Hacker News: 63

New comment by 63 in "Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school"

63 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:50:16 +0000

It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups, after all they made this choice. But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.

> A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there is no evidence its software was at fault.

If you work for Palantir, you are writing software that kills people. Software that, in this case, killed 123 children. What salary is worth that?

I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth [0]. I think about it nearly every day.

[0] https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

New comment by 63 in "Developing provably correct Rust code with Verus"

63 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:02:35 +0000

If you found this interesting, you may also be interested to hear about some related projects with similar goals/scopes: Miri[0], Kani[1], and Creusot[2]. There looks to be some significant overlap between Verus, Kani, and Creusot but I've not used any of them so I'll refrain from trying to differentiate them.

[0]https://github.com/rust-lang/miri

[1]https://github.com/model-checking/kani

[2]https://github.com/creusot-rs/creusot

New comment by 63 in "I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s"

63 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 02:09:11 +0000

A bit unfortunate that so many of the interesting bits were left to ai. I would've enjoyed some commentary on why the custom TLS implementation was necessary. Oh well.

Update: found this explanation in a comment at the top of the (surprisingly short) Go file in the linked repo:

The target client is Netscape Communicator 4.51 (both the 40-bit export build and the 128-bit US build) with its clock set to the year 2000.

Go's crypto/tls cannot help: it dropped SSLv3 in Go 1.14, never accepted the SSLv2-compatible ClientHello that Netscape 4 sends, and never had RC4-MD5 or the 40-bit export suites. So this file carries its own tiny SSLv3 server-side implementation on top of stdlib primitives (RSA PKCS#1 v1.5, RC4, DES, 3DES, MD5, SHA-1). The server key is 512-bit RSA so that export clients can encrypt the premaster secret to it directly, without a ServerKeyExchange.

New comment by 63 in "Stop Making TUIs"

63 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 17:27:23 +0000

When you're one of the people who finds TUIs inaccessible, "accessibility" isn't just a downside to be considered, it's table stakes. I think they're fine for one off toys for individuals and small groups, but if you're selling a product to the public, it ought to be accessible first and foremost.

New comment by 63 in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

63 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:23:09 +0000

When you purchase a new laptop, you can choose a different manufacturer who may have a more durable product. When you have a framework, you're forced to buy the same component from the same company that made it poorly in the first place, if it's even in stock.

New comment by 63 in "Self hosted email continues to steeply decline"

63 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:59:09 +0000

Like many others, I gave up on self hosting email when I realized Gmail and Outlook would always mark me as spam, if I even got delivered. DMARC and DKIM did nothing, I think the datacenter IP was just blacklisted. Ostensibly there are ways to get it unblacklisted but man what a pain the ass for the whole process.

New comment by 63 in "The End of Creativity"

63 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:51:14 +0000

Maybe I'm an outlier, but personally if a friend used ai to make me a gift like in TFA, I'd be pretty offended. Using AI shows that you didn't care enough to even think about it on your own. When I see a business use obviously AI generated imagery, I think "I'll stay away from them, they clearly don't care enough to do things the right way." It's a sign of disrespect and a lack of care. I know my partner thinks similarly, as do most of our friends. I don't think creativity is going anywhere long term, though perhaps there will be an awkward adjustment period while older people catch up to the new social norms.

New comment by 63 in "The largest available Minecraft world, totalling 15 TB"

63 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:08:38 +0000

I suspect the real threat wasn't the blacklisting so much as the possibility of lawsuits that could come after

New comment by 63 in "The largest available Minecraft world, totalling 15 TB"

63 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:07:44 +0000

I think broadly I'm in agreement that the censorship via blacklisting threats was unwarranted. That said, I also think we should keep in mind that this isn't some public forum made for adults to have discussions, it's a public block game server. I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children. Personally I think there was potential for some kind of middle ground, but I'm also not mourning the loss of the obsidian nazi builds too hard. The paradox of tolerance and all that. The vast majority of the anarchy spirit is still there, it's just slightly less edgy. It's hard to discuss in good faith because the advocates for lack of censorship here are largely people who want to spam the N word in chat all day or their unwitting allies. Ultimately, whatever the outcome (and I think the current outcome is at least /ok/), I've made peace with the possibility of losing minecraft as a medium for totally free speech. It's just a block game.

