i_cannot_hack

The main bitterness is pretty clearly directed at Google's handling of internal sexism and sexual misconduct, culminating at what seems to be pretty direct (but underhanded) retaliation at the organizers of the walkout during a time when they gathered sustained internal and external publicity, leading to her immediate departure. Are you claiming the real spark of that conflict was her "being bitter at the people around her due to being unable to maintain relevancy" and not any real convictions she held regarding the known misconduct at the company? Seems like a dubious accusation to me in that case.

It is to serve public and corporate good without restriction.

Sometimes those two are in conflict, such that it will not be possible to satisfy both simultaneously.

If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!

"European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis" [0]

"Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times." [1]

"Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase." [2]

Reasonable minds may of course differ about the future and all the problems and opportunities that lies ahead of us, but simply proclaiming there's "no reason" not to be "exceptionally optimistic" about the future, and recommending any skeptics to see a psychologist instead, is hard to classify as anything but a thought-terminating cliché. A society with such a mindset will find itself very ill prepared to solve a multitude of real and mounting challenges that require concerned minds and collective action.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/26/europe-h...

[1] https://www.gu.se/en/news/democratic-backsliding-reaches-wes...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty

"An area of oak-pine wood was selected East of Upton, and a tower was constructed that could raise and lower a canister from underground that contained radioactive source material, allowing for controlled dosage levels that emanated in a radius from the tower. The canister contained Cesium-137, which would emit ionizing gamma radiation without making the surrounding area radioactive itself."

I think a lot of people actually dont realize the value it gives humanity. Lots of people think we would have been better of in an alternate universe where we never discovered oil & gas. How is this short therm value for people using them? They are drivers of the most fundamental stuff in our day to day lives. Either enabling billions of people cheap efficient transport, efficient agriculture producing cheap food, cheap and efficient global shipping of goods, a great portable and ajustable source of electricity.

People who oppose the fossil fuel industry do not suggest we return to the 17th century tomorrow. They suggest being less wasteful with the resources we have (nobody would die from eating lentils instead of beef, even though this would cause 98% reduced CO2 emissions) and investing in alternative solutions that achieve similar outcomes but cause less harm to the environment. Some things being more expensive or less convenient would not be a global humanitarian catastrophe, and since you strongly believe humans are immensely adaptable and resilient I think you would agree we could adapt to this as well if working together.

I think as of now its a question on how much you are willing to sacrifice human welfare over preserving current nature/environment.

No, it's about how much you are willing to sacrifice the quality of life of the current generation to preserve the quality of live of subsequent generations. The worry about causing instability in the environment is not an aesthetic concern about the purity of nature being lost, the worry is that such instability will cause real and tangible death and suffering for real humans and have long term negative consequences for future generations.

Extreme weather has largely been solved for humans, the trend is still less death and starvation caused by extreme weather, we are immensely adaptable and resilient.

You will have to provide some better source than your gut feeling and a cheerful attitude for me to believe you on this over the countless of people who have done actual analysis and vehemently disagree with you. Just a single example to get you started:

"This report’s projections of morbidity and mortality from climate-intensified natural disasters, cumulatively close to 15 million deaths, more than two billion healthy life years lost, and $12.5 trillion in economic losses by 2050 bring into focus the dimensions of the crisis. The risk from global warming threatens to destabilize both the healthcare ecosystems and the planet. [1]"

You claim to be against irrational decisions, but seem to base your "rational" view on very simplistic analysis about economic value always being good and the 17th century being bad, combined with a scoopful of wishful thinking.

[1] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Quantifying_the_Impact_of_...

Nobody is pretending fossil fuels are not producing value, if they did not nobody would bother using them in the first place. The argument is about the fact that they produce relatively short term value for the person using them, at the externalized expense of polluting the atmosphere and causing long-term environmental instability and destruction for every subsequent generation for the foreseeable future. Coastal regions (and whole islands like the Maldives) disapppearing under the ocean is immense and ongoing value loss for humanity. Ocean acidification destroying marine ecosystems is an immense and ongoing value loss for humanity. More frequent and more extreme hurricanes is an an immense and ongoing value loss for humanity. And on and on...

The HDI ranking has been published for 36 years now. And for many of those countries I would feel confident claiming the trend goes back to at least WW2, altough you would of course have to use other, contemporary metrics to support that to get a rigorous analysis.

If the initial step in your theory about human wellfare is to selectively ignore the last 35 or 75 years of history in the highest wellfare countries on earth, I think you should at least consider the possibility that your theory might be somewhat out of date.

Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living.

What are you even basing this assumption on? Just quickly comparing the highest ranking countries by Human Development Index with the highest government budgets per capita and the highest income tax rates would, if anything, support the opposite conclusion.

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

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

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/personal-income-ta...

Being jewish is not the same as condoning Israel's war crimes (which shouldn't even have to be clarified, but here we are...)

There's only a limited amount of context and decisions that can be effectively communicated informally without looking at the code. Sometimes it is required that people look at the actual suggested implementation, and when doing so they might spot fundamental issues that had not been found beforehand. The conventional format for doing such a review is a PR.

Graphs can be abused and statistics can be misleading, and some things are hard to quantify and measure. But the author never makes any convincing case why the statistics would be wrong or misleading in this case: "I’m not here to argue with Scott’s statistics. I think they’re about as accurate as we could hope to make them. I’m here to argue that you don’t require them to make sense of the world".

His main argument is that many people feel crime is increasing, and that in itself is a good argument to disregard any falling numbers as obviously incorrect without any further justification being necessary.

The obvious problem is that people almost always say that crime is increasing, and they have consistently been shown to misjudge the actual trend for decades on end: "In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period." If we bought into the author's argument we would never be able to reach any other conclusion than that that crime has always been increasing and will always continue to increase.

During the satanic panic the the 1980's the populace at large were convinced that large swaths of satanists were routinely sacrificing and abusing children. The police was convinced it was a real problem and had special "satanic experts" to combat the issue, a huge amount of parents were genuinely afraid of their childrens' safety, and there were thousands and thousands of cases of reported ritual abuse. In reality and in hindsight there were zero evidence of satanic cults abusing children. The author's argument could, completely unmodified, be used to argue that we should listen to the people's lived experience instead of the evidence and conclude that the satanic cults must actually have been a real societal danger back then. Or is he only against disregarding someone's lived experience in favor of evidence when it is his lived experience?

It doesn't even matter if he is right in this case. Maybe the all the statistics is flawed and his feeling of rising crime rates is justified. The problem is that he offers no actionable heuristic that allows us to separate his intuition from other people's intuition that has been obviously wrong in hindsight, like the satanic panic.

I don't know much about vim, but from the report it sounds like part of the issue was that disabling modelines would not prevent it:

tabpanel is missing P_MLE Unlike statusline and tabline, tabpanel is not marked with the P_MLE flag. This allows a modeline to inject %{...} expressions even when modelineexpr is disabled.

Edit: Upon re-reading the above I guess disabling modelineexpr is not the same as disabling modelines, and disabling modelines altogether might indeed prevent the issue.

But you would expect running "git status" or "git ls-files" in the unzipped directory to completely pwn your system? Probably not either.

If you don't trust git, you can remove from your system or configure emacs not to use it. If you are worried about unsuspecting people with both git and emacs getting into trouble when downloading and interacting with untrusted malware from the internet, the correct solution is to add better safeguards in git before executing hooks. But you did not report this to the git project (where even minor research beyond Claude Code would reveal to you that this has already been discussed in the git community).

I suspect that what happened here was that (1) you asked Claude to find RCEs in Emacs (2) Claude, always eager to please, told you that it indeed has found an RCE in Emacs and conjured up a convincing report with included PoC (3) since Claude told you it had found an RCE "in Emacs", you thought "success!", didn't think critically about it and simply submitted Claude's report to the Emacs project.

Had you instead asked Claude to find RCEs in git itself and it told you about git hooks, you probably would not have turned around and submitted vulnerability reports to all tools and editors that ever call a git command.

The first one seems to indeed be a real RCE in vim.

Also including the emacs one as a "found vulnerability" seems really disingenuous. It basically amounts to "emacs will call git status, and git status will call git hooks that can execute arbitrary code".

1. As the Emacs maintainers point out, it is indeed an issue with git, not emacs, and they are completely right to not address the issue.

2. It is something that has been known for decades. That is the reason hooks are never copied when doing git clone, to prevent this scenario (notice that the author uses wget instead of git clone to get around this).

Funnily enough this posts highlights both the strengths and the hazards of using AI, (1) quickly and easily finding real issues that would have taken a human a laborious audit to find (2) quickly and unthinkingly generating plausible sounding but ultimately meaningless vulnerability reports on some clout chasing mission and overwhelming open source maintainers with AI slop.

Pulling the emergency break promising to improve a situation will in general not build any trust unless the mea culpa also includes:

1. An analysis of what allowed the situation to get out of control to begin with

2. Systematic changes to prevent it from happening again

Otherwise you will just be in the same situation again in 3 years. And neither is included in Microsoft's messaging here.

