Hacker News: gradschool

One woman's Tesla was remotely controlled by an abusive ex-partner

gradschool — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:16:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/09/how-one-womans-tesla-was-remotely-controlled-and-harass-by-her-abusive-ex-partner-ntwnfb

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626052

Points: 74

# Comments: 34

Ask HN: How to Relicense an Old Project

gradschool — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:38:18 +0000

I've heard from someone who wants to revive an old abandoned project of mine and asks that I change the license from GPLv3 to LGPL or MIT. I'm willing to do that but I took down the original repo from github a long time ago and there seems to be only a fork that still exists. What's the right way to make it publicly known that I'm changing the license?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391444

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: One SSH key or many SSH keys?"

gradschool — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:26:39 +0000

I use a distinct key for each remote account. Although it's meant to be infeasible to infer a private key from a public key, distinct keys give me another layer of defence in depth in case an attacker ever finds a way to do it. Another advantage is that I can use passphrases selectively. For example, if I have an unpriviledged remote account with shell access disabled because it's used only for proxy tunnelling, it's less important to have a passphrase protecting its key than it would be for a remote root account, and not having one could be more convenient.

New comment by gradschool in "A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life"

gradschool — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 16:46:24 +0000

A great science fiction premise could be that a technologically advanced adversary genetically engineers mirror life people to work as spies and saboteurs at wiping out the rest of the population so they can have the world for themselves, but they get rumbled by dogs specially trained to sniff them out or various other means that might surprise and delight the reader. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the difference between the smell of an orange and a lemon is down to the chirality of a single molecule.

New comment by gradschool in "How Gödel's Proof Works (2020)"

gradschool — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:11:06 +0000

I'm assuming a finite alphabet and a finitely axiomatizable proof system per convention. I can't think of an uncountable set of propositions in which each can be written as a finite string of symbols, so that's what I was missing. Thank you for clearing this up for me.

New comment by gradschool in "How Gödel's Proof Works (2020)"

gradschool — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:25:23 +0000

I'm aware that very smart people have thought carefully about all this, but I still can't help thinking that this argument is unnecessarily complicated. It seems to me that a proof is something that can be written down as a finite string of symbols, so any proof system admits only countably many proofs. On the other hand, it's easy to make up an example of an uncountable set of propositions. That's too many for each of them to have a proof, so some of them must be unprovable. What am I missing?

New comment by gradschool in "Mathematics Without Mathematicians"

gradschool — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:58:52 +0000

Being obtuse comes effortlessly to me, I'm afraid. My comment pertains specifically to the kind mathematics that has no applications as a rebuttal to what I read as the author's main claim it will inevitably decline as a human endeavor. Saying that, I believe that AI has great potential to advance engineering.

New comment by gradschool in "Mathematics Without Mathematicians"

gradschool — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:40:33 +0000

I don't move in these circles but the way I picture it is that higher mathematics in its purest form has no applications but is rather a medium of creative expression among a select few. How is AI generating voluminous opaque proofs of esoteric results so different from generating millions of hours of music nobody likes or has time to hear that we think the former is world-changing while the latter is just slop?

New comment by gradschool in "Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified"

gradschool — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:11:02 +0000

I got a UGREEN DXP6800 about two weeks ago on which I installed FreeBSD, and was just noticing today how slow the USB is when I saw this article mentioning a possible explanation (like ten times slower than when I plug the same external SSD into another machine). Have you noticed USB bandwidth issues in your setup or is it likely just some misconfiguration on my part?

New comment by gradschool in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

gradschool — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:52:08 +0000

> Imagine if border guards seize money willy-nilly.

no need to imagine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

New comment by gradschool in "Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM"

gradschool — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:05:31 +0000

> This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures.

Peripheral to your comment, there is an argument against AI generated CSAM that no one seems to be making so allow me. AI will do the same for CSAM as it has already done for copyright laundering. That is, it will enable its distributors to train their models on real CSAM while obscuring the training material. A legal regime that permits unrestricted distribution of AI generated CSAM incentivizes actual abuse as a source of training material. If one opposes legal prohibitions on free speech grounds, then at a minimum there should be an audit requirement incumbent on AI generated CSAM distributors to document their process in sufficient detail as to establish that they haven't used actual CSAM for training, similarly to the way porn distributors are required to document that their models are of legal age.

