Hacker News: theteapot

New comment by theteapot in "The Underhanded C Contest"

theteapot — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:56:16 +0000

Or better, sleeper agents. Anthropic released a study on this in 2024 "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training" -- https://www.anthropic.com/research/sleeper-agents-training-d..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y9j2BoHg2c

New comment by theteapot in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"

theteapot — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 23:57:57 +0000

The difference is watches and corvettes typically appreciate in value, where as computer hardware typically drops like a rock.

New comment by theteapot in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"

theteapot — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 21:24:39 +0000

> Constant: the IDOR dataset (the same real, open-source applications we've used in prior research) ...

What we're they? Also, wouldn't one expect a more recently released coding agent (with a more recent knowledge cut off) to perform better because they have access to more knowledge about vulns in these OSS projects, and even possibly have knowledge of your own "prior research"?

New comment by theteapot in "Why eval startups fail (2025)"

theteapot — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 08:49:52 +0000

What's an eval?

New comment by theteapot in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

theteapot — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:15:26 +0000

Agree. From the article:

> Here's my favorite part, though. Digging into the data, one of the first things that jumped out at me with blinding clarity was that the worst release, by far, in rsync history was entirely prior to the introduction of Claude ... And yet nobody noticed.

Language really does suggest the article's author does have a dog in this fight and is cloaking opinion in fancy statistics jargon. "Blinding clarity"? All you have to do is draw a plot. And anyway, v3.4.1 was 2025-01-16, technically well within the AI assisted coding era and before attribution was becoming standard practice.

New comment by theteapot in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

theteapot — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:24:36 +0000

I spend $0/month.

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

theteapot — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:25:34 +0000

> having more engineers around was beneficial to the stock price ... When banks hiked interest rates ... It was just no longer profitable to keep a bloated engineering staff around to boost the stock price.

Erm, what's known of the mechanism coupling software engineer head count and stock price? Or is it just an empirically observed phenomena?

New comment by theteapot in "The Art of Money Getting"

theteapot — Mon, 25 May 2026 02:11:24 +0000

> I could talk fancy and bullshit ... I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it

That's a formidable combination.

> I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really ...

You probably think that because talking fancy and bullshitting come naturally to you.

New comment by theteapot in "GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories"

theteapot — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:42:52 +0000

I think he means template-injection -- https://woodruffw.github.io/zizmor/audits/#template-injectio...

New comment by theteapot in "Learning Software Architecture"

theteapot — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:43:32 +0000

Completely agree. Had me until the very last point. WTF. Communicate.

New comment by theteapot in "Learning Software Architecture"

theteapot — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:11:41 +0000

Nurse Practitioner? I would say SOLID [1] is a good start, but then I watched this [2] and now I'm in crisis and can't code anymore.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI

New comment by theteapot in "Debian must ship reproducible packages"

theteapot — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:27:42 +0000

> Yes, if some people who built from source control compared their builds to the builds from the tarballs it could detect the xzutils compromise.

Good. Then we are on the same page.

New comment by theteapot in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

theteapot — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:59:12 +0000

This rings true for me too, but I don't think it counts if your just using AI to aid maintenance. The basic argument in the article is around how many hours of maintenance you have to do for each hour of "value-add" feature development. So A. your only measuring maintenance costs not the ratio and B. The "old code" whp wasn't written with AI in the first place.

New comment by theteapot in "Debian must ship reproducible packages"

theteapot — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:40:48 +0000

Your wrong. It was both. The payload was embedded in the binary blob test file. The mechanism to pull it into the build was added to the release tarball only.

Here's the quote from the guy that discovered it in the initial public disclosure [1]:

  After observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz package) on Debian sid installations over the last weeks (logins with ssh taking a lot of CPU, valgrind errors) I figured out the answer. The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored. At first I thought this was a compromise of debian's package, but it turns out to be upstream. One portion of the backdoor is *solely in the distributed tarballs* and debian's import of the tarball ... it is also present in the tarballs for 5.6.0 and 5.6.1.

[1]: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4

New comment by theteapot in "Debian must ship reproducible packages"

theteapot — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:33:20 +0000

In xz-utils hack the attacker slipped changes into the Github release tarball that were not present in the Github version / git commit history. The Debian maintainer built from the release tarball instead of just pulling from the git repo directly. Shouldn't have been doing that but good luck convincing him not to use the workflow he's been using for the last X years (I tried). With repro builds we can clone the git directly confirm we get the same build.

New comment by theteapot in "Stop MitM on the first SSH connection, on any VPS or cloud provider"

theteapot — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:12:24 +0000

> The technique appears to be new: I haven't found a proper write-up of this, nor of any other provider-independent solution.

Maybe I'm missing something but SSH already has a built-in solution for this, key-certs. Just sign the server key with a private CA key you trust.

New comment by theteapot in "I caught the car"

theteapot — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:54:46 +0000

Congratulations. It made me remember how proud I was when I became a Senior, and then earned my Super Engineer shortly after. Just recently I've earned my Extreme Engineer title. Good luck on your journey.

New comment by theteapot in "GNU IFUNC is the real culprit behind CVE-2024-3094"

theteapot — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:45:42 +0000

False dichotomy. There was a series of blatant process failures from Github maintainer through Debian package maintainers. IFUNC also bad.

New comment by theteapot in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"

theteapot — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:50:32 +0000

Mmmm, fresh people.

New comment by theteapot in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

theteapot — Thu, 07 May 2026 01:12:05 +0000

the obscure IETF? Which standard is that exactly? Who cares guess - Claude do that stuff.