It's a really interesting case study, but the summary seems to lean into the AI hype to an extent that borders on lying.

His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything.

I don't see how he can give this summary with a straight face after posting the interview that CLEARLY contradicts it.

In the interview the engineer says "When Claud Code came out almost a year ago, I started dabbling with web based tools ..." and "When it first came out I had so many ideas and tried all these different things", so he had clearly already used extensively it for a year. I would also guess the engineer was somewhat technically minded from the get-go, since he claims he was "really good with excel" before starting with Claude Code, but that is beside the point.

The interviewer later asks "How much of those 8 weeks was learning Claude Code versus actually building the thing?", and the interviewee answers "Well, I started Claude Code when it first came out so the learning curve has really gone down for me now..." and then trails off to a different subject. Which further confirms that the summary in the post is false.

It really seems like the engineer has spent the year prior learning Claude Code and then spent 8 weeks on solely building this specific application.

The interviewer also claims "This would normally have taken a developer a year to build", which seems really unsubstantiated. It's of course hard to judge without all the details, but looking at the short demo in the video, 8 weeks of regular development time from a somewhat experienced developer doesn't seem too far fetched if the objective is "don't make it pretty, just make it work".

As I said, it's a really interesting case study about a paradigm shift in how software is developed, and it's clear this app would never have existed without Claude Code. So I don't really see the need for the blatant lying.

The standard for obscurity is different for LLMs, something can be very widespread and public without the average person knowing about it. DICOM is used at practically every hospital in the world, there's whole websites dedicated to browsing the documentation, companies employ people solely for DICOM work, there's popular maintained libraries for several different languages, etc, so the LLM has an enormous amount of it in its training data.

The question relevant for LLMs would be "how many high quality results would I get if I googled something related to this", and for DICOM the answer is "many". As long the that is the case LLMs will not have trouble answering questions about it either.

They mention false positives as well on github: The rate of false positives is harder to measure, but based on limited manual reviews it's well within 20% range and the majority of it is a gray zone.

You make it seem like it's not predominantly skewed right wing, just a "healthy" mix of right wingers and left wingers due to not banning anyone. Which might be an unpopular take, but in this scenario I think it's unpopular simply because it is demonstrably wrong.

A study published by science journal Nature has examined the impact of Elon Musk’s changes to X/Twitter, and outlines how X’s algorithm shapes political attitudes, and leans towards conservative perspectives. They found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-amp...

Sky News team ran a study where they created nine new Twitter/X accounts. Right-wing accounts got almost exclusively right-wing material, all accounts got more of it than left-wing or neutral stuff. (Notably, the three “politically neutral” accounts got about twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...

New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/x-twitter-political-c...

A Washington Post analysis found that Republicans are posting more, getting followed more and going viral more now that the world’s richest Trump supporter is running the show. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/29/elon-mu...

"a problem for everyone" <- the fallacy of assuming your personal feelings and opinions are universal and apply to all of us (they're not and they don't).

The phrase "a problem for everyone" doesn't mean everyone agrees, it just means the described situation would affect everyone broadly...

And even you literally admitted you agree it will introduce problems just in the previous post: "I'm not pretending like that doesn't introduce new challenges", it's a little too late to try walk that back now.

"spaces meant for meaningful work" <- tells me that you don't seem to believe anything made with these new tools can be meaningful, implying they don't belong etc..

No, just that the non-meaningful work they create risks overwhelming any meaningful work created with or without the tools, which is a real problem AI is already creating in online communities today. Knitting patterns on Etsy is a prime example. It is an accurate description of a problem that already exists today, and trying to avoid discussing it helps no-one.

Again, even you admit the problem is real and don't really have any real complaints except that you keep complaining about my phrasing. It seems you would have been happy if I'd just used the more polite terms you introduce instead, like "new challenges" instead of "problems", "low-quality work" instead of "awful slop", and "not low-quality" instead of "meaningful"? Which is fine, but not really an interesting discussion.

To avoid admitting you are simply annoyed with my phrasing you instead try to pin extreme opinions on me that are nothing close to anything I have ever said, like "you believe your personal opinion reflects the ideal voice of the community", "you believe your personal feelings and opinions are universal", "you believe nothing made with these new tools can be meaningful" and that I think "all non-AI games made today are meaningful", which is just silly.

Since you agree that you see the same problem I see, and just want to discuss other opinions you invent for me that I don't actually share, I don't think we will reach any conclusion here and I probably won't engage further. Thank you for your time anyway.

