It's hitting cars too. Our 2026 Chevy equinox has so many alarms and chimes that we have zero control over, the worst one has no notification of what its alerting us of.
As a pretty decent driver, this terrifies me, because I first think, "What am I missing?" But then it hits me - these alarms and chimes are breeding generations of drivers, not just young ones, who are grossly incompetent and should not be driving.
The fact that I cannot control what alarms go off is asinine. And they put a lock on how low you can turn the chime volume. So, basically, you're telling me that I have to harass my neighbors at 5 am when I load the car for work, because you want to chime nonstop when the door is open and I have zero control to turn it off or lower than the locked minimum. Oh, and don't forget the threats of voiding the warrantee if you dig deeper to disable anything. My favorite alarm and warning pops up randomly when you're driving, sometimes blocking the map, and it says something to the effect of, "Remember to stay focused on driving!"
I see this slipping into not just alerts and notifications, but also ads. Waze does not care if they block my directions by blasting an ad on part of my screen, which has absolutely caused me to miss exits since they don't want to tell you the exit ahead of time on longer strips, only, "drive for 45 miles"...
I see this like popups, and if industry can't handle themselves they need to be forced to stop doing this altogether and find a rework, since it's clearly affecting private and public machines that could burnout or kill people.
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act makes it clear that digging deeper cannot void any warrantee except unless they can show you caused the issue via digging deeper. You may needa lawyer to enforce it.
Abbreviations and acronyms are highly inefficient if not defined clearly and up front. It also creates a division between those who know and those who don't.
I absolutely detested seeing "ISO" suddenly everywhere on Facebook and Nextdoor in place of "in search of". If you didn't know that before, you know it now, but you may also be annoyed by it not being about the international organization for standardization, which also goes by ISO, but not for any reason people would magically guess, without a background in Greek. (ISO explains that, since the acronym would differ in every language, ISO is actually derived from isos, which means "equal". Happy coincidence that it almost matches the name of the organization, but could also become obscure with time and lost history.)
For our company, I've been very clear that we don't make up acronyms unless a layperson could reasonably guess what it stands for, and also not confuse it for something else.
> It also creates a division between those who know and those who don't.
Yeah, it's called "expertise" and it isn't as bad as you seem to think. Blogs for security professionals will use jargon and technical words aimed at other security professionals, and that's OK, not everything on the web is for everyone.
Just like how in my game development blog I don't explain what a "loop" is because I'm assuming the audience knows basic programming already, otherwise every article would be balloon out of scope easily.
A quick skim of https://iverify.io/blog makes it seem pretty clear that iVerify’s audience is people who are interested in security, not just existing industry experts.
But then skim the submission article and try to evaluate which audience it seems written for.
Considering they have stuff like "Located within the Sysdiagnoses in the Unified Logs section (specifically, Sysdiagnose Folder -> system_logs.logarchive -> Extra -> shutdown.log)" in the article, my guess is that they're aiming for people who at least have a basic understanding of security, not general users, as those wouldn't understand an iota of that.
Considering there is actualy not an iota of technically security challenging stuff (specifically, any computer user can understand your quote that there is a log file located at some path, there is 0 security understanding required there), using your own logic we can deduce the general audience was the target
The typical/general computer user wouldn't even understand the ">" character, I think you either don't grasp the wide range of people who sit in front of computers daily, or you over-estimate their ability of grasping computer concepts, because you'd say that sentence to the typical computer user and most of them wouldn't understand most of it.
That's fine, you don't need to understand the > character, it clearly says there is some log file located at some folder.
> because you'd say that sentence to the typical computer user and most of them wouldn't understand most of it.
Yeah, do try that, just not your cut version focusing on the irrelevance of a specific path and the meaning of >, but the whole paragraph. Do see how many people fail to understand that there was some file at some folder. You could even ask extra SAT questions "what do you thing a "shutdown log" is, does it record activities during device shutdown?")
Any example where somebody says an article doesn’t do a great job defining its terms just becomes proof that the authors only wanted readers who already understand the terms.
