Hacker News: mapmeld

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'"

New comment by mapmeld in "We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility"

mapmeld — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:36:10 +0000

I have to agree; even if they are getting regular 20th century out-of-print books, is that going to add a significant percentage to their training data?

I can only think of it being a 'low-background steel' situation where they want to locate original, non-digitized text for validation or knowledge bases.

Folding Prion Protein with AI

mapmeld — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:22:31 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.georeactor.com/prionbio-1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49253354

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mapmeld in "What Happened to HackerOne?"

mapmeld — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:27:27 +0000

From what I've seen in the bounty-related subreddits, AI is flooding bug bounty inboxes with low-value or meaningless reports, or straight-up hallucinations when people use smaller models (to turn a profit, you make lots of low-value bug reports and see who pays out).

This has a negative effect on humans doing their work with or without LLMs: curl shut down their bounty program, and GitHub just announced they're "restructuring" theirs. The author of this post also makes a case that HackerOne hasn't been honest about LLM training and use, either to hackers or to their own staff.

New comment by mapmeld in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"

mapmeld — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:55:51 +0000

There's also a scam where they contact the owner from abroad, offering to return it, claiming they're an innocent trying to activate a used phone they spent their last dollar on, or threatening the original user into unlocking it. They will say that they're hackers, connected to criminals in your home city, using your name and recent photos to say that they're going to expose your text messages. Anything to get an unlock.

New comment by mapmeld in "Elevators"

mapmeld — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:10:26 +0000

My apartment building is replacing the elevators, and someone on staff revealed that the first renovated elevator is intended to pick up only from the lobby (i.e. if you summon an elevator from the 10th floor, one of the others will come). This has caused some grumbling or calling it an "express elevator". In an apartment it really is mostly trips to many floors from the lobby. The only time this maybe would be inconvenient might be in the morning commute, when fewer people are re-entering.

New comment by mapmeld in "Did They Ghost You?"

mapmeld — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:45:12 +0000

In 2017 I was talking to a recruiter who genuinely forgot about my application. As in I pinged them, things got moving again, and I actually got hired.

In 2021, I talked to a quantum startup and all indications were that the feedback was "overall extremely positive", and the final step would be talking to the CTO or CEO. For some reason HR could not get that meeting scheduled for two weeks, before telling me I didn't get the job. This seemed like a communication thing, but a few years later the whole company shut down, so I guess I dodged a bullet and/or they changed their mind about hiring.

New comment by mapmeld in "Taylor Farms Called White House to Try to Delay Cyclospora Recall"

mapmeld — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 11:33:18 +0000

There's a U. Minnesota spinoff company Priogen testing for chronic wasting disease. I saw them advertising on Reddit for hunters to test their deer meat. Here's a recent news story about the Pennsylvania Game Commission offering kits: https://www.fox43.com/article/news/local/pilot-project-chron...

New comment by mapmeld in "Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25"

mapmeld — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:08:08 +0000

A few months back, Cloudflare used AI to make a Rust rewrite of WordPress, but I doubt that they would have found or corrected issues like this on the way? https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/

New comment by mapmeld in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

mapmeld — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:14:55 +0000

This is the worst one for me. I can maybe think of what it means, but I never heard it before, and could easily be imagining a meaning.

Some of the other Claude-isms (quickly googling, especially 'gate' and 'canonical') I feel the issue is they sound right, but aren't specific enough to why we are doing something.

New comment by mapmeld in "Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)"

mapmeld — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:09:18 +0000

I was in Dayton Ohio to see the Wright brothers stuff. There were sidewalk plaques for inventors and celebrities who lived in the city, and they had one for Thomas Midgley Jr. I was shocked!

Fun fact: during their time Dayton had the most patents per capita of anywhere in the US.

New comment by mapmeld in "How to hide from killer drones"

mapmeld — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:01 +0000

I have seen a few Ukrainian drone videos that cross over onto regular subreddits, and this subreddit is far more graphic. Do not take this 'NSFL' lightly.

Lianda and the Long March

mapmeld — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 03:46:48 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.georeactor.com/books-06-26b

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48654837

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by mapmeld in "John Jumper to join Anthropic"

mapmeld — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:12:03 +0000

If AlphaFold really is brute force on known protein problem space, would it then be usable as a model for novel proteins?

New comment by mapmeld in "Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school"

mapmeld — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:07:19 +0000

Were schools banning search engines? I remember teachers recommending Dogpile (because it would combine search engines), and we did some computer lab stuff in the 00s, but there was no one saying that we should ignore search or the internet altogether.

In middle school I remember being assigned a book report that would include the author's biography. I'd just finished a book (The Gammage Cup) and of course my local library did not have any information about the author. So in that situation it was assumed that you would learn traditional research methods, but also that you would just pick a classic book where the information was readily available.

New comment by mapmeld in "Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite"

mapmeld — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:54:45 +0000

WebGL is a major upgrade for maps. But as an old school web maps person, the obvious solution to the first problem (nearby points clustered even on the city level) is to use the maxZoom option which is in most clustering libraries.

New comment by mapmeld in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

mapmeld — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:12:06 +0000

I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.

New comment by mapmeld in "Report on an Unidentified Space Station"

mapmeld — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:47:51 +0000

I was also thinking of this story around the Backrooms lore (since you can find references that it is infinite or planet-sized repeating). Of course I couldn't remember enough to have it pop up on Google or ChatGPT. Grateful that someone posted it.

New comment by mapmeld in "What are locusts and what happened to them?"

mapmeld — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:01:46 +0000

I highly recommend one of the books cited in this article (Jeffrey A. Lockwood's Locust). He writes about hiking to the glacier to find preserved locusts, the formation of the Entomological Commission which discovered that existing anti-locust practices were ineffective, all sorts of details.