Hacker News: sharkbot

Veles, Google's open source secret scanner

sharkbot — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:54:56 +0000

Article URL: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/07/stop-leaked-credentials-in-their-tracks-with-veles-our-new-open-source-secret-scanner.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44652883

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by sharkbot in "AV1@Scale: Film Grain Synthesis, The Awakening"

sharkbot — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 17:26:45 +0000

Agree. Purely opining, but I assume that it's because of the emotional connection that artistic media has on people, despite the flaws.

People remember the emotions the artwork engendered, and thus the whole work is associated with the feelings, flaws and all. If the work is particularly widely known, the flaws can become a stand-in for the work itself.

I see this in video games - I'm fond of the NES-era "flaws" and limitations (palette limits, sprite limits, sound channel limits), but less connected to the Atari 2600 or SNES/PS1/NDS/etc flaws. Shovel Knight is charming; A Short Hike, while great, doesn't resonate on a style level.

New comment by sharkbot in "Vibe Coding Is Overrated"

sharkbot — Sat, 03 May 2025 16:29:00 +0000

There are parallels to the “rapid application development” push of the 90’s. Visual Basic, Tcl/Tk, Python with Tkinter, HyperCard; all of them promised shortening the development cycle and democratizing computing. Code was interpreted rather than compiled, dynamically typed rather than statically, and a lot of batteries were included.

It sorta worked, and sorta didn’t. I’m seeing no evidence that this round is different. LLMs allow coding via natural language and assuming a lot of context that is typical to human conversation, but a lot of coding is delving into nuance, which is going to be work, no matter the tool.

A method to assess 'forgivable' vs. 'unforgivable' vulnerabilities

sharkbot — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:53:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/report/a-method-to-assess-forgivable-vs-unforgivable-vulnerabilities

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881493

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by sharkbot in "Justin Trudeau promises to resign as PM"

sharkbot — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:21:13 +0000

There is no formal “next in line”. The closest potential successor would have been the deputy prime minister; Chrystia Freeland held that role until a few weeks ago when she dramatically resigned and sparked this chain of events.

Currently, this is “Working as Intended” in Canada’s political system.

New comment by sharkbot in "Remote code execution via MIDI messages"

sharkbot — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:18:24 +0000

Now for the most important question: can you run DOOM on it? :)

New comment by sharkbot in "Security Is a Useless Controls Problem"

sharkbot — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 21:51:16 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this topic thru the lens of moral philosophy lately.

A lot of the “big lists of controls” security approaches correspond to duty ethics: following and upholding rules is the path to ethical behaviour. IT applies this control, manages exceptions, tracks compliance, and enforces adherence. Why? It’s the rule.

Contrast with consequentialism (the outcome is key) or virtue ethics (exercising and aligning with virtuous characteristics), where rule following isn’t the main focus. I’ve been part of (heck, I’ve started) lots of debates about the value of some arbitrary control that seemed out of touch with reality, but framed my perspective on virtues (efficiency, convenience) or outcomes (faster launch, lower overhead). That disconnect in ethical perspectives made most of those discussions a waste of time.

A lot of security debates are specific instances of general ethical situations; threat models instead of trolley problems.

New comment by sharkbot in "Founder Mode"

sharkbot — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 14:55:42 +0000

I’m thinking of the metaphor between Newtonian and general relativity. At low energies, masses and velocities the two theories correspond in predictions with little discrepancy. If the velocity/mass/energies increase dramatically, then Newtonian physics will fail to give accurate predictions.

Same with “hire smart people and let them work”. When salaries are relatively low, consequences are limited and incentives are well aligned, that approach works. As soon as any of those things change, then the “manager mode” fails dramatically.

As someone who ascribes to “manager mode” most of the time, I’m going to start looking more at places where the assumptions break and (carefully) try out “founder mode”.

New comment by sharkbot in "CrowdStrike debacle provides road map of American vulnerabilities to adversaries"

sharkbot — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 00:57:18 +0000

I think that’s an oversimplification. If you have a Windows system handy, look for a file named “errata.inf” [0]. It’s a giant configuration file that is full of tweaks to make dodgy hardware work reliably.

Hardware, software and firmware are all prone to mistakes, errors and corner cases that are surprising. Security issues generally live in the intersection of systems with different metaphors. Hardware is not immune from issues, and software can help reduce that impedance mismatch.