New comment by 63 in "Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship"

63 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:25:24 +0000

I agree that it's worth reading the original source and encourage all to do so. My takeaway however was that the majority had a much stronger body of evidence than the dissenters.

New comment by 63 in "Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28"

63 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:45:21 +0000

Many of us work on Java monoliths that started in the 2000s when it was in vogue and we still have to keep them chugging along on Java 8. Personally I'm familiar with all the new features that have come out in the last few years, but for my actual work, java is literally stuck in the past.

New comment by 63 in "Update on Ocean Observatories Initiative"

63 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:44:07 +0000

For those unfamiliar, this implies they would have been able to override a presidential veto, so the administration backtracking is just saving the president the embarassment of a defiant congress/disunified party.

New comment by 63 in "Show HN: Ironwall, a safety-first native programming language and compiler"

63 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 01:11:49 +0000

I'm not sure most systems programmers would agree that a language with GC is suitable for their work.

"No syntactic sugar" and "no macros" sounds like a recipe for boilerplate that will be offputting for many.

Please consider adding some code samples to the front page of documentation, as syntax can be important to people.

I disagree with some other details, but I do think that a low level GC language that doesn't have some of Go's particular warts (particularly nil and error checking) is worth pursuing.

Writing the initial compiler in Typescript is an interesting choice but I suppose that won't matter after it's bootstrapped.

Ultimately it's hard for me to take the project seriously at such an early stage but I don't think it's fundamentally flawed. Good luck

New comment by 63 in "News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development"

63 — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:37:09 +0000

It seems like esp32 boards have taken over the pi's original market as developing for them has gotten easier while pis have gotten more expensive

New comment by 63 in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

63 — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:00:34 +0000

My understanding is that 50% of people in the state of Utah are mormon. I'm not saying there wasn't corruption, but it could very well be pure chance with those odds.

New comment by 63 in "Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back"

63 — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:01:45 +0000

Seems like a lot of entities are "quietly" doing things these days. The llm-ification of every piece of text on the internet is driving me crazy

New comment by 63 in "Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus"

63 — Sat, 16 May 2026 14:16:45 +0000

Even running a port scanner is enough to face disciplinary action at many US colleges. Taking down the network for the entire school for 15 minutes surely deserved more consequences than were doled out here. I'd encourage the author to focus their efforts and talents on something more constructive.

New comment by 63 in "Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?"

63 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:29:32 +0000

Maybe my net worth is too low but I just don't see a value proposition. I don't want daily emails from LLMs and if I need updates on my investments any more often than quarterly (at most), I should probably seek safer investments. I am a bit interested in budgeting tools, but I want them to be completely deterministic. For me at least, financial planning is pretty uneventful and time spent optimizing expenses more than I already have would be better spent seeking a higher paying job.

New comment by 63 in "A Journey Through Infertility"

63 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:43:56 +0000

Another quick thought - so long as we live in a world where children in need of adoption exist, I hope we can make adopting more normal too. If you're in a position to become a parent, why on Earth would adoption not be the default? It seems much better for everyone involved. The fixation on breeding and having children whose genetics perfectly match your own is strange and mildly alarming to me.

New comment by 63 in "A Journey Through Infertility"

63 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:40:10 +0000

There's many reasons why this piece wasn't made for me, so I don't want to begrudge anyone, but I wonder how much we can do to alieve this as a society by normalizing childlessness. I never wanted to have kids, but if I did, I doubt I would've been willing to endure what the author did for it. You can (and honestly I think most people should) live a long and fulfilling life without having kids. Myself and so many of my peers were raised in households that really were not good places for children. I'm of course grateful to exist and indebted to my mother for her countless sacrifices, but it pains me to think about how much happier she might have been if she didn't feel compelled to become a mother. I hope someday having children becomes the exception rather than the norm, because it doesn't feel like something that should be taken lightly. I hope that finding out you're infertile can be met with "Oh, okay. I guess I'll do something else then," the same way that folks with imperfect vision can't be pilots or astronauts and those with tremors can't be surgeons. I'm glad IVF is available for people who want to pursue it, I just want to live in a world where no one has kids "by default" without truly accepting the toll it will take.