I think it's fine for the magazine, but I would have liked to see it expanded in the HN submission title, since many of us are not cybersecurity specialists.
I assume this blog post is targeted for the security community, where IoC is universally understood. Of course it is confusing on HN, but authors are free to assume their audience - like we don't define what HTTP, MVC and "btw" mean every time we use it. Or, for a better example, HN and YC are used here all the time, but would be confusing for outsiders (and should be defined outside of HN context).
The web already had terminology for this in online enthusiast forums: WTB (Want to Buy), FS (For Sale), FT (For Trade), etc. The slow death of the open web in favor of platforms has evidently caused a lot of rework like this. Other notable examples include backwards emoticons (: and DM instead of PM.
You'd probably end up with tighter and tighter tolerances such as they mention with the triakis tetrahedron.
The challenge is that it gets computationally intensive the more sides that you add if you don't have shortcuts like ruling out entire blocks of orientations in their parameter space (they figured out that if one shadow, projection, protrudes significantly, then you'd need a large rotation to get that protrusion into the other shadow, thus removing all of those rotational angles and reducing the number of orientations needed to check). More sides and more symmetry make it much harder to test a candidate, but you have an interesting idea.
That military career is quite a rollercoaster. Quick-thinking but also youthfully impatient, clearly disciplined enough to rise in the ranks but kicked all around based on how history went. It's pretty amazing that his achievements spanned quite different areas beyond just the military.
This is quanta magazine. It is for lay people. The reason people are "nitpicking" the title is that "shape" is not a technical term. The technical term for what was found is "convex polyhedron". I read so much of the article before I was sure that it was talking about convex polyhedra specifically because the title is so ambiguous.
Quanta Magazine is very much designed for non-technical lay people.
From their About page: Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent online publication launched by the Simons Foundation in 2012 to enhance public understanding of science.
Oh come on. Quanta Magazine basically writes for HN. They have very little online footprint elsewhere, but they feature here multiple times a week and I'm sure they know it. The titles are almost always in this mold, implying some profound yet vague discovery. Some real, recent examples:
- "Researchers Discover the Optimal Way to Optimize"
- "Origami Patterns Solve a Major Physics Riddle"
- "A simple way to measure knots has come unraveled"
- "The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves Crashes Into View"
I don't necessarily mind it, even if I don't find the articles very informative. But it's certainly fair game to nitpick this borderline-clickbait style.
It's a pity that they are missing a hugely troubled audience - elderly hooked on YouTube, specifically.
It's an ugly addiction that mirrors what we've seen with alcoholics and schizophrenics, whereby they point a finger at anything but the actual problem, and any remedy that the have, or are given, they adamantly avoid and refuse.
YouTube, like other social media, is driven by pushing and pulling on the right emotions in the right way to get you hooked. Sexy, funny, happy, cute, sensational, sad, scary, angry. Enough Sophia Vergara, cat videos, UFOs, doom and gloom, bias-confirming politics, etc, and you'll have someone watching all day long. It's not like what it was when an elderly person watched daytime soap operas and gameshows, this is a dopamine-fueled additive binge. We've seen several really bad cases where it's almost everything that the lonely elderly person does. There's no more "journey" or "investment" when you can simply flick to the next video that tickles your fancy in that moment.
These are the people I'm sincerely concerned about, and they have zero reason to go seek help. It's not an issue to them. In fact, they'll fight tooth and nail to claim anything else is their problem except this.
It's almost as though the first generations to enjoy television weren't ready for something this addictive.
Personally, I despise YouTube, despite growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley. That platform serves a handful of purposes for me, such as helpful tutorials the rare time that I need them and epic Mongolian folk metal music videos.
YouTube recommendations are tailored to what you watch. I end up being recommended car repair videos, security/hacking/surveillance videos, repairing old vintage computers and some like comedy and music stuff I like.
The stuff that you mention. You can literally say "Not Interested" on the video and it will show you less of content. I see none of it.
