Hacker News: lixtra

New comment by lixtra in "Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS"

lixtra — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:24:30 +0000

> You set up an HTTP server that literally sends people the data when they request it. Don't do that if you don't want people to have the data.

By the same argument I could say: If I send you an exploit and you execute it, don’t complain that your setup fell for it. Just don’t download and run random data from the internet.

In reality there’s a consent and expectation beyond the pure technicals.

New comment by lixtra in "Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise "

lixtra — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 05:47:03 +0000

Would that large trial have shown the cancerous effect of smoking? If not, do you then agree that some possible adverse effects were not checked for and could have slipped through?

New comment by lixtra in "Vulnerability reports are not special anymore"

lixtra — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:11:18 +0000

Of course, all the generated code has to reviewed and vetted for by a senior developer. Of course, this has to be re-done every now and then when new classes of vulnerabilities appear that the previous generation didn’t have in mind.

Or do you just trust the AI that was trained on a lot of bogus code?

New comment by lixtra in "I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M"

lixtra — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Hand in your paper when you’re on vacation or even better on a conference in Europe. GDPR will apply. Of course it will take so long that you won’t benefit from a decision for your studies. And one possible outcome is that your college won’t allow submitting from EU and won’t admit EU citizens (similar to US citizens having difficulties opening accounts in EU banks).

New comment by lixtra in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

lixtra — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:05:38 +0000

While there was some intent to cause harm their attempts were amateurish. The actual damage was done by the agent setting up aws infrastructure not on the demands of the owner.

New comment by lixtra in "DAG Workflow Engine"

lixtra — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:10:12 +0000

Ideally, you submit your own project as https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

New comment by lixtra in "Securing a DoD contractor: Finding a multi-tenant authorization vulnerability"

lixtra — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:56:20 +0000

Yes, there are also many other lucrative illegal activities.

New comment by lixtra in "We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities"

lixtra — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:51:02 +0000

> The cleanest mitigation is to return results in a canonical order, such as lexicographic sorting.

And hope that the sorting time cannot be used as a side channel.

New comment by lixtra in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

lixtra — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 06:13:13 +0000

I agree it’s awkward. But I don’t find it creepy per se. It was a tradeoff to which all parties consented.

In one case there was just that one room available stranded in the middle of nowhere.

In other cases it was due to lack of financial resources.

New comment by lixtra in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

lixtra — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:10:35 +0000

Example Finland. Could you end up in a nude Sauna with your superior? Yes, especially if it is same sex.

Example Germany. Which law would be broken? Internal compliance rules, yes, that would be often the case.

New comment by lixtra in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

lixtra — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:25:21 +0000

HN guidelines say: Assume good faith. We should apply it to Sheryl here as well.

In Europe several of my acquaintances shared a bed with their professors/superior for various non-sexual reasons. It’s also a cultural thing.

New comment by lixtra in "CEO of health care software company sentenced for $1B fraud conspiracy"

lixtra — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 05:17:27 +0000

As you would expect from a state press release, not a tabloid publication.

New comment by lixtra in "The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy"

lixtra — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 21:58:07 +0000

The 4% rule is considered safe for a 30 year retirement period. So at 50 you might want to withdraw a little less.

New comment by lixtra in "Adding Breadcrumbs to a Rails Application"

lixtra — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:33:25 +0000

Somehow this code lacks the magic I‘m used from rails:

    class BooksController < ApplicationController
    def show
        @book = Book.find(params[:id])
        add_breadcrumb("Home", path: root_path)
        add_breadcrumb("Books", path: books_path)
        add_breadcrumb(@book.title)
      end
    end

Only the title is specific to the show method. Home should be set by the application controller and Books by the books controller code.

New comment by lixtra in "Sj.h: A tiny little JSON parsing library in ~150 lines of C99"

lixtra — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 04:57:03 +0000

Layer8 DID the thing though, skimmed through the code and thought about security issues.

New comment by lixtra in "The madness of SaaS chargebacks"

lixtra — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 19:25:56 +0000

The requested feature is more like list-unsubscribe headers for mailing lists[1]. Instead of categorizing the mail as spam (blocking) you send a clean unsubscribe back to the sender.

[1] https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/insights/list-unsubscribe

New comment by lixtra in "SQL needed structure"

lixtra — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 08:51:03 +0000

Yes, you could use union. But then you have to pad the columns of the other tables with NULLs to arrive at the same output and carefully count. And we all hate counting.

New comment by lixtra in "Passkeys and Modern Authentication"

lixtra — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:58:43 +0000

You might even split them so that k out of n trusted people are needed to restore them.

For example https://shamir.securitytools.io/

New comment by lixtra in "Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers"

lixtra — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 10:14:30 +0000

A naive approach could still leak information through side channels. E.g. if you search regularly for foobar, the answer might suddenly get slower if foobar appears more in the document base.

Depending on the context it could be relevant.

New comment by lixtra in "Kubernetes is a symptom, not a solution"

lixtra — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 01:26:02 +0000

Maybe thought provoking. But sad to read ai garbage. It’s easy to imagine a better world. But you also need to provide a way to reach it. For example a lot of things are wrong with docker. But it enables us to run yesterday’s software in the cloud. Tomorrow’s software is not written yet.