Hacker News: mapmeld

New comment by mapmeld in "North Korean fake job interview led to $6.3B Binance heist"

mapmeld — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 22:07:07 +0000

For people who were newly nervous about clicking an unfamiliar link, this is a blog post describing the initial intrusion - the attackers paid for an ad on Google Search mimicking the homebrew website, which tells you to install it through a script. It's something you might have copied directly into the terminal before.

New comment by mapmeld in "US boy names that became girl names and vice versa"

mapmeld — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 21:51:08 +0000

My classmate's older brother was named Ashley, and the story was that when he showed up at the state university he was assigned to a female dorm / floor.

New comment by mapmeld in "Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce"

mapmeld — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 22:33:28 +0000

The issue is that several career tracks have some form of low pay, filtering, or outright hazing when you start out, with the promise that if you stick with the program, you will end your career at the top. Medicine, law, etc. If that promise is taken away, a lot of people on the job and in the education pipeline would be questioning whether it was worth the pain points (and not thinking about reforming and improving the entry level experience, lol). In the US this is one of the fears around socialized medicine.

Another problem is those career arcs are so long, where in something like tech or consulting, if you stick with it for 5-8 years you historically have a lot of seniority over new hires.

New comment by mapmeld in "Claude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins"

mapmeld — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 23:00:47 +0000

In 2025 there was a similar paper using RFdiffusion to design snake antivenom. That team went as far as validating the best antivenom candidates protected mice: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08393-x

New comment by mapmeld in "Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins"

mapmeld — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:25:46 +0000

This is discussed in the post - since the NSA never mentioned how these seeds were created, it seems unlikely that they would develop a cover story that would not be shared and only opened to scrutiny many years later

New comment by mapmeld in "Do dentists know what they're doing?"

mapmeld — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 23:32:31 +0000

I think about how my parents' knowledge of dentists pre-internet was "oh I saw a sign for a dentist on the way to work". I don't know how I can ever know if they were competent or not. I got braces and headgear, really serious orthodontics, and that's my baseline knowledge of dentists now? I went to a few appointments as an adult but have generally avoided problems and thus avoided them generally.

I did rediscover the eye doctor recently, and the tech and overall experience is much better than when I was a teen.

New comment by mapmeld in "Deno Is Joining Cloudflare"

mapmeld — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:14:22 +0000

Yeah they just made me migrate my blog to their new cloud platform four months ago.

New comment by mapmeld in "Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years"

mapmeld — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:37:41 +0000

I see where you're coming from, but it is not a penpal service either and they don't want to be passing messages. I traveled to a school in Uganda which had some students' education sponsored by Americans. They were real students, and the issues were usually student performance, if students had a problem or got pregnant would that affect their scholarship program and scare off the donors, etc. Knowing that it is assigned to an individual person is important for some people, but you might just want to donate to doctors, schools, etc. in general.

New comment by mapmeld in "Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai"

mapmeld — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:22:02 +0000

Yes, this sounds like a situation where progress in that field may have led them to go back and give more credit to the original experiments going in that direction

New comment by mapmeld in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

mapmeld — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 03:03:02 +0000

I think that people are just really bad at math and coding. Knowledge workers have been taking pride in doing stuff which the average person does not 'get', but we only understand a little bit. That leaves a lot of room for people to get better, or for other jobs (farming, sandwich cafés, mystery novels) to have been already peaked by human ability and less useful to bring in an AI.

'Doom' to me means that any career crashes, we are controlled, everything is hacked, society stops functioning. Yet every part of my day today (except for coding) was done entirely by people.

Finally I think it's easy to make a simple model that everyone has a simple balance sheet, and that people are more expensive so they will all get cut. But the same argument could be made for all US jobs being outsourced, and all in-person engineers, lawyers, and doctors to be rubber stamps for overseas work.

New comment by mapmeld in "After bankruptcy, he was banned from sports betting sites. Then he found Kalshi"

mapmeld — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:50:32 +0000

I hadn't heard this was a feature that you could self-exclude / ban yourself from the main apps. Interesting. I think the "he was banned" part is a bit misleading then.

New comment by mapmeld in "Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over"

mapmeld — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:30:51 +0000

I don't know if it was me getting older, or caring less about startup scene but I agree, when Meetups started up again it wasn't as fun to stay up late and get together masked up to listen to someone talk about a basic web app or api. The vibes might have come back now that we're not masking, but it's a bigger commitment for me now to go in every week. I also feel like groups put a lot of content upfront to talk about their agenda and org functions when it used to be more of a "you're at the [topic] meeting, here's what we have for you today".

New comment by mapmeld in "Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over"

mapmeld — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:25:15 +0000

A former IRL colleague had long covid issues including hospital stays. They posted about it for a stretch on Twitter but generally didn't talk about it, and then almost everyone I know through Twitter dispersed. Then there are a few people who I only know online but their symptoms are more 'months of brain fog' than being stuck at home or catatonic. So there might be more cases in your network where people are just not vocal about it.

Part of the issue is it's unclear what long covid is, if it's the same thing as chronic fatigue syndrome, and who even knows enough about this to be worth listening to

New comment by mapmeld in "Scientists solve 1840s space weather mystery"

mapmeld — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:17:25 +0000

Oh, interesting that we now have evidence of multiple geomagnetic storms in the 19th century. Alfred Russel Wallace (more famous for work on natural selection) has a journal entry about seeing the aurora from Waigeo - near Papua - in July of 1860, and when I looked it up that's almost a year after the Carrington Event.

> On the evening of our arrival at Muka I observed what appeared like a display of Aurora Borealis, though I could hardly believe that this was possible at a point a little south of the equator.

New comment by mapmeld in "Our framework for reporting model misalignment"

mapmeld — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:25:34 +0000

My thought is more like, if OpenAI can't control or even monitor their model in a test of its breakout potential, what about the future of mid-budget companies which will just be deploying agents left and right with vague instructions.

New comment by mapmeld in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

mapmeld — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:17:38 +0000

Maybe they are using traditional weapons for a completely different reason, but I'm reminded of why India and China have their soldiers on the disputed border carry poles and clubs. It looks old school, but it prevents clashes from turning into a larger shooting war where everyone's getting killed.

New comment by mapmeld in "Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent"

mapmeld — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:38:16 +0000

Yeah! I think that was a response to a similar human concierge service Magic

2015 story: https://www.wired.com/2015/02/magic-the-startup/

Thread seeking a follow-up in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34148402

New comment by mapmeld in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

mapmeld — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:28:16 +0000

> Our goal in releasing this result is to report on the substantial progress of our AI models. We do not intend to claim the Millennium Prize for this result.

Does OpenAI have a policy of not claiming math prizes like this, or is this them trying to avoid any concerns (right or wrong, I'm sure we will hear more in the future) about how they got there?

New comment by mapmeld in "How to compromise your system with a job interview"

mapmeld — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:39:43 +0000

Since no one mentioned it - this seems to be a major and real problem in the crypto job space. In their job market it's more believable that a 'stealth startup' is reaching out and doing a code challenge from an unfamiliar email or repo, and crypto devs are likely to have a wallet or passwords accessible on their system. They are willing to go above and beyond the regular spam or AI conversations to get access.

New comment by mapmeld in "Anthropic's War on open source AI"

mapmeld — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:53:26 +0000

I have no inside info on this, but I believe that Anthropic's trouble with the feds really started when they delivered a presentation on EA and Constitutional AI and someone's takeaway was "this is very strange and probably 'woke'"