rn) but I really don't understand their system at all.

with··on Pivot to AI safety, I beg you
> We will need MILLIONS of people in the field.

it's a real issue but I'm not sure it's the mass mobilization problem the article makes it out to be. pretty sure it's growing extremely fast, and it's a new field in general. the models will keep growing in capability because of human game theory (I need to make my model better because my competitors are). it's not practical to expect millions in headcount to move from frontier capability research to safety

with··on Copilot edited an ad into my PR
Everyone is doing this now. Granted, on Codex / Claude Code, you can disable it, it’s not the default to have it disabled. For some reason on Cursor, they keep shoving the “Made with Cursor” into my PR description despite me disabling attribution, which looks really stupid on a work PR.

I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how do we not read this as cheap advertising?

with··on Ask HN: Why Isn't Everything Public?
yes, but the same people who have the power to make those same things public are the ones benefiting from the same fraud, waste, and corruption
with··on Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit
> do these types of techniques really work?

They have been proven to: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

with··on The Cognitive Dark Forest
if the idea can just be obliterated by an LLM, there was never a moat to begin with
with··on AI isn't killing jobs, it's 'unbundling' them into lower-paid chunks
Just further proof that context is the real moat, not intelligence. All the models are already converging to be equally intelligent and that will only continue. GPT 5.4 / Opus 4.6 are the first two models I’ve used where I’m like, yeah, with the right spec/context they can pretty much do anything.

The “bundle” or “context” is the value.

with··on A decade of Docker containers
nice share!
with··on A decade of Docker containers
docker is bloated. i'm almost certain half of every image is dead weight. unused apt packages, full distros for a single binary, shell configs nobody touches. but the incentive is to make things work, not make them small. so bloat wins.

still, i use it every day and i don't see what replaces it. every "docker killer" solves one problem while ignoring the 50 things docker does well enough.

with··on Warn about PyPy being unmaintained
Thanks, I also saw this as PyPI and was confused, lol
with··on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI
Fair point, the "tuned to flag aggressively" claim was speculative on my part. Turnitin's own documentation says they favor false negatives over false positives.

That said, their accuracy claims have been disputed before. Inside Higher Ed [1] reported that Turnitin's real-world false positive rate was higher than originally asserted, and the company declined to disclose the updated number. And, USD also noted that while Turnitin claimed <1% false positives, a Washington Post investigation found a 50% rate on a smaller sample, and that non-native English speakers / neurodivergent students get flagged at higher rates [2].

Now, those are from 2023 and the product (and AI in general) has been updated drastically since. But the broader incentive problem holds even if the detector itself is conservatively tuned. The product is a black box. And the downstream cost of errors falls entirely on students, not on Turnitin's renewal rate. You don't need aggressive tuning for the incentive structure to be broken.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/01/t...

[2] https://lawlibguides.sandiego.edu/c.php?g=1443311&p=10721367

with··on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI
nobody's asking who profits from false positives. these AI detection vendors have a direct financial incentive to flag aggressively. more flags = "more value" = more school contracts renewed. same playbook as selling antivirus to your grandma. sell fear, charge per seat, and make the false positive rate someone else's problem.
with··on When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
MCP is a completely useless abstraction, and I’m not sure why anyone would push for it over basic cli tools / skills.
with··on Show HN: The Dot
this looks chaotic. I love it
with··on Microgpt
yep, agreed. wasn’t knocking the project at all, it’s great for exactly that purpose
with··on Microgpt
"everything else is just efficiency" is a nice line but the efficiency is the hard part. the core of a search engine is also trivial, rank documents by relevance. google's moat was making it work at scale. same applies here.
with··on A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
Our lawmakers have zero idea how software works.