[0] Found an instance here, no claim to its veracity or safety: https://www.gherush92.com/documents/744E.asp?type=2&file=C%3...

New comment by sharkbot in "Grothendieck’s use of equality"

sharkbot — Mon, 20 May 2024 17:08:24 +0000

It's also a complex number, a Unicode character, an ASCII character, an Extended ASCII character, a glyph, the multiplicative identity element, a raster image, ...

The GP point is correct; we implicitly convert between all these representations naturally and quickly, but there are interesting branches of mathematics that consider those conversions explicitly and find nuances (eg, category theory).

New comment by sharkbot in "Leaving LinkedIn"

sharkbot — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 16:46:43 +0000

This might be No True Scotsman, but it doesn't sound like you are a "finger gunner" after all.

After (fairly) long time in the industry, it seems to come down to:

- understanding what one's clients need (not what they ask for)

- understanding what's in the realm of the possible (technically, politically, organizationally)

- understanding what are the possible futures (good, great, and abject disaster)

If, after answering all those questions, one still advocating for a rewrite, you've shown the maturity needed to undertake the effort.

"Finger-gunning" is usually related to skipping those steps, not the ultimate decision.

(edit for formatting)

New comment by sharkbot in "Fantasy meets reality"

sharkbot — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:01:35 +0000

I feel like there are parallels to computer security. A lot of my experience in this domain is looking at systems that were designed in a thoughtful way, but the designer didn’t fully appreciate being surrounded by a universe (especially one full of people of varying mixes of deviousness and cleverness).

The “real world engineer” job exists, it’s a security engineer. And it’s equal parts awesome and draining.

New comment by sharkbot in "Threads and Goroutines"

sharkbot — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 00:41:23 +0000

I don’t have your answers, but the runtime source has some pointers that would likely get you the answer you seek: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/runtime/HACKING...

It sounds like blocking calls switch to a system stack and return the Go stack to the executor pool, but I don’t have source links to back up that claim.

New comment by sharkbot in "Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)"

sharkbot — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 13:35:25 +0000

Just to be clear, there are many aspects of biology that that professor is ignoring on a regular basis that you’ve elided (hibernation, molting, limb regeneration, etc). What specifically about procreation is important enough to call that individual’s expertise into question?

New comment by sharkbot in "Understanding Cybersecurity Frameworks: NIST, ISO, and More"

sharkbot — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 02:30:27 +0000

What are alternatives you would suggest to these frameworks?

(I am also deeply skeptical of these frameworks, but don’t have a strong argument against them, and they seem pervasive in the security industry)

New comment by sharkbot in "Ferengi Rules of Acquisition"

sharkbot — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 13:48:41 +0000

But the Ferengis changed their society to include “fe-males” due to internal politics and change from within. It wasn’t instituted from the outside, it was Ferengi society advancing via the means of their own political system.

I think that speaks highly of the Ferengi social system.

New comment by sharkbot in "Teenage Engineering OP-1: The micro synth with massive impact"

sharkbot — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 03:32:21 +0000

Buy a TE pocket operator. They are reasonably priced. If you like chiptunes, PO20. If you want to sample, PO33. If you want a drum machine, PO32.

I have an OP-1 and a collection of pocket operators. The PO’s are my favourite creative outlets, by far.

New comment by sharkbot in "Why I recommended ECS instead of Kubernetes to my latest customer"

sharkbot — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 17:08:13 +0000

Mostly a note to self: it is interesting to read this account and connect it to the financial planning case studies that show up in personal finance blogs and articles. It seems like there’s a lot of shared terminology and practice between the domains.

New comment by sharkbot in "What if we set GPT-4 free in Minecraft?"

sharkbot — Sat, 27 May 2023 00:14:45 +0000

Incorrect. The program under inspection could halt or could not halt; undecidability is a statement about Turing machines inspecting that program and unable to make a determination (via a clever proof by contradiction).

The Halting Problem is a truly interesting result, and for the most part uninteresting in practice.

New comment by sharkbot in "The Absurdity Of Stacks"

sharkbot — Sun, 21 May 2023 13:10:57 +0000

The halting problem has been proven definitively undecidable via proof by contradiction, by Alan Turing. The proof implicitly created the notion of Turing machines, a key model of computation.

There is a solution to the halting problem. It’s that it is undecidable.