Recommendations are mostly tailored to your history, except with a couple hardcoded slots populated with some general-purpose "engaging" trash from your locale/geographical location, pretty much always political content.
And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.
They're not short-sighted; there's science behind it. The science of getting people to waste as much time as possible generating "engagement". All of this is A/B tested to hell and people's careers live and die by it.
Yes, maybe shortsighted is not the right word, but regardless, they misunderstand signal constantly.
I go out of my way to block accounts that post stuff I don't want in my feed and pretty much all of them see that as an invitation to give me more of the same content. Likely because I "interact" longer with the content since it takes clicks to block the account.
> Recommendations are mostly tailored to your history, except with a couple hardcoded slots populated with some general-purpose "engaging" trash from your locale/geographical location, pretty much always political content.
I don't see that at all. I use YouTube most evenings (I watch YouTube instead of TV).
I do have like traditional news media sometimes on the third or fourth row and you can dismiss that quickly.
> And if you click on one, by mistake or curiosity, now you've sent a signal that you like it and will get much more of it in the next batch of recommendations.
You fix that by simply pressing "Not Interested" a few times. It can be annoying. It isn't the end of the world.
This is not true. I have never seen that at all. I rarely use the YouTube main feed, but looking at it right now, it's 100% bicycle repair and cooking.
The idea that YouTube pushes a political point of view is itself a falsehood pushed by people holding a particular point of view.
I don't know about pushing a certain political point of view, but my 3rd or 4th row of recommendations frequently becomes a labelled "news" section if something big happens either federally or in my state. Separate from normal recommendations.
This is an important caveat. I get recommended what the parent commenter you replied to stated, mostly videos on home repair, tech, and technological skepticism because those are what I watch. I also get Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and other alt-right pipeline dorks in my recommendations solely because of my gender and age. I never engage with political content on YouTube and I’ve cleared my watch history multiple times, these still show up.
I actually ended up disabling watch history all together and I’ve installed an extension (Unhook) that hides the sidebar recommendations, Shorts, and other useless features.
> I also get Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and other alt-right pipeline dorks in my recommendations solely because of my gender and age. I never engage with political content on YouTube and I’ve cleared my watch history multiple times, these still show up.
That doesn't happen. Firstly you literally click on the video and say "don't recommend channel" and you will never see a JRE episode again.
Also, just by how you phrased that whole paragraph. I don't believe you are telling the truth.
None of those characters are "alt-right". "alt-right" essentially means White Nationalist.
You cannot tell me that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are White Nationalists because of their support for Israel and one of them is Jewish. White nationalists really don't like Israel and Jewish people. They however were labelled as "alt right" to smear them, by other political commentators and publications who are typically on the left and American.
You would only use that framing if you were listening to those commentators and/or publications that used similar phrasing.
Also Jordan Peterson actually talked about addiction on a Joe Rogan podcast and it was one of the things that put me on the road to dealing with my drinking issues. I stopped listening to Joe Rogan about episode 1000 after they stopped being live and were prerecorded.
I have plenty of criticisms of them now. But I Jordan Peterson did help me at least indirectly. I don't watch either of them anymore and haven't watched them for quite a number of years at this point.
There are some subtleties here. One of my friends and I are both interested in camping and outdoor gear. This keeps causing YouTube to recommend videos on prepping and guns. Go ahead and block channels and select less of this and it sort of works for a while
But then it comes back with more. There are lots of prepping and guns channels. Maybe a pepper who talks about gardens gets highlighted or a gun thing that has a manufacturing complication or business hook comes up. There are many such channels, lots of content, and the connections are very strong, at least with YouTube recommendations.
He fixes up a lot of different type of vehicles and actually explains in detail what he is doing. A lot of car stuff is just people like do a dyno test of like suped up car, I don't find it very interesting. I end up just blocking those channels.
I really think that people are nitpicking a system that works reasonably well for the most part.
They do not. The alt-right hate Jews or people who support Israel. Ben Shapiro is a Jew, Jordan Peterson supports Israel and used to work for Daily Wire that had a Jewish host. No white nationalist would ever support that.
You are either lying, or have no idea what you are on about.
We all get showed the alt right rage bait on youtube. It's full of "shapiro destroys libtards", "peterson annihilates the woke left", and "Rogan talks to <alt right conspiracy theorist> and wakes up to the real truth".
You can't deny what is right in front of everyone to see.
> We all get showed the alt right rage bait on youtube. t's full of "shapiro destroys libtards", "peterson annihilates the woke left", and "Rogan talks to <alt right conspiracy theorist> and wakes up to the real truth".
Firstly. None of that is alt-right. It is America Republican slop rage-bait. Alt-right specifically means White Nationalist.
> The alt-right (abbreviated from alternative right), or dissident right, is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity and establishing a presence in other countries during the mid-2010s.
White Nationalists literally hate the Jews, Israel and anyone that support them.
- Jordan Peterson supports Israel and last time I checked worked for the Daily Wire. The Daily Wire was co-founded by Ben Shapiro.
- Joe Rogan is 90s style liberal who is into UFOs, Big Foot and other kooky shit. He literally named his comedy bar "The Mothership". Nothing about that is White Nationalist/Alt-right.
None of them are White Nationalists, nor would they be accepted by White Nationalists. So you are 100% incorrect on that.
Secondly, The Ben Shapiro Ownage stuff was popular circa 2015-2018. Guess what was popular before that? "Hitch Slap", which was Christopher Hitchens basically berating people are various religions.
I've not seen any of that content described in years and it fell out of favour back in 2018-2019.
> You can't deny what is right in front of everyone to see.
It isn't though.
None of the ownage videos have been popular for years and quite honestly I don't believe you have seen them unless you've specifically gone looking for them.
I have tested whether this does come up on a fresh browser profile using a VPN set to the US (as I am in the UK). I used several different locations in the US. I didn't see one of these videos.
I believe you and others are lying because they have a political axe to grind.
You’re too focused on labels. Humans don’t work that neatly. Political labels can work if you and the other person are educated on politics (95%+ of HN isn’t) but otherwise focusing on labels mislead the convo and vibe.
A lot of white nationalists love Israel. Saying they don’t is like saying a lot of fascists don’t love fascism (aka Israel). A lot don’t and a lot do.
Similarly there are plenty of people who are progressive except for Palestine/Israel (it’s a known saying). And plenty of conservative or right wing people who are not progressive except about Palestine.
> You would only use that framing if you were listening to those commentators and/or publications that used similar phrasing.
> You’re too focused on labels. Humans don’t work that neatly.
No I am using the terms correctly. You (from later on in your reply) aren't.
> Political labels can work if you and the other person are educated on politics (95%+ of HN isn’t) but otherwise focusing on labels mislead the convo and vibe.
These are specific political positions that are held by prominent members. Calling Ben Shapiro a white nationalist is simply idiotic. If you aren't informed about it, maybe you should not make strong claims about it.
> A lot of white nationalists love Israel. Saying they don’t is like saying a lot of fascists don’t love fascism (aka Israel). A lot don’t and a lot do.
No they don't. No white nationalist would support the Jews or Israel. I am sorry you are simply showing your ignorance.
As an aside, Fascism is a wildly misunderstood and misused term. I actually loathe ever talking about it today because like the term "Nazi" it has been totally misused by idiots. You do not understand the term fascist.
> Similarly there are plenty of people who are progressive except for Palestine/Israel (it’s a known saying). And plenty of conservative or right wing people who are not progressive except about Palestine.
Obviously there are splinter groups in any organisation that believe different things. Those people btw are referred to differently.
> Projection
No at all. I am just calling it as I see it. I also lost any good will I would have had with you in the conversation as a result of this jab.
You make it sound like anti-semites will always dislike Israel as if the average evangelical isn’t an anti-semite. This is why normies who don’t understand politics and over emphasis idpol and labels are always surprised when anti-semites can and do love Israel.
