Leaked? Isn't it used in the open basically like for everything including student IDs?
This was once common but is exceedingly rare these days. I'm sure exceptions exist, but nearly all Americans now treat this as a Very Secret Number.
Readit Newsdandelany commented on 221 Cannon is Not For Sale fredbenenson.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/mecredis
Isn't a vote being verifiably tied to a person actually a bad thing? Then you can actually check what e.g. your wife or kids voted for and punish them if they vote wrong. Or get people to pay for votes, but doing that at scale is obviously hard.
Maybe this isn't what you meant by verifiable, but there are systems with this property and they are bad.
The property you are talking about is generally called "deniability" in the literature, whereas the GP is talking "verifiability" ie. being able to verify your own vote is cast correctly. They are both valuable, sometimes mutually exclusive, but not necessarily, see eg. https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0021.pdf
dandelany commented on F5 says hackers stole undisclosed BIG-IP flaws, source code bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/WalterSobchak
What I'm saying is they often actually mean "country", but that is less fancy sounding. A nation-state is just one specific type of polity, certainly not the only type which organize attacks.
You’re overthinking it. “Country” is simply more ambiguous when used as an adjective. “F5 announces attack from country hackers” sounds silly and confusing.
dandelany commented on Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups thriftytraveler.com/news/... · Posted by u/_tqr3
I don't have any data, but it wouldn't at all surprise me if single/business travelers are way more likely to cancel or change flights, and this is just pricing that into the ticket cost.
I suspect they also empirically have less price-sensitivity on average, for a variety of reasons
dandelany commented on A thought on JavaScript "proof of work" anti-scraper systems utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/zdw
> bots could still use sites but they effectively pay for use. That seems like the best of all possible worlds to me
This would make the entire internet a maze of AI-slop content primarily made for other bots to consume. Humans may have to resort to emailing handwritten PDFs to avoid the thoroughly enshittified web.
As opposed to what we have now?
dandelany commented on Building an agentic image generator that improves itself simulate.trybezel.com/res... · Posted by u/palashshah
Why do you agree? I think we should outsource as much as we can to abstraction. We've been doing it forever.
"Simple stochastic blob detection" is an abstraction. You write (or import) a function where the the gnarly logic lives and call `detectBlobs()`. "Use an abstraction" doesn't mean you should use the same abstraction for every task, you should use the right tool for the job.
dandelany commented on Possible new dwarf planet found in our solar system minorplanetcenter.net/mpe... · Posted by u/ddahlen
I still think he did it because he wanted to have his name on something significant. He’s a science communicator, not a researcher, and he’s not going to be making any discoveries. So he’s gotta change something that already exists to have his name on something that everyone knows. He had the power to change its status, so he did. I think that’s all it was. I hope I’m wrong but I’ve never heard a really GOOD reason to undo something that was so commonly known and taught. The definition for “planet” could change and Pluto could have been left alone, grandfathered in, in a way. There’s a reason it was discovered first. It’s huge compared to other dwarf planets.
There’s no reason that Pluto couldn’t have remained a proper planet. It’s big enough to be round and its largest moon is big enough to be round. Mars doesn’t have any round moons. Mars is still a planet.
He didn't "do it", he was one voice among many astronomers who have been calling for a reclassification for years, the IAU voted and made the decision. It's a little silly calling him out for "doing it" for ego reasons when you are the one implicitly giving him credit for it... He didn't write the definition, he didn't chair the committee, he wasn't even on the committee. All he did was leave it off the list of planets at the Hayden Planetarium, where he was director.
dandelany commented on SpaceX pushed "sniper" theory with the feds arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/jnord
> (The whole idea seems a bit crazy too, there are a thousand things which can go wrong with a rocket, so let's look for snipers.)
If I didn't know any better, I'd say some guy who both roasted his brain with drugs and spends a lot of time in the company of a person who was sniped at is in charge of the company.
…you realize this happened nine years ago, right?
dandelany commented on The April Fools joke that might have got me fired oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/... · Posted by u/goldenskye
In high school a friend figured out you could map any network drive to your desktop and access it (Windows XP), and since everyone in the entire school district had a username of {last name}{first initial}, you could gain read/write access to anyone’s network drive (essentially “home folder”). He used it to get test answers from teachers, I used it to create (empty) folders named “porn”, “porn 2”, et al.
Anyway when he was caught (a fellow classmate ratted him out) he got 10 days out of school suspension. The VP threatened to call the police… for what offense I’m not really sure. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of cybercrime and cybercrime laws. I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it “hacking” of course) if his user account literally had permission to map network drives?
They removed the ability for student accounts to map network drives, but the district IT guy was not fired. I really don’t get that. Maybe the union saved him… but dog, everyone knows you can map network drives by right clicking on the desktop. I never thought to try it, but that doesn’t mean the district’s IT SME gets a pass.
Is it still trespassing if the door was unlocked? Yes. Not sure why so many people have trouble applying the same principles of unauthorized access to computers.