"useradd bob" is an "account setup". does that need age verification too? haha

with··on Show HN: ClawCare – Security scanner and runtime guard for AI agent skills
I understand the entire project was vibe coded, but can you at least write the post yourself?
with··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
the interesting question is why dario published this. these disputes normally stay behind NDAs and closed doors. going public means anthropic decided the reputational upside of being the company that said no outweighs the risk of burning the relationship permanently. that's a calculated move, not really just a principled one.
with··on Making MCP cheaper via CLI
MCP's only real value is the auth handshake for third-party SaaS. the actual tool execution is worse than a subprocess call. more tokens, harder to debug, and the failure modes are worse. if someone just extracted the OAuth layer into a standard that CLIs could use, there's very little reason for the rest of the protocol to exist.
with··on Could users acting en masse take a major website down?
It happens all the time, and it doesn’t even require coordination, just synchronized intent.

Examples:

- ai.com launching with a super bowl ad and being taken down just from large sign up volume

- Taylor Swift drops an album on Spotify, everyone rushes to stream it, crashes Spotify

- random small websites get featured on reddit front page and get hit offline

> how large would the number of users need to be

depends on the target. small website on shared hosting could be hit offline by 1000 concurrent users. major platform might need millions of users concurrently hitting write paths, not just loading cached/static content. or all requiring open sustained connections

> what would they have to do

just all do the same thing at the same time.

with··on Ask HN: What's it like working in big tech recently with all the AI tools?
I work for a $50B+ company (is this big tech? idk), but I’ll answer this because we are fully embracing AI (Cursor, Claude Code, cloud agents, AI reviews, you name it)

> Have you noticed faster pace of development?

Yes, our org has had a 50% increase in PRs since Opus 4.5 released.

> Have you seen changes to code quality or code review?

Yes, significantly more bugs (no exact number), but consider it maybe 3-4x in volume. However, nothing catastrophic and everyone just uses AI for fast-follow fixes anyways. The company as a whole is embracing this style of development for better or worse.

> Do teammates that use these tools complete sprint tasks faster than those who don't?

Yes, but my entire team uses them. I’d say the ones who use it more effectively (crazy skill setups, better tooling/commands, better scaffolding) finish much faster. Probably 80% of my team still uses Cursor in the one-shot way with very vague requirements, and don’t have the AI connected to github, jira, slack, etc which can actually feed really important context into decision making.

If I do something more than once a day, I write a custom slash command for it. This has personally 2x’d my pace.

with··on Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
everyone in the comments is talking about stylometry and rewriting your posts with LLMs. the paper barely uses stylometry. the attack surface is semantic: your interests, your city, the conference you mentioned once 2 years ago. you can't rewrite your way out of having said you work in fintech in austin and own a golden retriever.
with··on Show HN: Open-source self-hostable backend – try to break my live instance (48h)
There are some extremely concerning security vulnerabilities in this project that even the weakest of hackers could exploit.

Is this product a ragebait/troll?

1) Account takeover of any user with just their email: POST /v1/account/recovery with any user's email, the API response gives you the plaintext recovery secret. Call PUT /v1/account/recovery with that secret + a new password. You now own their account. No email inbox access needed. Two curl commands.

2) Password hashes returned by the API: GET /v1/users with any API key returns every user's full argon2 hash, algorithm, and tuning parameters. tested and got $argon2id$v=19$m=65536,t=3,p=4$... for test@kraz.in.

3) CORS reflects any origin with credentials: Send Origin: https://evil.com to any endpoint — server responds with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://evil.com + Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true. Any website on the internet can silently read authenticated API responses from logged-in users

There is literally like 50 more of these though. The author probably didn't spend more than 5 minutes on security hardening.

with··on Show HN: Open-source self-hostable backend – try to break my live instance (48h)
'Failed to execute SQL: too many connections for database "postgres"'
with··on Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston
"advanced manufacturing center" which is 20k sqft, about 1/7 the size of a typical Costco. I wouldn't hail this as the great revival of american manufacturing
with··on I'm helping my dog vibe code games
the real takeaway is buried at the bottom: "the magic isn't in the input, it's in the system around it." random keystrokes producing playable games means the input barely matters anymore. we're basically at the point where the engineering is in the scaffolding, not the prompting.
with··on The singularity won't be gentle
Of course it won't be gentle. Just look who is saying it will be gentle and what their economic incentives may be. You don't get 12 figure funding rounds by admitting that your product might destabilize the world labor market.
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