This exact thing goes on in my YouTube sidebar. Let's say I watch a video game streamer. The sidebar will end up consisting of:
- Same streamer, different video
- Different streamer
- Far right pundit blasts immigration
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
- Video game review
- Same streamer, similar content
- Ben Shapiro OWNS Liberals with FACTS
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
It's obvious that some slots are simply reserved for whatever YouTube thinks will enrage/engage. Nothing I do seems to stop this. I can click "Don't Show Me This" until I'm exhausted, and next time around, while they might not recommend that exact channel, they just fill these slots with different ragebait. There's no way to say "Don't recommend this shit or anything like it."
I think you've drawn the wrong conclusion from this observation. The realization you should have reached instead is that game streamers are highly aligned with the radical right. Those videos are in there because other viewers sought them out after watching the streams.
Or that the youtube algorithm is leading you toward videos that will maximize their metrics (engagement). Video Games is just the example here but I get the same things from other anodyne hobby videos.
The "gamer to alt-right pipeline"[1] is weirdly real, but what I don't understand is why all these social media companies are trying to funnel gamers as a particular group into extreme right political content, and why is the alt-right targeting gamers in particular? I guess it's possible that gamers tend intentionally seek out this content, so the algorithm matches this energy, but it would surprise me. Why would gamers want this crap?
Disaffected male youth almost universally play (or watch people play) video games as their primary form of entertainment.
The point of my comment though, was that it’s not just video game content leading here, it seems to be any male leaning hobby, including weightlifting, sports, tabletop gaming, etc.
I think it's just the overlap between gamers and a desirable younger male voting demographic that helped Trump win in 2024. These guys aren't watching cable news so it seems logical to try and reach them on the internet.
yeah but then they sometime just emerge some random stuff in your feed, and if you give in to it once and click on it, they will assume this is all you want from now on.
YouTube recommendations are always so rage-baity for me to the point where I blocked them entirely.
Can't look up a movie or a gadget without getting a thumbnail with big red letters saying that the thing sucks, this despite me avoiding review/reaction content like the plague.
> I've found the opposite to be true. If I engage with a video in any way shape or form, even to say I don't want it, they consider that engagement
I don't think that is the case. If I click Not Interested. Similar video don't show.
> Now you get baited with Member Only videos too. I'm already paying you $30 a month..
To members? Or to YouTube to remove ads? If it is the former, you have shown YouTube that you are willing to pay for memberships, so they going to recommend them.
Why YouTube specifically? In my experience it is the tamest of all feeds.
Not that they have any more morals or self control, they just seem to have a comparatively awful algorithm that brings up the same 14 videos over and over.
Youtube is one of those platforms I would probably never have used if my feed wouldn't be adjusted to me.
There is real gold on youtube, like for example the math explainers by 3blue1brown. But if you ever tries opening a private browser window and opening and see the video recommendations it looks like a platform only containing mindless trash, with the mental nutritents contained in a piece of cardboard.
And there are people who like precisely that: Mindnumbing somethings that just keep your brain from having a single thought.
If you’re using it as a tool it’s perfectly usable with just a search bar. I want to learn how to do something in a visual manner, I go to YouTube. Type in “how to replace [part] on [my car]”. All I have on the YouTube homepage is a search bar, because I used the Unhook extension to hide everything else.
Ya, I custom coded our startups entire bespoke sensor array and smart systems. No AI. It was build before LLMs gains the traction that we see now. I tested several models to see if they could build the same. They can't yet.
My code will never be publicly available. That's a key trade secret of our business. When investors and others tell us that someone else could build it, I let them know that they could build their own, similar version, but it wouldn't be what we have.
We've verified that by having friends and family, some of the best coders that we know - Stanford, MIT, and other CS alum, as well as top FAANG programmers - try to reproduce it. It's always something done in their own style that doesn't do the job as it needs to be done (they work ok, but they all miss some key crucial parts of why our system succeeds at what it does).
