<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: mwwaters</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mwwaters</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 20 Oct 2026 06:37:56 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=mwwaters" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Let's Encrypt is adding two additional remote perspectives for domain validation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I liked the idea conceptually of CAA record only allowing DNS validation. Then use DNSSEC.<p>I say “conceptually” since I know: 1. Actual attacks found with CT have used compromised TLDs, which kills the whole thing anyway, and 2. I haven’t really seen where the hosting company’s infrastructure (BGP ads and internal routing) is what’s compromised. Well certainly in the latter case they can probably also get in to the hosting machines directly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:17:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154252</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154252</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154252</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Which userspace API was changed?<p>Internal Kernel API changes all the time which can break proprietary drivers. But userspace API has a far higher guarantee.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:54:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934204</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934204</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934204</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Coding is not solved"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I know this is true.  But I don’t think “Some parts of important codebases are black boxes. Therefore it’s fine if all of that code base becomes a far bigger black box” sounds like a good argument.<p>Also, there was probably some human at some point that had some understanding of what they were trying to do and why. The black boxes generally get programmed around after they long left but at the time they had bugs ironed out over decades. (Yes I know sometimes true slop is done over a short period of time and the programmer leaves. But I’ve generally seen the black box built over decades instead).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:25:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883133</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883133</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883133</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The Windows 11 ISO on a two year old Lenovo laptop did not have the Ethernet or WiFi driver. “Have Disk” also did not work for whatever reason when I downloaded the driver to a USB drive. I had to open up a command prompt within the Windows installer and run the GUI driver installer.<p>In Linux, I now have a custom Arch install which Gemini did help with a lot. It helped unblock significantly where I wanted to get fundamental understanding. A Debian installer will just work though (ironically, some years ago, I had issues with Ubuntu working out of the box but not Debian).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:49:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147187</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147187</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147187</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The passkey method uses Bluetooth to ensure proximity.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:57:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015527</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015527</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015527</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The far bigger benefit is phishing resistance (with hardware-contained keys themselves being phishing-proof on a non-compromised system).<p>It moves to the account recovery flows, but that can be much more difficult to phish.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:44:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015446</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015446</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015446</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation falls to lowest in 50 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The first FRED link shows how noisy that subgroup is. It’s bounced around with 83-84% during that time. It was 83.8% in March and 83.5% through much of 2024.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:56:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767257</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767257</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767257</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>OAuth first and foremost is driven by getting secret information from, let’s say, Big Company. It’s understandable that there are many steps for some random Joe to get Google emails or Facebook DMs.<p>OpenID piggy-backed on it by layering on new terms to an already complex scheme. The precious, secret information from Big Company in OpenID is just Email and maybe Name and Profile Picture. Then there’s a lot of ceremony for the service using OAuth to securely get that big secret (the user’s Email, which they had to supply in the first place directly to Relying Party).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:15:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676489</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676489</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676489</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I really dove into it, I understood mostly why all the complexity was all there <i>if I cared about data at the identity provider</i>.<p>When it’s only used for SSO, it’s extreme overkill.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:08:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676378</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676378</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676378</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That is for whatever it considers reverse-engineering the model to try to create a competing one.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:19:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48484661</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48484661</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48484661</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The “enough of us” is at least a majority of voters agreeing. I’m not sure what the alternative to that is.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 20:39:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087745</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087745</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087745</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Agents for financial services and insurance"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For doing some reporting stuff internally, there isn’t a certification. But there are definitely humans who have to certify financial statements and communications for financial offerings.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 21:34:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028904</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028904</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028904</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Why IPv6 is so complicated"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>SLAAC and link-local is very different from DHCP/NAT/etc. in IPv4 world. Link-local addresses are pretty arcane in IPv4 while they are a central idea in IPv6.<p>That’s fine. As pointed out elsewhere, DHCP was relatively new when IPv6 was introduced. But it is a learning curve well past just knowing the difference between NAT and stateful firewall.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 03 May 2026 08:55:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994924</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994924</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994924</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "GPT-5.5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, that’s the issue.<p>There is a lot of boilerplate or I can ask for ideas, but outside of boilerplate the review step make generation seemingly worse.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 04:28:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885522</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885522</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885522</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "I’m spending months coding the old way"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There’s certainly a lot of uncertainty.<p>But pro-AI posts never seem to pin themselves down on whether code checked in will be read and understood by a human. Perhaps a lot of engineers work in “vibe-codeable” domains, but a huge amount of domains deal with money, health, financial reporting, etc. Then there are domains those domains use as infrastructure (OS, cloud, databases, networking, etc.)<p>Even where it is non-critical, such as a social media site, whether that site runs and serves ads (and bills for them correctly) is critical for that company.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:19:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811207</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811207</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811207</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The scams are more sophisticated than getting gift cards to pay the IRS. A number saying that it’s from the bank will say they need to verify some account information.<p>I have had to actually verify my “investment profile” with a major broker in order to unfreeze some trades, in a high friction process. To the extent that a sideloaded app that looks exactly like the bank app has a low friction install, then people can get fooled and irrevocably lose savings.<p>If the lock-down is opt-in, almost nobody will opt in to it. If the lockdown is opt-out, then whether scams still happen depends on how much friction there is in opting out.<p>Freedom to install other unsigned sandboxed apps has a solution: Banks could use passkeys and other non-phishable methods. Sideloaded apps in Android can’t get to the bank app’s passkey.<p>Passkeys or hardware tokens get worries about the enshittification of the theoretical recovery process. Which, if that’s the case, I guess we should hope for/pay a better world, at least with banks and brokers. For them specifically, for account recovery allow either showing up in person or using ID checks.<p>Both for personal accounts and business accounts (i.e. with Business Email Compromise), I believe the onus should be on the bank to use non-phishable methods to show the human-readable payee from their app for irrevocable transfers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:35:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457015</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457015</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457015</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’ve heard the actual OEM cost is offset by the manufacturer getting paid for all the bloatware included.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:59:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47456487</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47456487</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47456487</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "US commercial insurers pay 254% of Medicare for the same hospital procedures"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Electricity price regulation, at least for transmission, has been a thing for states for 100+ years and federally since the 1930s. Pipelines and railroads also have price regulation of some sort.<p>Monopolies, in these cases natural monopolies, can in fact exist. Look at the Micro supply and demand curves. As a general rule over those 100 years, there has not been rationing of electricity. There are natural blackouts and today an unplanned surge in demand (as happens in every industry such as chips after Covid), but generally the price regulation did not cause some kind of gas lines.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:24:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407449</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407449</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407449</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Electric utilities face price caps and there are not electricity shortages.<p>It depends on the level of market failure, but there are not a ton of hospitals to choose from regardless.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:49:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407187</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407187</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407187</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Medicare has overhead, but you’re not saying whether it is more than commercial insurance. The admin expense/profit portion of commercial insurers also don’t take into account provider admin costs (not to mention the huge amount of time patients can deal with denials, appeals, etc.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:33:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407055</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407055</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407055</guid></item></channel></rss>