Top all-time · #3924
Kevin Chen
Personal blog · kevinchen.co/blog · on HN as kevinchensecurityaiprogramming
Kevin Chen's personal blog at kevinchen.co covers security, ai and programming. Since 2014, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Tearing Down the Rewind.ai App”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kevin Chen's blog and projects for technical teardowns and postmortems, including Rewind.ai's app internals, a Redis server compromise, and driverless car analysis.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Tearing Down the Rewind.ai App5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-12-25
- Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-01-12
- /blog/postmortem-server-compromised/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-11-28
- Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-22
- Supporting MacOS Mojave’s Dark Mode on the Web2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-26
- Square thinks I don’t exist2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-01-28
What Hacker News says?
Serious lapses on the parts of PayPal and GoDaddy. Ironically, there are sites which even refuse to identify the real person - like this one posted on HN a few days back( http://kevinchen.co/blog/square-identity-verification/ )
Comment linking /blog/square-identity-verification/
on “How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username”Submitted Square thinks I don’t exist as a story · 567 points
HN discussion- disk storage: depends what you're doing, but seems to be about 150MB / hour. This is WAY too much in my book. I think we could get this way down. I'd love help here too :D - Candidly, haven't done extensive testing in battery department, but someone posted an article in a sibling comment https://kevinchen.co/blog/rewind-ai-app-teardown/ and it said "Overall, running Rewind reduces my battery life by about 20–40 pe…
Comment linking /blog/rewind-ai-app-teardown/
on “Show HN: Rem: Remember Everything (open source)”Submitted Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare as a story · 260 points
HN discussionI suspect it's Apple Silicon only because there are simple APIs that Apple has provided to take screenshots of the desktop and OCR text from images. I don't think OP necessarily built any low-level code from scratch here (not that their provided code isn't useful). Someone else has previously looked into how Rewind.ai may be doing its thing under the hood and there are more details about it here: https://kevinchen.c…
Comment linking /blog/rewind-ai-app-teardown/
on “Show HN: Rem: Remember Everything (open source)”Submitted Installing Red Star 3.0, North Korea's homegrown operating system as a story · 137 points
HN discussion> remember people saying the exact opposite It was a common but bad hypothesis. "If you had asked me in 2018, when I first started working in the AV industry, I would’ve bet that driverless trucks would be the first vehicle type to achieve a million-mile driverless deployment. Aurora even pivoted their entire company to trucking in 2020, believing it to be easier than city driving. ... Stopping in lane becomes much…
Comment linking /blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-rideshare/
on “Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix”Submitted Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science (2018) as a story · 103 points
HN discussionOne of my favorite creative uses of Excel comes from !!Con 2017, where Kevin Chen used spreadsheet to implement HDR imaging[1]. It’s also just an incredibly well-crafted presentation. [1] https://kevinchen.co/projects/excel-hdr/
Comment linking /projects/excel-hdr/
on “Folk Interfaces”Submitted Postmortem: Server compromised due to publicly accessible Redis as a story · 84 points
HN discussionThe default in Redis changed, as a result of active exploitation: https://kevinchen.co/blog/postmortem-server-compromised/
Comment linking /blog/postmortem-server-compromised/
on “Secure your MongoDB, Redis, etc”Submitted Why we still can't stop plagiarism in undergraduate computer science as a story · 51 points
HN discussion> Why is freeway driving more difficult (genuine question)? “Stopping in lane becomes much more dangerous with the possibility of a rear-end collision at high speed. All stopping should be planned well in advance, ideally exiting at the next ramp, or at least driving to the closest shoulder with enough room to park. This greatly increases the scope of edge cases that need to be handled autonomously and at freeway sp…
Comment linking /blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-rideshare/
on “Waymo is bringing autonomous, driverless ride-hailing to London in 2026”Submitted Supporting MacOS Mojave’s Dark Mode on the Web as a story · 9 points
HN discussionIs that "same direction travel divided between autonomous trucks and all other traffic"? Or "only on highways where traffic directions are separated by a median"? The former sounds like a massive (understating it probably) infrastructure investment. Trains sound better (as other comment while I was typing notes). The latter doesn't solve the issues noted in the recent article here: https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomo…
Comment linking /blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-rideshare/
on “GM to Shut Down Ultra Cruise”Submitted Installing Red Star 3.0, North Korea’s Homegrown Operating System as a story · 6 points
HN discussionPrivacy issues aside, it's really cool to see a new category of device! I've been actively searching for something that will allow me to "write" my essays while I'm driving. I've tried voice memo apps for iOS, and the transcription stinks for everything I've tried. Rewind's transcriptions for meetings works great, so I'm cautiously optimistic --- Sidenote: I've been loving Rewind as a company, but I'm a bit worried…
Comment linking /blog/rewind-ai-app-teardown/
on “Rewind Pendant: a wearable that captures what you say and hear”Submitted Analyzing Tesla AI Day: Language models and computer architecture as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHere you go: https://kevinchen.co/blog/postmortem-server-compromised/
Comment linking /blog/postmortem-server-compromised/
on “Help:We Found a Bitcoin Mining Prog / Email Server Running on Our Server”Submitted How autonomous vehicle simulation works as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThank you for responding. We searched the whole system for authorized_keys files and found one created in a /var/lib/redis/ of a staging container (with no firewall) on this host. We then came across the redis vulnerability https://kevinchen.co/blog/postmortem-server-compromised/ . A junior dev had spawned this container without help from dev-ops and hence left ports open. What doesn't make sense to us is how this d…
Comment linking /blog/postmortem-server-compromised/
on “Help:We Found a Bitcoin Mining Prog / Email Server Running on Our Server”Submitted Sensitivity strikes again: RoboCop Kaggle competition edition as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThey didn't have their own compression algorithm; they used ffmpeg to compress screen recordings to MP4 files at 0.5 FPS. https://kevinchen.co/blog/rewind-ai-app-teardown/
Comment linking /blog/rewind-ai-app-teardown/
on “Limitless Acquired by Meta. Rewind Mac app shutting down”Submitted Tearing Down the Rewind.ai App as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Safaris New CSS Dark Mode Media Query as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Activating Apple Pay over the phone as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Disassembling Rewind.ai as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
