Hacker News: kmoser

New comment by kmoser in "Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure""

kmoser — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 17:23:59 +0000

That's on par with this (apocryphal) translation of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" <=> "The vodka was good, but the meat was rotten."

New comment by kmoser in "The quirky personal homepages of programming language creators"

kmoser — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 04:44:16 +0000

It's easy with Firefox: Right-click frame, select This Frame > Open Frame in New Tab.

But I get your point; there should be a one-click link to these pages, especially since some of them don't allow themselves to be opened in an iframe.

New comment by kmoser in "The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist"

kmoser — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:06:48 +0000

You would think. But that's not always the case: Florida residents face driver’s license denials over mismatched documents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FSwv_D8gxw (Now, it's Florida, which may partly explain the idiocracy.)

New comment by kmoser in "Coin-sized device can hack a Boeing 737"

kmoser — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:00:57 +0000

> In their paper, the researchers outline a range of fixes for the vulnerability they've uncovered, starting with removing the connector in the vulnerable port altogether, or plugging it with epoxy.

If you can safely disable the port completely, that implies the port is not needed to begin with. Is that really true? What's the purpose for it?

New comment by kmoser in "The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist"

kmoser — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 05:39:57 +0000

That is trading one problem for another: when the name on your birth certificate doesn't match the name on your government issued ID, certain other government entities tend to deny you services.

New comment by kmoser in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

kmoser — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:40:35 +0000

They see it as a win because you've still been using their site for a decade now, and every time they advertise their app there's still a non-zero chance you'll relent, but if they stop pushing their app, that chance drops to zero.

The only winning move is not to play.

New comment by kmoser in "Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT"

kmoser — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:04:40 +0000

I have a framed copy on my office wall of this story from the NY Times, August 13, 1981: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/13/business/business-digest-...

New comment by kmoser in "How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story"

kmoser — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:26:48 +0000

I worked on a project in 1990/1991 (pre-WWW) that involved making the phone book electronically accessible. For development my client purchased CD-ROMs containing the White Pages from the entire NYC tri-state area (NY, NJ, and CT), making it trivial for me to search by name and/or number. Once the web had been around for a few years, reverse-lookup became commonplace.

New comment by kmoser in "$580M undersea cable rerouted to avoid the grave of Dobby the House Elf"

kmoser — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:35:17 +0000

Why wouldn't those various interests just complain about the next area being surveyed? Why would they stop after the first?

New comment by kmoser in "Banksy works cost public almost £150k"

kmoser — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:25:18 +0000

Destroying art generates income for the workers paid to destroy it.

New comment by kmoser in "50k Boat Names"

kmoser — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:23:07 +0000

How about Titanic II?

New comment by kmoser in "Banksy works cost public almost £150k"

kmoser — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 17:29:43 +0000

The government has appropriated Banksy's artworks (e.g. the police sentry box), and could sell them. If the sale of those artworks exceeds the cost of cleaning others, then the government has netted a profit, which takes the monetary argument off the table.

New comment by kmoser in "A domain can now say it is for sale, in DNS"

kmoser — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:23:21 +0000

> Remove it when the domain is no longer for sale. The convention has no “not for sale” value; absence is the only way to say no.

Since most domains that are for sale don't currently have such a record, it would be wrong to assume they are not for sale. Therefore, absence of such a record does not explicitly mean "not for sale." It's no different from a house: a "for sale" sign in the front yard means it's for sale, but lack of a sign doesn't mean it's not for sale; it could mean the owner doesn't wish to advertise that way, or at all.

New comment by kmoser in "Let the machines in"

kmoser — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 23:02:04 +0000

The author exhibits the same starry-eyed ideals that people tend to get when trying to explain away the simplicity of designing an "intelligent" agent (for any definition of "intelligent"): they think they can just provide the machine with basic, unquestionable axioms that should underpin the core, and everything will somehow work itself out from there; and at the very least, if those core beliefs are never violated, we've got ourselves a pretty safe system.

Well, as we can see, it's devilishly difficult to prevent a machine from violating those core beliefs. But the problem is, even those core beliefs have nuance and exception: war is bad? Not if you run an arms company. Humans are valuable? Not if you're an insurance company who can make more money on human misery than on human health. And the list goes on. Statistics won't take care of it when a machine makes a decision based on some internal logic that it can squeeze out of our vague rules.

New comment by kmoser in "Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude"

kmoser — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:48:10 +0000

> 1970s personal computers were "controlled" by the likes of Richard Stallman.

Who are you talking about? Richard Stallman is all about allowing anybody to freely run their own software on their own hardware.

New comment by kmoser in "Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude"

kmoser — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:25:52 +0000

Today's state-of-the-art AI systems are the equivalent of late 1970s personal computers: bulky and expensive, but wildly more powerful than what came before. And look what happened: tech improved by orders of magnitude, and eventually computers were tiny and cheap.

I predict the same will happen with AI: certainly the latest and greatest will still command a steep price (yes, supercomputers are still a thing) but for most people who just need something reasonably fast and powerful, cheap (or free) AI will do the trick, especially when run locally.

So no, the aristocracy won't have a lock on the technology because tech is always being democratized. Until arbitrary computation itself is outlawed (and yes, I know, governments and industry are always inching us closer to that), we'll be ok.

New comment by kmoser in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

kmoser — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 02:08:40 +0000

> When the article says "he was found guilty" what does that even mean? "found" implies there was evidence.

IANAL but to be "found guilty" means you are determined to be, in the eyes of the law, guilty. Actual guilt is irrelevant. As for evidence, there's the "matching" username (which, we all now know, didn't really match).

New comment by kmoser in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

kmoser — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 02:04:53 +0000

The prosecution certainly could have done a comparison, but it seems they just went with the matching username and figured it was a slam-dunk (which it turned out to be). It's very possible the defense was never even made aware of those photos, and thus had no recourse for challenging them.

New comment by kmoser in "How to write English prose (2023)"

kmoser — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:24:24 +0000

Some people enjoy reading flowery words and intricately nuanced language; those who enjoy writing in that style should continue to do so, and reap the rewards of a similarly inclined audience.

New comment by kmoser in "Brazilian farmers tokenized dairy cows to get loans, bypassing bank limits"

kmoser — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:49:16 +0000

I wonder what opportunities exist for a malicious actor to intercept the data flow and substitute it with their own, either for the purposes of devaluing someone else's cow or to increase the value of their own--or even to generate fake cow biometrics, feed them directly to devices, and pretend you have a real, live herd.