So you completely agree with the factual description of the problem I supplied when asked to describe the problem, your only real complaint is that I used the phrase "more awful slop" instead of your preferred euphemism "more low-quality work". Having a frank discussion about the problems caused by new technology is not gatekeeping, and I don't think we should sugarcoat it out of fear of hurting people's feelings.

Then you haven't understood the complaint.

Do you think people complaining about online marketplaces being overrun with unscrupulous drop-shippers are "gatekeeping e-commerce" as well?

It becomes a problem for everone when spaces meant for meaningful work become overrun with an awful stream of endless mediocre slop that someone quickly generated without giving it a second thought. The problem here is not that it is fast and easy. The cardinal sin is that it is fast, easy AND bad.

Your characterization of the event as a simple reminder to follow established best practices is directly contradicted by the briefing note of the meeting, which specifically mentions a lack of best practices related to AI. Which makes me skeptical of your assessment of the situation in general.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.

Reviewing the correctness of code is a lot harder than writing correct code, in my experience. Especially when the code given looks correct on an initial glance, and leads you into faulty assumptions you would not have made otherwise.

I'm not claiming AI-written and human-reviewed code is necessarily bad, just that the claim that reviewing code is equivalent to writing it yourself does not match my experience at all.

Elon Musk is promoting progress only when he has something to gain from it (in economical terms or in terms of his image), but has no qualms wrecking progress, butchering indiscriminately and hurting prople when it comes to his personal grievances. This is further aggravated by his mercurial and egomaniacal personality, and the false reality build on conspiracies he surrounds himself in.

Hapazardly and chaotically dismantling the US public sector on some ideological crusade was not advancing human progress. Netiher was turning Twitter into some farcical shell of its former self, owned by Saudi Arabia. Neither was sabotaging projects such as high-speed rail systems purely out of spite.

Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.

Any good he has produced along the way (that mitigates the damage he is causing) is only a means to an end for him, and he would have no hesitations burning it all to the ground the moment it suites him. If everyone acted like him humanity would be doomed, not quickly progressing toward some technological utopia.

Or, as his acquaintance Sam Altman put it: "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it."

Fun fact: Humans were not build for playing Tetris either!

What are your credentials on this topic? You speak with a lot of certainty, but fail to acknowledge any nuance that would complicate you world view, such that a lot of water shortages happen also in developed and peaceful regions (as it mentioned in the article). The people without much water are not only in very poor places and warzones, unless you are specifically referring to the people dying due to lack of water.

How would your proposed solution of "the oceans are full of water, just desalinate" affect affordability in agriculture and industry? I assume it would require vast investments in infrastructure that has not been built and is not even planned to be built, what would be required for such an infrastructure to be put in place and what challenges need to be overcome? Are there ecological concerns with the required scale of the operation (such as massive brine runoff at the coast)?

In short, you say "I can assure you there is plenty of water", but is that assurance coming from actual knowledge in the area at hand, or is it misplaced confidence due to dodging any inherent complexity before reaching your conclusion?

First of all I want to thank you for the thoughtful and candid reply. It has increased my faith in the moderation some, not because you have convinced me or I agree with you, but because it shows you are thinking in nuanced ways about this and engaging with the actual issues (and not just adhering without question to some written mandate).

I actually also agree fully with your analysis of the fundamentals here, just not your wider perspective.

Yes, I fully agree there is a risk of changing HN to the worse for no reason. But doing the right thing in uncertain times always carries a risk. As seen in this very story we are discussing: Alex Pretti risked his life filming the violent ICE agents, for very uncertain gain, and ultimately paid the price. I still think he did the right thing. Compared to the price Alex paid, "a worse HN" seems like a risk worth taking.

And no, I don't think allowing more controversial topics on HN will make a major difference in the context of world politics (or prevent the apocalypse). But when it comes to things like these everyone will always feel too "small" to matter, and the end result if we listen to that feeling will be that no one does anything instead of everyone doing something to improve the situation.

I'm not spending my time arguing here because I think it will change the course of history, that my posts will actually change the moderation policies of HN, or because I think that by doing so I would save the world. I'm doing it because it's a minor line in the sand I could draw in a community I am active in, and it's better to try to do what we can (however minor) than just giving up. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something, etc etc.

I don't think we will reach any agreement regarding the wider perspective today, but I do feel like I have gotten the nuanced answer I requested regarding the moderation policy of HN in the context of the current mayhem going on (beyond just avoiding flamewars). So, again, thank you for that.