GitHub is good for those looking for a job or to share their projects openly. I wouldn't even trust a private repo. Everything is either on systems and servers that we have control over or in my head. As we grow and scale, we have a roadmap for how to keep control over those trade secrets until it's time to pass off the company (if we do). At that point, I'm confident that whoever takes over will realize that this will be like the Coca Cola recipe, or any other trade secret which could be reproduced but not necessarily in the same way. (Knowing the history of that recipe and what others have created that tastes identical, it's more apocryphal and maybe not a perfect example, but you get the idea).
Anything controlled by another company is something out of your hands. Pick and choose wisely where you keep your stuff.
Stealing ideas has been the name of the game for a long, long time. It doesn't have to be like that. We just spent $50k defending one of ours, which yields no ROI unless we pull through and make it a reality. If someone has - money, sales and marketing skills, or other business competency, of course they'd rather steal than invent their own thing or invite the dev on board.
Again, this doesn't have to be this way. Either Y-Combinator needs to boot the thiefs and invite the original dev, the thiefs need to invite them in with a fair equity share, or else we continue to perpetuate this culture. And, I agree with others, creatives have already become more and more afraid of sharing their work and having it stolen. Ours was covered with a bullet proof contract that the other party presented us with. We also have a patent pending. Neither of those stop someone from stealing from you and it's your job to protect your IP (and money). It almost bankrupt us... but because it was their contract, our lawyer constantly was scratching his head since it was a slam dunk case.
Steve Jobs and Apple stole the UI from Xerox, Tesla wasn't Elon Musk's, and you can go down the list. Look up the history of Arduino and wiring. I have no problem buying Arduino knockoffs because of it. (The two profs that didn't give their grad student attribution have a history of stuff like this as well as infighting)
But it doesn't have to be like that, it's our choice to continue perpetuating it and it will lead to emergent properties that people won't like. The question is: how long can the party last for investors, incubators, and thief startup founders in our highly connected age?
Instead of waiting to find out, I hope that Y-Combinator and associated investors pioneer a better culture of rejecting these people when they find out and promoting the actual creators. Michael Seibel talked about the best creators not being the best networkers back at startup grind 2019, and that the old model of investing is broken. 6 years people. (I've been building a network of us who are expert at going out and finding the best creators, but it would be nice to have the resources and platforms of larger institutions).
Why don't we promote the actual creators OR pair those good at identifying the opportunities and pitching and marketing them. That would be WAY better, and everyone wins while making a better, long term sustainable culture and model.
The fact that this post has so little traction here compared to reddit is a bit concerning. Y-Combinator should boot the other startup and bring on the original dev in their place, or at least offer to bring them into a cohort. That would be proper justice while also successfully promoting good culture and dissuading stealing attribution. If not that, then the original dev should be invited to be part of the team with a proper equity share.
That's just the opinion and perspective of another startup founder. We identify our own opportunities and develop our own innovations instead of stealing them. We give credit where credit is due without having to be asked to. I want to crush the culture of stealing other people's ideas. It's been around for a long time but it's really not sustainable. What happens when creatives no longer share openly? Where will the ideas to steal be?
As a pretty decent driver, this terrifies me, because I first think, "What am I missing?" But then it hits me - these alarms and chimes are breeding generations of drivers, not just young ones, who are grossly incompetent and should not be driving.
The fact that I cannot control what alarms go off is asinine. And they put a lock on how low you can turn the chime volume. So, basically, you're telling me that I have to harass my neighbors at 5 am when I load the car for work, because you want to chime nonstop when the door is open and I have zero control to turn it off or lower than the locked minimum. Oh, and don't forget the threats of voiding the warrantee if you dig deeper to disable anything. My favorite alarm and warning pops up randomly when you're driving, sometimes blocking the map, and it says something to the effect of, "Remember to stay focused on driving!"
I see this slipping into not just alerts and notifications, but also ads. Waze does not care if they block my directions by blasting an ad on part of my screen, which has absolutely caused me to miss exits since they don't want to tell you the exit ahead of time on longer strips, only, "drive for 45 miles"...
I see this like popups, and if industry can't handle themselves they need to be forced to stop doing this altogether and find a rework, since it's clearly affecting private and public machines that could burnout or kill people.