New comment by gradschool in "Solving Santa Claus Puzzle"

gradschool — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:09:19 +0000

The problem as stated seems ill posed to me. If Santa wakes up when either quorum is ready, then it's never true that both are waiting unless they arrive simultaneously. Either that's a zero probability event that can be safely ignored, or it needs to be handled by arbitration in some form. Attempting to resolve contention by giving preference to one or the other shifts the problem to that of determining whether they're close enough to be considered simultaneous, with edge cases needing to be resolved by arbitration, and so on.

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: Advice for first-year CS students?"

gradschool — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:47:28 +0000

Learning stuff can be done on your own any time. The best use of your time in college is to cultivate professional contacts. Keep an eye out for professors who appear to be in charge of research projects with outside funding and volunteer to help out by doing whatever nobody wants to do, even if it's unpaid and even if it cuts into your study time. Be the first person that comes to mind when the professor's high flying industry friends tell him they wish they could find some bright highly motivated intern. If you don't think you need to try this hard this soon to find a job I hope you're independently wealthy.

New comment by gradschool in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

gradschool — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:26:11 +0000

Not to be alarmist, but suppose a galactic federation judges that humans in their current state of development will pose a danger to other civilizations when they imminently attain warp capability, so as a safety precaution they need to be confined to their planet for at least a millennium. An agent of the federation posing as human manipulates the population into allowing 100,000 satellites to be deployed. With that done, federation scientists solve the many-body problem for the exact necessary speed and trajectory of a small meteor to shatter one of the satellites such that some of its fragments precisely target its neighboring satellites, and so on, while the rest get kicked up into higher orbits. Life goes on but any enterprise that depends on penetrating the debris field becomes infeasible.

New comment by gradschool in "New Sweden: the US's long-lost 'secret' colony"

gradschool — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:55:50 +0000

I blame it all on one guy. What if that plonker who broke ranks on the English side during the battle of Hastings after the English had successfully held the high ground against the French all day stayed in bed that morning, and William the Conqueror just had to bugger off back where he came from? The British Isles turn away from Europe and develop stronger ties with Scandinavian countries over the ensuing centuries. A kingdom of the north eventually extends to encompass Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and the Iroquois confederation well before Columbus. With first contact happening at a time when neither side has any technological advantage, the relationship becomes more of an alliance than a colonization. I don't know how to extrapolate further except to imagine that the world looks very different.

New comment by gradschool in "WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)"

gradschool — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:52:19 +0000

Story time. In college 40+ years ago my housemate wanted to impress this girl by inviting her to write an important paper of hers with a looming deadline on his computer with WordStar instead of her usual methodology involving a typewriter. She was using WordStar comfortably in less than five minutes but being completely new to it was unaware of the practice of periodically saving one's work. Around three in the morning it crashed and took all of her work with it. I was told she burst into tears and had left when I woke up the next morning to find my housemate busily trying to retype it from her handwritten notes.

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: How to introduce cloud computing to high schoolers?"

gradschool — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:33:50 +0000

Inform them that you've put the answer key to their upcoming final exam on a poorly secured EC2 instance or s3 bucket. This technique serves a variety of students in different ways. Those who have no idea what you mean get a valuable introduction to independent study. Those who have the chops might up their game enough to crack it. Those who are rich enough to hire a smart kid to do it for them impart a valuable lesson to the group on the nature of privilege. Those who are neither smart nor rich are incentivized to stay in school. To top it off, make the final exam consist of thought provoking essay questions whose answer key takes the form of detailed notes and citations.

New comment by gradschool in "The One Dollar Counterfeiter"

gradschool — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:30:05 +0000

A small leak can sink a ship. The fake dollars weren't knowingly accepted. If public confidence in the value of money is lost, we're all in big trouble. The Secret Service was right to pursue the case zealously.

New comment by gradschool in "Newcomb's Paradox Needs a Demon"

gradschool — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:33:26 +0000

I don't know about y'all, but this paradox was resolved to my complete satisfaction in a blog post some years ago, I believe by Scott Aaronson, though I can't find the link. If the predictor has such a good success rate, then it must be simulating people's brains, but since it's not always right, the simulation isn't perfect. The best strategy for playing this game therefore is to look for indications as to whether I'm the real me or the simulation when the question is posed to me, and choose accordingly. Am I floating in a sensory deprivation tank being asked my choice by a disembodied voice with no recollection of how I got there and no memory of my childhood? In that case maybe I'm the simulation, so my answer is that I'll choose just one box. Is it an ordinary day of my life and a plausible setting with all of my faculties and recollections intact? Then I'll assume simulated me had my back and take both boxes.

New comment by gradschool in "Ask HN: (Your) Request for Startups?"

gradschool — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:32:10 +0000

inspired by a recent thread on here, a usability testing service for apps and websites where the testers are old people