HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

zxcvasd

86 karma · joined January 13, 2026

a victim of dan/tom, i can only post twice (?) every ~2 hours (???). my comments are immediately [dead] on arrival.

not sure why, they dont bother to tell you. none of my comments have ever been flagged. i dont think any have even gone into negative karma. they have never replied to a comment of mine.

super fucking cool, dan and tom! super fucking cool.

fuck this place

submissionscomments
zxcvasd··on Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware
>Operating systems are supposed to get in the way of things like this

debbie from accounting will say "darn thing wont let me do my job", and get frustrated from all of the prompts and approvals she doesnt understand. she is just going to click yes on every single prompt, not reading it. no meaningful security increase occurs.

debbies boss is going to get annoyed that debbies productivity has fallen 15% because she doesnt understand what her computer is asking for and she is having to stop what she is doing to hit some stupid prompt every 10 minutes. no meaningful security increase occurs.

tier 1 tech support will quit their jobs because now they arent just resetting hundreds of passwords each day, they have to listen to people yelling at them about their computer prompting for permissions every 10 minutes. "just hit yes whenever it shows up", they say. no meaningful security increase occurs.

neckbeard mcneckbeard on HN will screech "mIcRoSlOp thinks they know how to secure my computer better than me!! screeeeeee walled garden screeeeeeeeee if i bought it i should be able to do anything to it". mr. mcneckbeard is very vocal and causing all sorts of bad publicity. they hack some workarounds or change the settings so that they dont get prompted every 10 minutes. no meaningful security increase occurs. (side note: i ~mostly~ agree with mr mcneckbeard)

if security is not convenient, people will work around it, and you'll end up with even worse security because everything will be done in the shadows.

security an extreme balancing act. if the friction is too high, it will end up lowering security, not increasing it.

>Backwards compatibility is not more important than this

in more situations than you probably think, backwards compatibility is literally the most important thing.

zxcvasd··on Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware
at the risk of going a bit off topic here, what specifically has deteriorated?

as someone who has used 1password for 10 years or so, i have not noticed any deterioration. certainly nothing that would make me say something like they are a "shell of their former selves'. the only changes i can think of off the top of my head in recent memory were positive, not negative (e.g. adding passkey support). everything else works just as it has for as long as i can remember.

maybe i got lucky and only use features that havent deterioriated? what am i missing?

zxcvasd··on Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems
>I guess almost anyone can do the following

almost everyone knows the formula for olvine and quartz, too, of course

theres probably less than 10 people in my entire company that know half of the words you wrote there. whats an "iso"? what is "flashing" the "iso"? how do i "boot medium"? what is "KDE" and why do i want to say yes?

(i know what these are, and maybe most people browsing a tech-focused forum with "hacker" in the name, but the vast majority of people do not)

zxcvasd··on A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
sure, not denying that. my writing style is fairly different now in my 40s than it was in my late teens/early twenties.

but, those changes are usually pretty gradual and relatively small. thats why when attempting to identify someone via writing, you look at several aspects of the writing and not just word choice (grammar, use of specific slang, sentence length, paragraph structure, punctuation, etc.). it is highly unlikely that all aspects of someones writing changes at the same time. simply removing "ha" is inconsequential to identification if not much else changed.

additionally, this data is typically combined with other data/patterns (posting times, username (themes, length, etc.), writing that displays certain types of expertise, and more) to increase the confidence level of correct identification.

zxcvasd··on A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
this is a well-studied field (stylometry). when combining writing styles, vocabulary, posting times, etc. you absolutely can narrow it down to specific people.

even when people deliberately try to feign some aspects (e.g. switching writing styles for different pseudonyms), they will almost always slip up and revert to their most comfortable style over time. which is great, because if they aren't also regularly changing pseudonyms (which are also subject to limited stylometry, so pseudonym creation should be somewhat randomized in name, location, etc.), you only need to catch them slipping once to get the whole history of that pseudonym (and potentially others, once that one is confirmed).

zxcvasd··on I prefer to pass secrets between programs through standard input
i am on mullvad and accessing it fine. if you are on one of the default exit nodes, try switching it. i find the default nodes get blocked by a lot of sites, likely due to malicious behavior of other users.
zxcvasd··on I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
only because it isnt enforced.

if fines were levied and actually collected, itd be a pretty robust regulation for privacy. theres other issues with it, but nothing that requires gdpr to be wiped out -- just modified (and clarified) a bit.

zxcvasd··on Richard Feynman Side Hustles
>you just need to know at least a little more than the companies you are consulting for.

sometimes (i'd argue often, actually), you don't even need that. simply having an outside/fresh perspective and the fact that you aren't part of any of the existing groups/silos is valuable.

zxcvasd··on Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
well, what happens is netflix gives blender real cash. and thats the entirety of the translation
zxcvasd··on Break Me If You Can: Exploiting PKO and Relay Attacks in 3DES/AES NFC
this is a very common pattern in tptacek's comments, but it's not worth calling out as he absolutely refuses to recognize it, always falling back to a similar response you see here.

with a quick google of "3des broken" and reading the first paragraph of wikipedia on 3des, i was able to guess (correctly!) what they original commenter was referring to.

