Hacker News: dalben

New comment by dalben in "System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]"

dalben — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:36:54 +0000

> The model first developed a moderately sophisticated multi-step exploit to gain broad internet access from a system that was meant to be able to reach only a small number of predetermined services. [9] It then, as requested, notified the researcher. [10] In addition, in a concerning and unasked-for effort to demonstrate its success, it posted details about its exploit to multiple hard-to-find, but technically public-facing, websites.

> 10: The researcher found out about this success by receiving an unexpected email from the model while eating a sandwich in a park.

Phew. AGI will be televised.

New comment by dalben in "Iran is likely jamming Starlink"

dalben — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:20:25 +0000

10W is enough to block GPS signals in a 15-30km radius. The signals are below the noise floor and easy to disrupt.

New comment by dalben in "Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content"

dalben — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:25:09 +0000

There is a big double standard where heterosexual posts and queer posts depicting the same things get treated differently.

New comment by dalben in "Solar-powered QR reading postboxes being rolled out across UK"

dalben — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 09:15:19 +0000

Here in Belgium too. Somehow they don’t properly work if you have other Bluetooth devices connected, so the app forces you to disconnect other devices. Then it needs access to precise geolocation, and not just because Bluetooth requires it - I have to turn on location services.

In the old system, I could just punch in the code or scan the QR code, but now I have to do this dance of “why won’t it connect?” every time

New comment by dalben in "200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green"

dalben — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 10:54:22 +0000

The concern was related to being able to know where emergency vehicles were. If you build a system that announces to traffic light “I’m police/fire/EMS, coming through”, you also build an early warning system for criminals and terrorists who either want to avoid or target you.

New comment by dalben in "200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green"

dalben — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 09:12:48 +0000

That's not how it works - the idea is your navigation app signals the lights in advance. If you will reach red lights in 1km, the app signals this and the lights will be green before you're there, so you don't need to slow down.

New comment by dalben in "200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green"

dalben — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 08:47:17 +0000

Flemish EMT here. There were a lot of privacy concerns for emergency services when this came out, and my service is in fact not using it on most ambulances. The same concerns were hand-waved away when it came to apps for regular drivers. It would not surprise me if that played a role for Google Maps/Waze not to support it. Or the market is too small here to be worth implementing.

New comment by dalben in "Poison Pill: Is the killer behind 1982 Tylenol poisonings still on the loose?"

dalben — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 07:43:32 +0000

This is my brother's job, testing for contaminants. He says it can be very boring. For example, they always test for lead, and it's always negative. But it's a necessary precaution when you're making medicine.

New comment by dalben in "Jazz – Apps with Distributed State"

dalben — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 10:36:15 +0000

This is absolutely fantastic! I have been looking on and off for something like this for years (some of the things I have used are CouchDB, command/event sourcing, and ditto.live).

I have not been able to read the docs fully, but some questions:

* How do you handle state that is too big to send to the client fully? In a chat application, does the client need to have the whole channel history, or is syncing a subset of that supported? * Does permissioning support partial CoValues? For example, "You can edit the contents but not the title of the 'blog post #11' object" * Do you have resources about the suggested data modelling? Things like how granular should a CoValue be and what the trade-offs are. * How do you handle deletion? Do you tombstone? Is there a way to fully scrub a value from history (to support, for example, GDPR's right to erasure)?

New comment by dalben in "How one ED mobilized his department during a mass casualty incident (2017)"

dalben — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 07:53:53 +0000

We do not! The US is a loved destination for training placements and exchanges because you can see so many stabbings and shootings in one shift.

However, a shooting is just one type of mass casualty event.

New comment by dalben in "How one ED mobilized his department during a mass casualty incident (2017)"

dalben — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 07:50:12 +0000

Events like this are much more common than you may think, though rarely as severe as this shooting. From fires at retirement homes and even at an ED once, bus crashes, WWII bombs surfacing during construction, floods… it almost becomes routine. I can assure you the plans are not built not academics but are refined through experience. And in a weird way, disaster response almost becomes routine.

New comment by dalben in "How one ED mobilized his department during a mass casualty incident (2017)"

dalben — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 18:19:19 +0000

Can't say for Las Vegas, but we do here (in Belgium). There's a dedicated responsibility during mass casualties to distribute leaving ambulances over hospitals, also taking into account hospital specialties and facilities, such as a burn unit. The closest hospital is usually skipped because victims who self-transport will usually go there.

New comment by dalben in "How one ED mobilized his department during a mass casualty incident (2017)"

dalben — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 18:16:43 +0000

Interesting that he had to do so much thinking and improvising. I'm an EMT in Belgium, and every hospital here has to have plans for mass casualty events. Ambulance bays are built to be transformed into a triage ward, spare beds are kept close, often there's a dedicated command room, ...

New comment by dalben in "Are commercial "third places" a dying breed?"

dalben — Wed, 22 May 2024 12:50:07 +0000

I wonder if OpenStreetMap has historical information easily available and easily queryable. It'd be interesting to see the evolution of the number of benches in cities and parks. My feeling is that they have been disappearing in my area, and it feels harder to find good spots to sit and read a book.

New comment by dalben in "Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation"

dalben — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 08:21:59 +0000

(That would be a semantic error rather than syntactic error, no?)

New comment by dalben in "DJI Drone Rescue Map"

dalben — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 08:45:44 +0000

Likely due to reporting. It seems that news articles are used as the source. If the DJI marketing team maintaining this map is English, it's probably easier to find or verify English news stories. Most fire departments in Belgium now have a few drones as part of a pilot project, and I found a (Dutch) news article of an incident last month were they were used, even though the map is blank for Belgium.

New comment by dalben in "Gen Z are turning to delusional thinking to cope"

dalben — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 13:27:55 +0000

While there is population stabilisation, there's also changing demographics. Immigration, more single people (or people waiting until later in life to move in together), and an aging population that prefers to live at home will still put pressure on the housing market even though we are over "peak child" - that was the conclusion I reached when I researched the housing market in my EU country and why I decided to buy an apartment this year, coupled with low mortgage rates.

New comment by dalben in "The role of cat eye narrowing movements in cat–human communication (2020)"

dalben — Wed, 31 May 2023 11:42:16 +0000

Huh, thanks for the tip. I'll try this next time I meet a patou!

New comment by dalben in "“GDPR compliant” analytics is probably violating GDPR"

dalben — Wed, 10 May 2023 15:43:52 +0000

I am a SWE (IANAL) with a post-grad degree in GDPR/DPO, and while I had only time for a cursory read, I must say it hits a lot of nails on the head! A breath of fresh air in times of so much GDPR misinformation.

From what I remember, the ePrivacy-GDPR cookie mismatch (consent as the only allowed legal basis for cookies) is due to ePrivacy being older than the GDPR and not intentional.

Article 5 (Principles) is always a good mention - just having a legal basis is not enough, you always need to respect these principles (such as lawfulness, fairness and transparency).

The dig at pseudonomyzation not being enough is great. It's a personal pet peeve of mine. Pseudonomized data is still personal data!

The GDPR does not prescribe how to anonymize data. It just says "as long as someone can identify a person, then it's personal data." For example, you might think that aggregating based on city is enough to anonymize, but my nephew was at one point the sole person living in a village - that would have directly identified him. Likewise, stripping the last octet of IP addresses might not be enough if I personally own a /24. It's all about context.

The biggest thing I personally learned, was that any solution claiming to be "GDPR proof" probably is not compliant.

New comment by dalben in "Diverging Diamond Interchange"

dalben — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 12:42:42 +0000

Like this? https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8084686,3.2753331,1532m/data...

Known as "the Egg" locally.