Hacker News: surround

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

New comment by surround in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

surround — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 21:13:19 +0000

> What You Can Do To Protect Yourself

> 1. Disable your mobile advertising ID

> 2. Review apps you’ve granted location permissions to.

I'm surprised they missed the most important step, which is blocking the advertisers from collecting your data in the first place. This is easily done in the browser with uBlock Origin and system-wide with DNS filtering.

New comment by surround in "Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain"

surround — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 23:32:40 +0000

Anna's Archive announced they intended to infringe on the label's copyrights by distributing their music without a license. The law allows the court "to prevent or restrain infringement of a copyright" (emphasis mine).

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/502#:~:text=Any%2...

New comment by surround in "Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain"

surround — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 23:14:33 +0000

Wikipedia says

  Ek's initial pitch to Lorentzon was not initially related to music, but rather a way for streaming content such as video, digital films, images or music to drive advertising revenue.

So yes, they were always intending to get revenue from ads. And yes, the initial pitch included other types of media too. But I don't think we can call Spotify "an ad platform" that "never actually cared about music" any more than we could call Ars Technica "an ad platform that never actually cared about tech news."

New comment by surround in "I DM'd a Korean presidential candidate and ended up building his core campaign"

surround — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 18:12:44 +0000

Where does it talk about his use of English or his lawyers?

New comment by surround in "I DM'd a Korean presidential candidate and ended up building his core campaign"

surround — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 18:07:11 +0000

I can't find anything on his Wikipedia article for "English" or "lawyer." Can't we assume good faith?

New comment by surround in "Google's Genie is more impressive than GPT5"

surround — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 20:25:23 +0000

The leaderboard hasn't changed since it was updated to add gpt-5. Here's what it looked like yesterday https://archive.is/XIrbN

If you saw gpt-5 was ahead, you might have been looking at the leaderboard with style control https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text/overall

New comment by surround in "Google's Genie is more impressive than GPT5"

surround — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 18:22:26 +0000

You may have already figured this out, but the leaderboard you linked to (https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text/overall-no-style-control) shows gemini-2.5-pro ahead with a score of 1471 compared to gpt-5 at 1462.

New comment by surround in "Google's Genie is more impressive than GPT5"

surround — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:07:15 +0000

> The betting markets were not impressed by GPT-5. I am reading this graph as "there is a high expectation that Google will announce Gemini-3 in August", and not as "Gemini 2.5 is better than GPT-5".

This is an incorrect interpretation. The benchmark which the betting market is based upon currently ranks Gemini 2.5 higher than GPT-5.