YHK - yet another hacker news clone

You forgot one.

No need for something new here, Claude Code (Auto + default settings) has a tendency of running "find"/"ls" on your home folder when it struggles with solving a problem. I wish I was joking.

Now of course people trust these AI companies not to do bad things(tm), but all it takes is replacing the model endpoint URL -or any kind of harness compromise- and nothing will seem amiss

For banking I use macOS/linux, sometimes iOS unfortunately but we all do sins

Ideal setup:

- Dev machine

- Gaming machine (isolate downloading mods)

- Browsing machine

Popular harnesses have mature enough remote access features that I can use the same interfaces and even mobile apps.

If you’re not familiar with Docker, you can even have an LLM set up the environment for you and help you start and stop the container. If you do this, be very sure that you switch to having a harness run inside the VM or container, not having the harness on the host machine run commands inside the container. If you do the latter style, it will be running commands on the host which is what you want to avoid.

Before, people were responsible for the dependencies they were importing.

With npm and all the javascripters flooding the market, it became normal to be irresponsible "because everybody is doing it".

Fast-forward a couple of years, now everything is web based, even the stand-alone app version. No one knows what is running on own computer, even the Devs themselves don't know what the are asking you to run...

With a pinch of vibe coding on top, and thats the end.

We took 40 years for our industry to be taken seriously, it's all gone now.

I feel like your phone is good enough for all of those, and generally secure enough unless you're rooting/jailbreak it

I'd love to hear other takes on this though... Current thought is to just use something with a whole lot of exposure, in a whole lot of environments, pretty far downstream so the package hits all of that exposure, and hope someone spots it, kinda like xz. I tend to keep my base OS extremely minimal and do all my real work in VMs.

- 1 computer and Google identity for administrative stuff: Primary accounts for AWS, Google. I also do accounting and have the list of customers. I still don't have any other solution than opening PDFs for the invoices, but it's better than nothing.

- 1 computer for programming, with a non-asministrator account for everything. Claude runs in Docker, with the dev directory mounted, .git:ro (read-only) and .env mounted to /dev/null.

But Claude tries to escape it A LOT. Claude is designed like a virus, we tell him not to do things, and it 1. tried to download the git binary from the internet, 2. read the remotes in the git directory and tried to access them, only blocked because it didn't have the credentials.

DEFINITELY forcefully block out Claude from seeing your .env files, it WILL try to brute-force an access to your intranet!!

The other SSD is a normal setup where you do normal computer stuff. I don't access the dev SSD through it, I don't even mount it, although the danger seems minimal if you do. Banking, socials, gaming, whatever. No AI of any kind on it, aside from web portal for claude/chatgpt/whatever and possibly local AI model that gets no internet access.

No idea why I'd want to have its own setup split between gaming and socials, as an example. Better yet just toss all your twitter and bluesky accounts into a volcano, and consider whether to do it with HN as well.

I mean if you have only one there’s https://www.qubes-os.org/ but not sure about the gaming part, nor is it necessarily as good as separate isolated hardware.

Architecture page: https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/r4.3/developer/system/architectu...

No more laptops, just a dedicated android device.

I developed a devops/admin tool and then its claude code + github

- development & AI tools

- infra rollouts

- banking / other sensitive services

I have Steam Deck for gaming, and do most of casual web browsing still on host, because it's secure enough to use Firefox with ublock + privacy badger and enforcing SELinux. However, I dont use socials other than HN and Reddit under pseudonymous accounts. If I had real zuckerbook or instacrap accounts, maybe I'd have another VM for socials too.

I moved part of my wealth to a private bank, on an account requiring several signatures (from different persons) plus a vetting from the banker for every single outgoing transfer. Not only are several manual signatures required, in addition to that the banker must call me before authorizing any transfer, even if it's only, say, 1 000 EUR (now it's not a retail bank and that's kinda the whole point: transfers are rare and when one is done, no matter the amount, a shitload of verification do happen).

In addition to that, I told my banker that should anything out of the ordinary happen (say an order to suddenly wire 100 K to Dubai or Erithrea or something), then he should go out of his way to make me come in person to the bank to confirm the transfer.

You must train your banker: you must demo him voice impersonation on the phone. You have to make him become totally paranoid too.

I'm not going to say he's my buddy, but he knows I know my shit and we regularly talk for 20 minutes on the phone.

Any transfer to a new bank account: long discussion explaining what that account is and why I'm moving money there.

I've also got digital files (say administrative stuff, stuff from notaries, etc.), encrypted, that I myself cannot easily access. For to access them I must physically go to my safe at a bank first. And trying to impersonate me physically at the bank to steal my stuff means: "on your way out, you risk being locked in the secure airlock and then spend years behind bars".

> Makes me want to have like 5 separate computers:

I have a setup not totally unlike that. For example one phone with one additional app: the country's official "electronic ID" thinggy. And I don't browse from that phone.

I've got several computers and there's definitely my "trash computer", complete with bogus email accounts and crappy apps, etc.

> How else can you stay safe against a threat that exfiltrates your entire digital life in like 10 seconds?

The first thing is recognizing there's an issue if someone hacking your unique email then can steal everything you have. Many people stop there: they think, as in the XKCD, "it's game over anyway if someone gets my email, so I may as well not worry about it".

That is the mentality of losers.

You're already well ahead of the crowd by recognizing there's a problem and by thinking about solutions.

Many things can be done to lower the risk of a full compromise. I've got two physical LANs and the absolute most sensitive stuff (e.g. my banking apps) are done from a computer that does nothing but email + bank.

So it's not just a separate computer: separate computer on a separate physical LAN (not a VLAN). And there a tiny Pi doing the bridging between the two LANs. And of course it's got a serious firewall (a lost art, but it could make a comeback with the help of LLMs).

Something else that can help is stuff like Google Workspace and keeping the credentials for the admin account very secure and hardly ever logging into it. That way if "jack@acme.com" gets compromised, there's still "admin@acme.com" that can help get back control of jack@acme.com.

> - one for development only

I've got a user account for dev only.

> - one for gaming only

A dedicated computer for gaming yes.

> - one for socials only

Besides HN, I don't need those.

It's a wild world out there.

The hacks won't stop coming and you're not anywhere near paranoid enough.

You’ll have created an autonomous Robin Hood clone army. Fun times.

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

Script kiddies aren't new. Metasploit has been around literally decades. vx-underground existed for years, not to mention older open source projects that collect all known malware dev tools. APTs have been pwning stuff, script kiddies have been doing their thing. Nothing significant has changed for anyone in the know.

Just because LLMs automated some offensive stuff doesn't mean there's gonna be new magic collapse of society.

Hackers are almost certainly using open-source AI for this.