Hacker News: foobiekr

New comment by foobiekr in "SpaceX S-1"

foobiekr — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:58:42 +0000

A shocking number of the neocloud teams have exactly one skill set: raising money.

A few of them also have locked in power agreements.

Almost none of them have the expertise to build anything. Some of them are even outsourcing that to geezer tech and consulting shops.

It's not going to go well.

New comment by foobiekr in "SpaceX S-1"

foobiekr — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:56:26 +0000

No. xAI is buying Nvidia, not using Tesla chips.

New comment by foobiekr in "Apple unveils new accessibility features"

foobiekr — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:18:04 +0000

Are you implying that it might be exploited by unethical tech bros looking to build data sets?

New comment by foobiekr in "I’ve joined Anthropic"

foobiekr — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:14:36 +0000

Anyone who would voluntarily work for Musk when he went obviously has things going on that aren't great.

New comment by foobiekr in "The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers"

foobiekr — Tue, 19 May 2026 05:20:43 +0000

The tech companies will just use face recognition, tracing, gait recognition, unique properties (like scratches) etc. etc. for the same purpose, same way they pioneered browser fingerprinting.

New comment by foobiekr in "What Is Date:Italy?"

foobiekr — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:26:42 +0000

Attacks in general are all rare in practice in the grand scheme of the internet. So?

New comment by foobiekr in "What Is Date:Italy?"

foobiekr — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:25:45 +0000

It’s html. Which is code that your browser executes.

Millions of routers are compromised. BGP attacks happen. Anything http stands out as an interesting target for injection.

This position is foolish. It’s not a major ask to enable https.

New comment by foobiekr in "What Is Date:Italy?"

foobiekr — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:24:02 +0000

>I guarantee you're not getting "all kinds of MITM injections" on this block of text

You actually can’t guarantee anything of the sort. BGP hijacks are real.

New comment by foobiekr in "Colossus: The Forbin Project"

foobiekr — Sun, 17 May 2026 15:08:04 +0000

The film is very much better than the book. The sequel books, however, are not good. At all.

New comment by foobiekr in "First public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on Apple M5"

foobiekr — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:19:28 +0000

? can you expand?

New comment by foobiekr in "S-100 Virtual Workbench"

foobiekr — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:31:56 +0000

You could attach an H-19 to an H-8 and play advent on H-DOS.

The first computer I ever used. I was so young I didn't know how to spell "bird."

Hard sectored drives!

New comment by foobiekr in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

foobiekr — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:45:41 +0000

A lot of people suspected that most programs were absurdly redundant and for a very long time. The real issue is that the languages do not really allow for producing code that can be easily shared. Some of the functional languages do, but mostly in ways that are completely irrelevant and useless in practice for such a goal.

Programmers writing their fiftieth mostly identical CRUD handler may not have noticed but a lot of other people did.

New comment by foobiekr in "AI is breaking two vulnerability cultures"

foobiekr — Fri, 08 May 2026 22:21:09 +0000

I don't disagree with that, but my point is that Rust will not really solve vulnerabilities.

New comment by foobiekr in "AI is breaking two vulnerability cultures"

foobiekr — Fri, 08 May 2026 21:40:41 +0000

I am looking at the results of a mass vulnerability scan as I type this. Half of the bugs in one case are in fact (binary) parser errors for hand-written parsers. These really should not exist in any language - but in C it's particularly bad. Kaitai Struct or something similar would broadly have prevented these. Rust would help here, but less than a parser generator (because it could automate error checking insertion for things that aren't just out of bound access).

However, half of the vulnerabilities are logic errors in terms of what I would call RBAC enforcement, incorrect access permissions, and so on. Rust won't help at all with any of these.

New comment by foobiekr in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

foobiekr — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:14:22 +0000

I’m so confused. At least in tech all the big companies I work with are hiring in Poland because it is about the same as India after losses around fake hiring and the quality averages better.

It is absolutely a huge offshoring target at least for the US.

New comment by foobiekr in "Inkscape 1.4.4"

foobiekr — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:43:19 +0000

My wife makes extensive use of inkstitch and loves it.

New comment by foobiekr in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

foobiekr — Sun, 03 May 2026 21:31:57 +0000

This. The fact that the ai projects have to spin so hard should be tipping people off. But for some reason it doesn’t.

New comment by foobiekr in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

foobiekr — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:12:19 +0000

Agriculture is used to grow _food_.

New comment by foobiekr in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

foobiekr — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:00:17 +0000

Explicitly and openly not acting in good faith.

New comment by foobiekr in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

foobiekr — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:45:54 +0000

It is well known at the companies that I've worked for that there is no good faith at all in the process and it's basically ritual to justify the application.

Since they are clearly violating the law, how can I report this?