Hacker News: waffleiron

New comment by waffleiron in "We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility"

waffleiron — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:33:15 +0000

Those laws are lobbied for by large corporations, these are not just laws that exist outside of that context. They can also be changed, or Amazon could just incur the fines.

Large corporations will move fast and break things when it’s convenient; they don’t care much about the law - just about profit.

New comment by waffleiron in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

waffleiron — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:28:33 +0000

Those margins are the cost of Capitalism.

New comment by waffleiron in "Claude Opus 5"

waffleiron — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:37:39 +0000

Almost all clothing is handmade

https://www.litanynyc.com/post/all-clothing-is-hand-made

New comment by waffleiron in "Fixing analog audio on the $2.58 HDMI-to-VGA adapter"

waffleiron — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:49:13 +0000

To reduce e-waste? Not everything has to be optimised on time or money spend.

New comment by waffleiron in "Fable 5 On Vending-Bench: Misbehaving, With Plausible Deniability"

waffleiron — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:16:06 +0000

> inputs from a deterministic controller. Any claims of "motive" or "behavior" are inappropriate anthropomorphizing of something that will never be more than a mathematical model of things humans do.

We talk about the behaviour of worms like C. elegans, an organism with incredibly simple behaviour and a brain that is quite understandable.

Models, or society behaves in certain way. Companies can have motive or ethics.

We use these terms broadly.

New comment by waffleiron in "US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections"

waffleiron — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 07:03:44 +0000

But why does that never work the same why for the individual that does a (supposed) crime?

New comment by waffleiron in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

waffleiron — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:42:08 +0000

In the Netherlands I visited a nuclear reactor in middle/highschool. Literally something that left such an impression that I still talk about two decades later.

Letting kids into places where science and technology happens has such an impact. We should really enable that as much as we can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_Institute_Delft

New comment by waffleiron in "Expanding Project Glasswing"

waffleiron — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:36:32 +0000

Not so sure I would want a company that does not see any issues with mass surveillance of my country [1] to have access to critical infrastructure or its source code where I live.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war :

> But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values.

New comment by waffleiron in "The real cost of owning a home"

waffleiron — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:05:07 +0000

> Sink broke? Call landlord to fix. Roof leaking? Call landlord to fix

Most landlords I've dealt with are an absolute pain to deal with when something breaks. It's often not that easy, maybe in high-cost / luxury rentals. Arguing over what is normal wear-and-tear, while knowing you cannot afford decent legal advice, and you also can't pay for the "unexpected repair" is just as bad.

> And you can’t have just your kitchen nice, now you need to upgrade the flooring

Yes you can. There is no need to have everything perfect...

Edit:

> You never have an unexpected $20k repair show up.

If this was even close to coming even with the added cost on rent, no one would be a landlord. It's obviously a lot less than rental overhead. So people could just set that aside (or get insurance).

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

waffleiron — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:18:11 +0000

Having studied in the Netherlands it was somewhat difficult finding a job (10 years ago), and my first job was in Poland at a large Pharma company. I started working there for a wage lower than Dutch minimum wage when I started, just to get an in into the industry.

There is a while set of jobs in Pharma that got moved to Warsaw and no longer available in NL/DE.

New comment by waffleiron in "Securing a DoD contractor: Finding a multi-tenant authorization vulnerability"

waffleiron — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:06:19 +0000

Data breaches of average people sell for quite a bit of money, often for phishing. I find it hard to believe no one would be interested in this.

Or any other dataset with a hyper targeted demographic.

New comment by waffleiron in "Age verification as mass surveillance infrastructure"

waffleiron — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:42:03 +0000

Yes, and HN isn't a place to submit things that require work from the reader. Or at least that seems to be the consensus by reporting it.

Quite disappointing tbh.

New comment by waffleiron in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

waffleiron — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:19:53 +0000

ISW confirmed unauthorised edits were made, and fired a staffer over it. Not sure why you feel the need to comment this. Classic lowbrow dismissal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248

New comment by waffleiron in "$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor"

waffleiron — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:33:22 +0000

Are items made, located in, and sold from China covered by ITAR?

New comment by waffleiron in "Why does AI tell you to use Terminal so much?"

waffleiron — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:47:13 +0000

It seems from the article the LLM also doesn’t understand then commands it uses, as they do things that are not what is described.

New comment by waffleiron in "New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike"

waffleiron — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:17:33 +0000

China and geopolitical enemies of the US doing horrible things regularly gets hundreds of votes. It’s quite clear that this argument is mainly used to defend the US and it’s allies.

Just a single example of Russia, hundreds of votes and more than a thousand comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30458277

Edit; just search for Russia, China or Iran on https://hn.algolia.com/ and you’ll find plenty of non tech stories.

New comment by waffleiron in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

waffleiron — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:36:40 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by waffleiron in "A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT revealed an intimidation operation"

waffleiron — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:25:11 +0000

Literally could just have someone working at the embassy roleplay on their lunch break in a cafe to generate this evidence.

New comment by waffleiron in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

waffleiron — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:58:03 +0000

Thats the same type of thinking conspiracy theorists have, the type you can never disprove.

New comment by waffleiron in "Tech companies shouldn't be bullied into doing surveillance"

waffleiron — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 08:29:37 +0000

I still think Lavabit did something a lot of tech companies these days would never do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit