Hacker News: marcusb

New comment by marcusb in "As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'"

marcusb — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:28:33 +0000

*outlaw AI-generated legal documents by non-lawyers.

New comment by marcusb in "New Jersey fines data center $1.1M after drone pics expose 62 gas generators"

marcusb — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:25:45 +0000

It is in the Memphis area - not Nashville - but yes, they use gas turbine generators.

New comment by marcusb in "Self hosted email continues to steeply decline"

marcusb — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:52:58 +0000

Interestingly, DNS does have such a record (MB,) just never widely used - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035/#section-3.3.3

New comment by marcusb in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

marcusb — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:45:37 +0000

They implemented it. They just couldn't get out of their own way to successfully sell it (See "Dealer's of Lightning"[0])

0 - https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...

New comment by marcusb in "Zenzizenzizenzic"

marcusb — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 23:11:55 +0000

Or tried that vocabulary estimator that is currently on the front page (it gave me zenzizenizenic in the last section.)

New comment by marcusb in "Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere"

marcusb — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:18:08 +0000

It is used as a shielding gas in some welding processes (notably, MIG welding.)

New comment by marcusb in "Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment"

marcusb — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:09:48 +0000

False equivalence. In your straw man, the elephant isn't misled into believing that by posing for a photo it could be "helped," nor is it possible to communicate such an idea to an elephant. In the story, money was raised for the boy's cancer treatment, and that money was improperly withheld, denying him the treatment those funds could have provided. He was harmed by that, and by being misled into thinking he could get treatment by appearing in the video, he was scammed. Lying to the family and stating the funds weren't raised is also scamming them.

But, of course, you know that, but you would rather dig and (try to) play semantic games than admit you are wrong. Do better.

New comment by marcusb in "Mozilla's new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox"

marcusb — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:24:28 +0000

Yeah. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” may be a statement of current fact, not of values.

New comment by marcusb in "Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment"

marcusb — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 12:18:45 +0000

I think the kid in the article who got $27k raised in his name for cancer treatment, received $0 in cancer treatment from those funds, and subsequently died of cancer definitely got scammed.

New comment by marcusb in "Async DNS"

marcusb — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:51:49 +0000

I'm one of the Hickory maintainers, although I mainly work on the server-side code.

https://github.com/hickory-dns/hickory-dns is our Git repo

Documentation for the resolver including an example: https://docs.rs/hickory-resolver/latest/hickory_resolver/ind...

New comment by marcusb in "Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental"

marcusb — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:35:50 +0000

https://www.redox-os.org/

New comment by marcusb in "After the Bubble"

marcusb — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:03:54 +0000

A lot? Also irrelevant. All it takes is one for the statement "nobody can see the bubble" to be false. Take the housing bubble for instance. Do you think the people who called that one were successful purely by chance, or does the fact that a few investors observed that mortgage lenders were underwriting loans to people with extremely poor credit and approving loan applications the lenders knew to be materially fraudulent at a massive scale indicate that the call was more of an educated wager? Did they know to a certainty it was a bubble? No, of course not. Was it a very reasonable guess? Absolutely.

New comment by marcusb in "After the Bubble"

marcusb — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:48:07 +0000

That's the conventional wisdom, undercut by the fact that people have guessed (and bet their fortunes) that previous bubbles were bubbles well before they popped.

Its more accurate to say that bubbles rely on most people being blind to the bubble's nature.

New comment by marcusb in "After the Bubble"

marcusb — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:50:11 +0000

> The GenAI bubble is going to pop. Everyone knows that.

I think the first part of this is probably true, but I don’t think everyone knows it. A lot of people are acting like they don’t know it.

It feels like a bubble to me, but I don’t think anyone can say to a certainty that it is, or that it will pop.

New comment by marcusb in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

marcusb — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:02:35 +0000

More choice as in “more revenue streams from which to create shareholder value.”

New comment by marcusb in "Rsync.net Technical Notes – Q4 2025"

marcusb — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:48:39 +0000

Another happy rsync.net customer.

I published my scripts[0] and notes[1] about doing append-only backups with Borg on rsync.net since at the time rclone studio wasn't supported. My strategy is to do Restic backups to a backup server at my house and Borg backups to rsync.net as my offsite backup, so the scripts handle both.

The post I linked above also outlines how I handle expiring old backups (requires either manual action with your privileged key, or a suitably isolated host that has the ability to purge the backups automatically.). You really don't want to fill up your disk (or hit your hard quota) with Borg. Recovering -- even deleting existing backups -- requires a bit of extra space unless you want to rm -rf.

0 - https://marcusb.org/hacks/backuptools.html

1 - https://marcusb.org/posts/2024/07/ransomware-resistant-backu...

New comment by marcusb in "Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem"

marcusb — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:18:48 +0000

Rust has debug asserts for that. Using expect with a comment about why the condition should not/can't ever happen is idiomatic for cases where you never expect an Err.

This reads to me more like the error type returned by append with names is not (ErrorFlags, i32) and wasn't trivially convertible into that type so someone left an unwrap in place on an "I'll fix it later" basis, but who knows.

New comment by marcusb in "Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit"

marcusb — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 13:29:27 +0000

The security world overemphasizes (fetishizes, even,) the "advanced" part because zero days and security tools to compensate against zero days are cool and fun, and underemphasizes the "persistent" part because that's boring and hard work and no fun.

And, unless you are Rob Joyce, talking about the persistent part doesn't get you on the main stage at a security conference (e.g., https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA)

New comment by marcusb in "Laptops with Stickers"

marcusb — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:16:50 +0000

I used to work for medium/big tech companies (8,000 - 70,000 employees.)

I always had a sticker on my laptop - everybody had the same laptop (or maybe one of two models.) It was a reliable way to quickly identify mine in a big group at a meeting or conference.

New comment by marcusb in "Collaboration sucks"

marcusb — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:06:52 +0000

I once worked at a place where one of the partners consistently claimed the engineering team over-built and over-thought everything (reality: almost everything was under-engineered and hanging on by a thread.)

His catch phrase was "all you gotta do is [insert dumb idea here.]"

It was anxiety inducing for a while, then it turned into a big joke amongst the engineering staff, where we would compete to come up with the most ridiculous "all you gotta do is ..." idea.