Hacker News: praptak

New comment by praptak in "The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist"

praptak — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 07:47:47 +0000

Terrorism went from "kill one person to scare millions" to "stir shit up to cripple the adversary with the costs of prevention".

New comment by praptak in "Enshittification Is Coming for Everything"

praptak — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:03:25 +0000

https://archive.is/L1DPH#selection-1889.0-1889.54

Enshittification Is Coming for Everything

praptak — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:02:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49301518

Points: 7

# Comments: 3

Majorities of Americans say wealth inequality is a problem

praptak — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:02:31 +0000

Article URL: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/53821-majorities-americans-say-wealth-inequality-is-problem-want-government-intervention-january-2-5-2026-economist-yougov-poll

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49193849

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

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

praptak — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:00:06 +0000

Monkey see, monkey do: https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/all-my-clients-wanted-a-car...

"It's not about utility. It's not even really about the chatbot. It's about visibility, the fear of looking behind. A website without a chatbot in 2026 risks feeling unfinished, like something's missing. Even if what's missing is a half-broken widget that most visitors dismiss in three seconds. The chatbot has become a social signal, not a tool. A way of saying: we're keeping up."

New comment by praptak in "The Fall and Rise of Screwworm"

praptak — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 18:45:19 +0000

Releasing the steriles blindly is not enough, you gotta monitor the pest too. This is prohibitively expensive in rainforests and other areas with poor infrastructure.

Okay, maybe you could release the flies in large enough numbers not to need monitoring but I guess it would also be prohibitively expensive.

New comment by praptak in "Extinction-Level Capitalism"

praptak — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:53:56 +0000

Big AI is intertwined with these two via data centers, isn't it?

New comment by praptak in "Dopamine Fracking"

praptak — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:19:51 +0000

This is alienation as described by Marx. If you optimize a thing, at some point it becomes separated from its nature.

New comment by praptak in "Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it"

praptak — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:01:42 +0000

> First you need someone to be physically in there

Bluetooth works fine through walls.

New comment by praptak in "The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon"

praptak — Wed, 27 May 2026 06:08:17 +0000

There's a good article about it. Saying no is a budget. In other words you don't have enough veto power to stop all bad projects so you need to be strategic about spending this budget.

https://lalitm.com/post/why-senior-engineers-let-bad-project...

New comment by praptak in "The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon"

praptak — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:45:12 +0000

The problem with this kind of armchair economy is that you can argue both ways.

"End of ZIRP and the raise of just-say-no engineers": with capital being more expensive companies need to invest it wisely, therefore the need the judgement of the just-say-no engineer to avoid blowing it on unnecessary stuff.

New comment by praptak in "I bypassed AWS API Gateway auth with a trailing slash. Got $12K bounty"

praptak — Tue, 26 May 2026 10:47:56 +0000

Appending stuff to bypass blacklists is eternal.

My first job, decades ago. I couldn't update something on my laptop because client's gateway blocked `http://foo.com/update.exe`. Guess what, `http://foo.com/update.exe?` worked as a bypass.

New comment by praptak in "Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension"

praptak — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:16:44 +0000

It's pretty stupid that big customers like Railway are not somehow protected from this.

New comment by praptak in "Halt and Catch Fire"

praptak — Sun, 17 May 2026 05:24:47 +0000

When I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army.

This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.

New comment by praptak in "The AI Backlash Could Get Ugly"

praptak — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:53:26 +0000

"In absolutely no way am I scheming on how I might leverage it to shut down whole industries"

I don't think even the ultra rich who own the technology are directly scheming to do that. But they do accept it as a side effect of them getting more money and power.

Yes, the technology is a tool, it's an impressive tool but we cannot ignore who wields it and what they incentives are.

New comment by praptak in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

praptak — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:45:00 +0000

As a Polish IT worker I feel that we enjoy hardwork too much. I'm talking here about "kultura zapierdolu" [0] which is what we call the specific Polish version of culture of unhealthy work/life balance.

[0] https://lubimyczytac.pl/ksiazka/5124728/czesc-pracy-o-kultur...

New comment by praptak in "Knitting bullshit"

praptak — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:48:18 +0000

I remember this kind of slop from times well before the LLM explosion.

I'm specifically thinking of a print magazine that was designed to make you feel like you are a smart reader of science articles, without any useful information about the actual science or technology.

New comment by praptak in "What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)"

praptak — Tue, 05 May 2026 06:30:11 +0000

There is no party capable to take responsibility on the other side of the handover protocol.

New comment by praptak in "The gay jailbreak technique (2025)"

praptak — Sat, 02 May 2026 07:21:34 +0000

Maybe tell it to output rhyming slang pig Latin.

Or, since you are in a terminal anyway, rot13

New comment by praptak in "It’s Toasted"

praptak — Fri, 01 May 2026 07:46:16 +0000

You could make a similar noble call for everyone to just stop using cigarettes in 1950.

It would not work. What ultimately worked were laws designed to curb tobacco use combined with public education campaigns.