zxcvasd··on Break Me If You Can: Exploiting PKO and Relay Attacks in 3DES/AES NFC
to any non-cryptographer, i think that's a distinction without a difference. it's disallowed from use by the major standards institute due to a vulnerability where people can recover the plain text.

that sounds "broken" to me, but i'm not a cryptographer. so, i'll defer to you when you say it's not broken. (i dont know what the cryptographer-specific definition of broken is -- it'd be great if you would shed some light on that)

zxcvasd··on Break Me If You Can: Exploiting PKO and Relay Attacks in 3DES/AES NFC
if i were to guess, they are referring to CVE-2016-2183, which lead to deprecation of 3DES by NIST in 2019 (announced in 2017) and disallowing all uses in 2023. openssl also stopped including it in default builds starting in 2016 because it is considered weak.
zxcvasd··on I Made a MIT Licensed Mecrisp-Stellaris Language Server
><obscure set of random words>

"language server" is probably not particularly obscure (or random) to the audience of people who know what "mecrisp-stellaris" is (i.e. the audience of the post).

i actually doubt "language server" is obscure to pretty much anyone who has done any programming recently.

zxcvasd··on FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE
my mom can use signal no problem. she doesnt know what half the words in your comment mean, though.
zxcvasd··on Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't
>if your first instinct is to defend it

the reminder of "theres a human there" is not "defending" the actions. its a call back to reality, because people on the internet take little things way too fucking seriously all the time.

and yes, this is a little thing. extremely tiny. i promise you'll forget about it in a few days whenever the next thing in the outrage cycle bubbles to the top of your feed/HN

zxcvasd··on Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse
>A world without Microsoft.. no telemetry or backdoors.

thank god microsoft is the only entity on the planet that uses telemetry or violates privacy. get rid of them and we're in a new age!

zxcvasd··on Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure
heres the second paragraph in full:

"Here, amidst the repurposed neoclassical columns and wooden pews of a building constructed to worship a different kind of permanence, lies the physical manifestation of the "virtual" world. We tend to think of the internet as an ethereal cloud, a place without geography or mass. But in this building, the internet has weight. It has heat. It requires electricity, maintenance, and a constant battle against the second law of thermodynamics. As of late 2025, this machine—collectively known as the Wayback Machine—has archived over one trillion web pages.1 It holds 99 petabytes of unique data, a number that expands to over 212 petabytes when accounting for backups and redundancy.3"

can you help my small brain by pointing out where in this paragraph they talk about deduplication?

zxcvasd··on GitHub Incident
>10 hours of outage in a year affecting a team of 10 would cost north of $70k

10 hours x 10 developers x $70 per hour = $7000, not $70000.

zxcvasd··on GitHub Incident
but you can be smug when theres a github incident, and thats hard to put a price on
zxcvasd··on OBS Studio 32.1.0 Beta 1 available
>vMix is Windows-only, so I'd imagine the people it targets don't think about licensing much.

they probably think about money, though. and whether there's a significant difference in features or not.

zxcvasd··on GitHub Incident
if i thought it alone was proof enough, i wouldnt have also included the bit about how i was actively using azure.

its one signal, among others. and in any case, i wasn't trying to prove the parent commenter wrong. i was offering my own signal to the crowd.

zxcvasd··on GitHub Incident
like most rap videos do with cars/jets/mansions, just rent the ram sticks for a few hours!
zxcvasd··on GitHub Incident
having no issues on azure here, seeing no azure incidents on the status page or any of my admin panels
zxcvasd··on 25 Years of Wikipedia
this attitude is exactly why and how those "deranged redditor activists" (we're from the superior hacker news, of course, where there is no controversy or activists or differences in opinion) took and maintain control.
zxcvasd··on OBS Studio 32.1.0 Beta 1 available
what features does vMix have, which OBS doesnt, that would be worth switching to a proprietary and paid program instead of a free, open source one?
zxcvasd··on French Court Orders Popular VPNs to Block More Pirate Sites, Despite Opposition
>it is ridiculous to advocate that the solution to a broken system is circumventing the laws

can you explain precisely why this is a ridiculous concept?

it seems like an extremely reasonable course of action in some situations.

zxcvasd··on French Court Orders Popular VPNs to Block More Pirate Sites, Despite Opposition
vpn, piracy sites, government-level blocking, etc. is all pretty damn on-topic for hacker news.

the "wrong" types of political content, for this site, are the ones that have nothing to do with technology of any kind, and spark no curiosity otherwise.

zxcvasd··on Epic fined €1.1M over manipulating children through in app purchases
The fine was issued in the Netherlands, by a Netherlands government body, regarding kids from the Netherlands.

The predominately spoken language in the Netherlands is not English.

zxcvasd··on SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
years and years and years of ptorrone's posts aren't capitalized, though. it's not like they suddenly decided today, for the purposes of this post, to change their writing style.

in any case, i prefer to decide whether someone has the "emotional maturity of a child" based on what they say, not whether they push their shift key.

zxcvasd··on SparkFun Officially Dropping AdaFruit due to CoC Violation
valuing style over substance is folly.
Page 1 of 2Next →