Hacker News Reader

JStanton617on HyperAgents: Self-referential self-improving agents

At long last we've created Wintermute from William Gibson's classic 1984 novel Don't Create Wintermute

JStanton617on Somebody please get me this desktop wind tunnel for Christmas

Definitely justifying this by helping my nephew with his Pinewood Derby car next year

JStanton617on Jezebel to shut down after 16 years as parent company lays off staff

I don't think that's correct. Their 2022 annual report shows them as profitable. https://defector.com/defector-annual-report-year-two

Maybe took a major downturn in the past year, but I haven't seen any evidence of that

JStanton617on Facebook is blocking Canadians’ posts on the assassination of a BC Sikh leader

India (among other countries) have passed so called "hostage-taking laws" that require large social media companies to have in-country employees that can be strong-armed from ways small to large (threats of being convicted of treason and executed).

This is a specific policy to allow them to enforce their censorship laws in other countries.

JStanton617on Ask HN: Paychecks from a failed startup?

Payroll is one of the very few (only?) things that "pierces the corporate veil" - that is, the principals / board members are personally liable even in the event of corporate bankruptcy.

You could engage a labor lawyer, but if this was pre-series A and the founder was self-funding, there might not be any personal assets there either.

If you think the folding of the company is in good faith, you might just want to take the loss on this one.

JStanton617on Fictional Brands Archive

The America First Party was most definitely NOT a fictional brand - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Party_(1943)

JStanton617on Ask HN: Best way to “donate” dev hours to charity?

This exactly. For most small non-profs, basic IT upkeep - i.e. cleaning adware, patching vulns, getting backups set up and tested - is going to be so much useful than occasional airdropped code with no regular/timely maintenance plan

JStanton617on Most Crypto Developers Aren't Working on Bitcoin or Ethereum

What an absolute incineration of time, effort and skill

JStanton617on Fusion energy breakthrough by Livermore Lab

The loss just on the lasers is 100x (i.e. delivered power is 1% of the input energy). Add in a combined cycle effeciency of only 50%, you're looking at needing a 200x improvement to have commercially relevant "net gain"

JStanton617on Circadian lighting with Home Assistant: Like f.lux, but for your house

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527...

tl;dr - for the core phone/laptop F.lux use case, no, it isn't substantiated

JStanton617on iPad Pro M2

You need an MDM to manage it remotely. Something like Jamf Now is $2/device/month. Not sure how much the shipping costs, but might be break-even

JStanton617on One-on-ones with executives

I was taught basically this same method as the "Princess Bride" plan:

Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya (who I am)

You killed my father (why I'm reaching out)

Prepare to die (my ask / expectation)

JStanton617on My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)

This paper references consistently mischaracterizes AWS Lambda as a "Container as a Service" technology, when in fact it is exactly the sort of lightweight VM that they are describing - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...

JStanton617on Formula One’s sharpest car designer is also its master of loopholes

For those unfamiliar, the rumor is that Ferrari was somehow detecting the sample rate of the fuel flow sensor (which is a black-box provided by FIA and standard across all the cars), and increasing the flow rate only when the sensor "wasn't looking".

So doing a side-channel attack on the sensor, and designing a pump system to dynamically adjust the rate dozens of times a second. Hacking at its finest

JStanton617on Amazon Elastic File System Update – Sub-Millisecond Read Latency

EFS allows you to connect to the filesystem from multiple web front-end machines. Doing the same with EBS would require you to manage some sort of clustered filesystem, or run a separate storage tier server.

JStanton617on Ask HN: Do any discussion boards that aren't Facebook/Reddit still exist?

https://www.avsforum.com/

JStanton617on In-kernel WireGuard is on its way to FreeBSD and the pfSense router

OPNSense (the pfSense fork) is using the userland version. pfSense 2.5 is using this kernel code - https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/releases/2-5-0.ht...

"pfSense® Plus software version 21.02 and pfSense Community Edition (CE) software version 2.5.0 include a major OS version upgrade, a kernel WireGuard implementation..."

JStanton617on In-kernel WireGuard is on its way to FreeBSD and the pfSense router

Yes. The code you're running is described as having "random sleeps added to “fix” race conditions, validation functions that just returned true, catastrophic cryptographic vulnerabilities, whole parts of the protocol unimplemented, kernel panics, security bypasses, overflows, random printf statements deep in crypto code, the most spectacular buffer overflows"

This is a kernel RCE just waiting to happen.

JStanton617on Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

Or just some annoyed passengers with a roll of toilet paper? https://imgur.com/gallery/0b4wF3V

JStanton617on EC2 Instances Powered by Arm-Based AWS Graviton Processors

You mean this thing they just introduced yesterday? https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-predictive-scaling-for-...

JStanton617on “A Horrifically Bad Idea”: Smartphone Voting Is Coming

“There’s a reason you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”

JStanton617on Lego Axle Sorter [video]

Harder by orders of magnitude: https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/

JStanton617on Elon Musk offers to help Thai cave rescue

There are other ways, but why are they better? He says it out loud, other people can chime in and improve the idea, the Thai gov't sees it without him having to work his way up through a bureaucracy to find someone who can do something about it, etc.

This seems as good a way as any to do it to me.

JStanton617on Intel FP security issue

So Intel tried to shut *BSD out of the process again (like they did for the original Spectre/Meltdown) so they didn't feel they had to respect any embargo?

JStanton617on Twitter Employee Who Deleted Trumps Account Being Hailed Hero

https://twitter.com/en/tos:

"You understand and agree that the Services are provided to you on an “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE” basis."

and

"The Twitter Entities make no warranty or representation and disclaim all responsibility and liability for: (i) the completeness, accuracy, availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Services or any Content;"

Doesn't feel like something you should be conducting international diplomacy with...

JStanton617on I've removed all ad network code from my blog

This is exactly what an ad network is

JStanton617on The bandwidth bottleneck that is throttling the Internet

It does not work OK at all. Try being in any dense area such as an urban apartment building. There are 30 networks I can see on all 11 wifi channels. Its totally unusable.

JStanton617on Angular 2 versus React

React has a non-open license: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS, which basically says that an organization can no longer use React once it sues Facebook for any (unrelated) patent infringement.

This is an automatic no-way for React for any major company