Naracion

Hi HN, I just received 293 password reset emails in a span of 6 minutes from Rec Room (which is a social VR application). I haven't used the app in a long time, but events like these are concerning.

1. For people with a Rec Room account, has something like this happened to you recently? 2. What should I infer from this kind of event? Was this a bot trying to get into my account? Is this a common black hat method? 3. Why did the number of attempts stop at 293, a seemingly random number? Could of course be coincidence, but could it mean whoever / whatever was doing this was able to crack the password?

I have of course changed the password since, and I do use a password manager and unique passwords on every login. I'm just trying to stay abreast of new black hat techniques and how to understand + deal with them. I'm also confused about why Rec Room. It's not a bank account. I'm nobody famous and my account has been in disuse for a long time (I've only really used it a handful of times)--so why try to get into my account?

Any thoughts and / or advice would be welcome! Thanks.

The current academic publication model has several problems, including unethical fees and no payment for either the author or the reviewer (see ongoing discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35848894). It appears that there is no good way of getting out of the trap, because: 1. Researchers rely on being recognized as published and having their papers cited for promotions.

So, open platforms like arxiv exist to publish to the masses. However...

2. Readers rely on quality criteria to sift through the thousands of articles out there. Papers in highly reputed journals and conference proceedings have already gone through a pass through expert reviews.

What does HN think the likelihood is of us getting an LLM that might be able to assuage this issue by providing a good, robust review judging by research quality standards? Is anybody already working on this?