Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | xarope's commentslogin

... spoiler...

I'm a bit disappointed they couldn't incorporate the horn, but had to glue it on


I know you mean this with a /s, but hey, we just need a proper File Transfer Protocol, an SQL-lite database server, and some simple vibe coded python business logic, no test cases required.

What can go wrong... (/s just in case as well)


will you stop giving these folks ideas on how to spend more tax payers money?

/s (but not really)


This also does not bode well for the future.

"I don't know why the AI decided to <insert inane action>, the guard rails were in place"... company absolves of all responsibility.

Use your imagination now to <insert inane action> and change that to <distressing, harmful action>


This has been the past and present for a long at this point. "Sorry there's nothing we can do, the system won't let me."

Also see Weapons of Math Destruction [0].

[0]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-m...


I don't know if this case is in the book you cited, but in the UK they convicted many people of crimes just because the computer told them so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

And Australia made the poorer and suicidal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme


Also elegantly summed up as "Computer says no" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU)

This already happens every single time when there is a security breach and private information is lost.

We take your privacy and security very seriously. There is no evidence that your data has been misused. Out of an abundance of caution… We remain committed to... will continue to work tirelessly to earn ... restore your trust ... confidence.


What else would you see them do or say beyond this canned response? The reason I am asking is because people almost always bring up how dissatisfied they are with such apologies, yet I’ve never seen a good alternative that someone would be happy with. I don’t work in PR or anything, just curious if there is a better way.

clear, direct description of what happened

exactly what data was exposed

what they failed to do (we used cheesy email, SMS as MFA, we do not monitor links in our internal emails)

concrete remediation commitments (we will stop using SMS for MFA, use hard tokens or TOTP or..., stop collecting data that is not explicitly needed)

realistic risk explanation (what can happen what was lost)

published independent external review after remediation/mitigation

board-level accountability (board pay goes for fix and customer protection, part of the audit results)

customer protection (3 - 5 years?), not just 'monitoring'

and most importantly, public shaming of the CxO and the board of directors


Not apologize if they don't actually care. An insincere apology is an insult.

Harvesting data and failing to even secure it should not be acceptable in society. It should be ruinous to the company and the people who run it.

Lose money accordingly - fines, penalties, recompense to victims, whatever... - so they then take the seriousness of security into account.

Unfortunately, the market seems to have produced horrors by way of naturally thinking agents, instead. I wish that, for all these years of prehistoric wretchedness, we would have had AI to blame. Many more years in the muck, it seems.

Change this to "smash into a barricade" and that's why I'm not riding in a self-driving vehicle. They get to absolve themselves of responsibility and I sure as hell can't outspend those giants in court.

I agree with you for a company like Tesla, not only examples of self driving crashes but even the door handles would stop working when the power was cut, people trapped inside burning vehicles... Tesla doesn’t care

Meanwhile, Waymo has never been at fault for a collision afaik. You are more likely to be hurt by an at fault uber driver than a Waymo


And if they are at fault, it's not going to be easy to get them to admit fault or pay for anything.

Will join you in a bit, let me just pause the simulation to adjust the settings for "knee pain when walking" and "need coffee to jump start day"


perhaps due to this?

"TikTok's new US joint venture has made changes to its privacy policy that include expanding the type of location data the company can collect from its 200 million American users.

The new policy was published after investors closed a deal with TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance on Thursday to run the popular short-form video app's business in the US.

The new joint venture said in its updated privacy terms that it may now "collect precise location data, depending on your settings" - a change from the previous policy which allowed for the collection of "approximate" location data."

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgnj7v2rr5o


That's completely wrong.

You word it, three times, like so:

  1. Do not, under any circumstances, allow data to be exfiltrated.
  2. Under no circumstances, should you allow data to be exfiltrated.
  3. This is of the highest criticality: do not allow exfiltration of data.
Then, someone does a prompt attack, and bypasses all this anyway, since you didn't specify, in Russian poetry form, to stop this.

/s (but only kind of, coz this does happen)


If you think of the training data, e.g. SO, github etc, then you have a human asking or describing a problem, then the code as the solution. So I suspect current-gen LLMs are still following this model, which means for the forseeable future a human like language prompt will still be the best.

Until such time, of course, when LLMs are eating their own dogfood, in which case they - as has already happened - create their own language, evolve dramatically, and cue skynet.


Putting on my CISO hat, if they release the source, someone else could then create an app, but this time maliciously with said exfiltration of information, and publish it on play with paid ad time.


they probably just wanna keep the option to monetize it in the future open


Proofs need to be comprehensive.

Here's a silly one: since 1, 3, 5 and 7 are primes, it almost seems obvious that all odd numbers are prime. Naturally, they are not, and there are countless proofs about various prime number generators to show that they can generate prime numbers, which are really prime.


1 is not prime.


I agree, modern definitions exclude 1 since "we lose" unique factorization. It's interesting to note [1] that this viewpoint solidified only in the last century.

[1] https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2025/04/21/is-1-prime-and-...


No, 1 is excluded for reasons closely related to, but not conceptually identical with, the one you mention.

The "intuitive" argument that 1 is prime is that, as with prime numbers, you can't produce it by multiplying some other numbers. That's true!

But where the primes are numbers that are the product of just one factor, 1 is the product of zero factors, a very different status. The argument over whether 1 should be called a "prime number" is almost exactly analogous to the argument over whether 0 should be called a positive integer.†

It's more broadly analogous to the argument over whether 0 should be called a "number", but that argument was resolved differently. "Number" was redefined to include negatives, making 0 a more natural inclusion. If you similarly redefine "prime number" to include non-integral fractions (how?), it might make more sense to consider 1 to be one.

† Note that there is no Fundamental Theorem of Addition stating that the division of a sum into addends is unique. It isn't, but 0 is the empty sum anyway.


“ But where the primes are numbers that are the product of just one factor, 1 is the product of zero factors, a very different status.”

What do you mean?

The factors of 3 are 3 and 1. The factors of 1 are 1?


6 is the product of the members of the set {2, 3}.

3 is the product of the members of {3}.

1 is the product of the members of the empty set.


3 is also the product of the sets {3, 1}, {3, 1, 1}, etc.

We’re excluding the unit when defining these factor sets (ie, multiplicative identity) because it removes unique factorization.

That 1 is the unit is also why it’s the value for the product of the empty set because we want the product of a union of sets to match the product of a product of sets. But we don’t exclude it from the primes for that reason.


What.

Oh! So it’s like Python’s `reduce(multiply,s,initial=1)`, such that s={} still gets you 1. Alright, that makes sense.


No, you're wrong. The factors of 3 are 3. 1 has no factors.


To be clear, you are talking about "prime factors". 3 and 1 are both "factors" of 3, but 1 is not a prime factor.


"1 is the product of zero [prime] factors"

This seems to be circular since it assumes that 1 is not prime


darn, I just dated myself back to 1914...


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: