Hacker News: surround

New comment by surround in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

surround — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:04:23 +0000

I'm not sure what you're referring to. If corn is replaced with solar panels that doesn't solve the fact that there will still be a ton of cars that demand ethanol-infused gasoline.

New comment by surround in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

surround — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:09:50 +0000

Its more efficient energy-wise, but isn't the issue that energy from solar panels can't power gas cars?

New comment by surround in "Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock"

surround — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:23:52 +0000

Fair enough. Though they certainly could still break in if the laptop isn't encrypted, so this tool is only useful when combined with disk encryption.

New comment by surround in "Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock"

surround — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:35:38 +0000

How do you define "state-level actor?" Police departments certainly have access to state and federal forensic resources to access unencrypted data in memory.

New comment by surround in "Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock"

surround — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:19:08 +0000

> in sensitive situations, law enforcement and border agents in many countries can compel a biometric unlock in ways they cannot with a password.

If the threat model includes state-level actors, then disabling biometrics won't prevent data from being retrieved from physical memory. It would probably be wiser to enable disk encryption and have a panic button that powers down/hibernates the computer so that no unencrypted data remains on RAM.

The website says shutdown "takes time" and "kills your session" but a hibernation button would take effect just as fast and would preserve the session.

New comment by surround in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

surround — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:18:20 +0000

It seems like Google's policy is unconcerned with the intent of the practice. If a website JS redirect ruins the user experience by breaking the back button, it will be demoted in search results. It doesn't matter whether or not the redirect was meant to be deceptive or malicious, websites shouldn't be ruining the user experience.

New comment by surround in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

surround — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:46:51 +0000

It seems Sam Altman has the same suspicion, based upon his response:

> There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me.

https://blog.samaltman.com/2279512

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921

New comment by surround in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

surround — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:20:09 +0000

> There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me.

For context his blog post seems to be a response to this deep-dive New Yorker article:

"Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47659135

New comment by surround in "Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead"

surround — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:53:03 +0000

Yes, DMCA made the mere act of breaking DRM illegal, even if what you do with the media is legal.

New comment by surround in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

surround — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:17:32 +0000

That's what the comment I was originally replying to was saying.

New comment by surround in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

surround — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:46:45 +0000

Try asking an LLM a question like "H o w T o P r o g r a m I n R u s t ?" - each letter, separated by spaces, will be its own token, and the model will understand just fine. The issue is that computational cost scales quadratically with the number of tokens, so processing "h e l l o" is much more expensive than "hello". "hello" has meaning, "h" has no meaning by itself. The model has to waste a lot of computation forming words from the letters.

Our brains also process text entire words at a time, not letter-by-letter. The difference is that our brains are much more flexible than a tokenizer, and we can easily switch to letter-by-letter reading when needed, such as when we encounter an unfamiliar word.

New comment by surround in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

surround — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:35:03 +0000

But for lisp, a more complex solution is needed. It's easy for a human lisp programmer to keep track of which closing parentheses corresponds to which opening parentheses because the editor highlights parentheses pairs as they are typed. How can we give an LLM that kind of feedback as it generates code?

New comment by surround in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

surround — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 04:14:20 +0000

I think you're right. Try asking GPT-5 this:

> Are the parentheses in ((((()))))) balanced?

There was a thread about this the other day [1]. It's the same issue as "count the r's in strawberry." Tokenization makes it hard to count characters. If you put that string into OpenAI's tokenizer, [2] this is how they are grouped:

Token 1: ((((

Token 2: ()))

Token 3: )))

Which of course isn't at all how our minds would group them together in order to keep track of them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615876 [2] https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

New comment by surround in "Is BGP safe yet?"

surround — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:10:04 +0000

Wow I'm surprised, you're right, and it has happened before:

> the attacker issued and registered a free temporary 3-month certificate for the developers[.]kakao.com domain through SSL certificate issuer called ZeroSSL. Because the routing policy was already manipulated by the BGP Hijacking, the attacker was able to register the certificate.

https://medium.com/s2wblog/post-mortem-of-klayswap-incident-...

New comment by surround in "Is BGP safe yet?"

surround — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:18:08 +0000

The graphic that shows that a hijacker can route traffic to their malicious website is a little misleading. Since the SSL certificate would be invalid, browsers would block the connection and show a warning.

I guess the attack could still be used for denial of service.

New comment by surround in "X is selling existing users' handles"

surround — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:07:11 +0000

Your posts: https://twiiit.com/hac

2020 - "Ping"

2021 - "Pong"

2023 - "Boop."

2023 - "Bleep"

2023 - "will inventing new technology be the solution to our problems?"

New comment by surround in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

surround — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:48:31 +0000

Trust your own style, even if you aren't a native English speaker. Here's an example where a non-native speaker used an LLM to polish his post. The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM's edited version.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707

For dyslexia, use a spell-checker. For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s. But don't let a style-checker or an LLM rob you of your own voice.

New comment by surround in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

surround — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:46:22 +0000

How do you know if it's real?

Story of a Failed Pentest (2018)

surround — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:01:26 +0000

Article URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20181118010006/https://threader.app/thread/1063423110513418240

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47267909

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by surround in "Let's Get Physical"

surround — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 21:54:33 +0000

Reminds me of "Story of a failed pentest"

https://web.archive.org/web/20181118010006/https://threader....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18475438