<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>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:14:51 +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 "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><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The legal infrastructure for banking and securities ownership has long had defaults for liability assignment.<p>For securities, if I own stock outright, the company has to indemnify if they do a transfer for somebody else or if I lack legal capacity. So transfer agents require Medallion Signature Guarantees from a bank or broker. MSGs thereby require a lengthy banking relationship and probably showing up in person.<p>For broker to broker transfers, there is ACATS. The receiving broker is in fact liable in a strict, no-fault way.<p>As far as I know, these liabilities are never waived. Basically for the sizable transfers, there is relatively little faith in the user’s computers (including phones). To the extent there is faith, it has total liability on some capitalized party for fraud.<p>These defaults are probably unknown for most people, even those with large amounts of securities. The system is expected to work since it has been set up this way.<p>Clearly a large number of programmers have a bent to go the complete opposite direction from MSGs, where everything is private keys or caveat emptor no matter the technical sophistication of the customer. I, well, disagree with that sentiment. The regime where it’s possible for no capitalized entity to be liable for  wrongful transfers (defined as when the customer believes they are transferring to a different human-readable payee than actually receiving funds) should not be the default.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:42:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143565</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143565</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143565</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If the side loaded app does not have permission to use the passkeys and cannot somehow get the user to approve passkey access of the new app, that would be a good alternative to still allow custom apps.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:26:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143318</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143318</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143318</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In the case of some knowing or blindfully unknowing money mule in the chain or at the end of the chain, the intermediary or final banks may not be at fault. The bank could have followed KYC procedures in that somebody with that name actually existed who controlled the account.<p>The money mule themselves is almost certainly insolvent to pay the damages. Currencies can also change by the money mule (either to a different fiat currency or crypto), putting the ultimate link completely out of reach of the originating country.<p>If intermediary banks are deputized and become liable in a no-fault sense, then legitimate transfers out become very difficult. How does a bank prove a negative for where the funds come from? De-banking has already been a problem for a process-based AML regime.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:06:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143042</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143042</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47143042</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The phisher’s app or login would be from a completely new device though.<p>Passkeys are also an active area to defeat phishing as long as the device is not compromised. To the extent there is attestation, passkeys also create very critical posts about locking down devices.<p>Given what I see in scams, I think too much is put on the user as it is. The anti-phishing training and such try to blame somebody downward in the hierarchy instead of fixing the systems. For example, spear-phishing scams of home down payments or business accounts work through banks in the US not tying account numbers to payee identity. The real issue is that the US payment system is utterly backward without confirmation of payee (I.e. giving the human readable actual name of recipient account in the banking app). For wire transfers or ACH Credit in the US, commercial customers are basically expected to play detective to make sure new account numbers are legit.<p>As I understand it, sideloading apps can overcome that payee legal name display in other countries. So the question for both sideloading and passkeys is if we want banks liable for correctly showing the actual payee for such transfers. To the extent they are liable, they will need to trust the app’s environment and the passkey.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:39:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141721</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141721</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141721</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is some world where somebody scammed through sideloading loses their life savings, and every country is politically fine with the customer, not the bank, taking the losses.<p>But for regular people, that is not really the world they want. If the bank app wrongly shows they’re paying a legitimate payee, such as the bank, themselves or the tax authority, people politically want the bank to reimburse.<p>Then the question becomes not if the user trusts the phone’s software, but if the <i>bank</i> trusts the software on the user’s phone. Should the bank not be able to trust the environment that can approve transfers, then the bank would be in the right to no longer offer such transfers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:24:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141467</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141467</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141467</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe I’m biased working in insurance software, but I don’t get the feeling much programming happens where the code can be completely stochastically generated, never have its code reviewed, and that will be okay with users/customers/governments/etc.<p>Even if all sandboxing is done right, programs will be depended on to store data correctly and to show correct outputs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:40:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056506</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056506</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056506</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I took this thread as asking whether PRs <i>that are pulled in</i> should be reviewed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Feb 2026 05:16:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043948</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043948</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043948</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The issue in the late-90s was all the investment created a lot of real revenue for telecoms and other companies. Even though there were a lot of shenanigans with revenue, a lot of real money was spent on fiber and tech generally.<p>But the real money was investment that didn’t see a return for the investor. The investments needed to have higher final consumption (such as through better productivity or through displacing other costs) to pay back the investment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Feb 2026 01:24:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930381</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930381</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930381</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mwwaters in "The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In the expenditures for the economy making up GDP, not a lot of it screams “AI-able.” Page 9 here breaks down GDP on expenditure basis.<p><a href="https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2026-01/gdp3q25-updated.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2026-01/gdp3q25-upda...</a><p>Given how much of the spending is hard goods and simply not AI-able (rent, most of housing new construction, most of other goods, most health care, much of other services), the replacement theory would require a massive displacement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Feb 2026 01:17:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930338</link><dc:creator>mwwaters</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930338</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930338</guid></item></channel></rss>