Hacker News: marcta

New comment by marcta in "Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production"

marcta — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 20:38:41 +0000

Hyperspace Pirate tried this at home, and it's horribly inefficient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRKbjT8AoJw

New comment by marcta in "Download your favourite YouTube videos"

marcta — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 21:34:26 +0000

One man's personal accumulation is another man's human knowledge.

New comment by marcta in "I wish tech companies knew more about me"

marcta — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 20:52:45 +0000

But if these companies know so much, surely they can work out that you have this particular buying habit, and other people don't have it.

New comment by marcta in "Supermarket freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack"

marcta — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:37:58 +0000

"That will never happen to us" - until it does.

New comment by marcta in "I Found a $90k Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Google"

marcta — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:00:34 +0000

If I hire an artist to draw something for me, I don't get to say that I drew it.

New comment by marcta in "Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe"

marcta — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:02:33 +0000

The salesperson comes in and says they've sold a big order of x units based on having a web portal that can set the temperature.

New comment by marcta in "Lobbying is corruption"

marcta — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:56:42 +0000

This just means that number 1 is also corrupt. OP is talking about the scale of none to complete corruption, not the relative rankings of all countries.

New comment by marcta in "Lobbying is corruption"

marcta — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:54:48 +0000

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.

-- Winston Churchill, 10 November 1942

New comment by marcta in "Lobbying is corruption"

marcta — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:42:04 +0000

Maybe a better word would be "corrupting". Lobbying causes people to act in a way that is contrary to what people expect at face value, since it changes the incentives: if we assume that politicians choose what is best for them personally, their actions change from "what makes me popular with the most voters" to "what gives me the most money and power". This is often (not always) to the detriment of the voters themselves.

New comment by marcta in "Lobbying is corruption"

marcta — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:29:33 +0000

That doesn't always work though, since citizens aren't given a vote on every policy issue[0]. Also, in the UK at the moment we have had a long stream of unelected governments, which make policy that isn't in the last manifesto that had a vote.

[0]: I'm not saying they should be, since that's what political representatives are for.

New comment by marcta in "REA Reverse – Engineer Anything"

marcta — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 08:35:57 +0000

Are we getting to the point where every API can be reverse engineered too? If so, that's not safe either.

New comment by marcta in "Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge"

marcta — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 05:41:22 +0000

Sure; but writing to an LLM is not "in private". That's the point of the original post.

New comment by marcta in "OpenAI agents tried to bruteforce a UN website's API fields"

marcta — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:57:06 +0000

> with Altman the only one worthy of the seat of power

How does that make sense, if Altman is unable to control OpenAI's agents at the moment?

New comment by marcta in "Astra for Law"

marcta — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:33:05 +0000

Don't leave it on a cliffhanger, what really happens?

New comment by marcta in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

marcta — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:37:05 +0000

Why is arr.filter().map() better than arr.reduce()? Doesn't arr.reduce() only loop once through the array?

New comment by marcta in "Python sets and dictionaries can have quadratic-time performance"

marcta — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:09:30 +0000

I think the point is that once it becomes a crypto key, stock price, weather observation, whatever, the datum ceases to be random and becomes arbitrary.

New comment by marcta in "My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test"

marcta — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:27:05 +0000

Which business will hire a consultant who doesn't fully endorse the AI-everything religion?

New comment by marcta in "AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users"

marcta — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:44:27 +0000

Here's a thought experiment: consider the person that you disagree with the most (politically, religiously, socially, whatever). Would you want _that_ person to have an AI chatbot aligned to them and their views?

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

marcta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:18:57 +0000

In fairness, a false positive is better than a false negative.

New comment by marcta in "Web Security is Too Hard"

marcta — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:41:54 +0000

Presumably the big scary sysadmins have access to the *.cloudflare.com DNS records, and marketing just needs to push this thing right now and can't wait, so it's easier for them to buy a new domain with a shiny new TLD than wait for pay.cloudflare.com to be authorised.

cloudflare.com/pay probably has a similar chain of approval: if every marketing idea had its own top-level route, it would get pretty crazy with such a big company.