Hacker News Reader

leetrouton U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Falls to Lowest Level Since 1982

Good summary about the physical and statutory limits

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/less-300-million-barr...

leetrouton Scientists solve 1840s space weather mystery

> If it were true, I expect it would be a national security concern, and quickly remedied

I dunno... things happen that expose these risks and lead times for replacement equipment can push out to 2-3 years.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/09/02/u-s-bulk-power-equipm...

leetrouton No Sloptober

Feel like "No Slop November" would be a better name (and easier to succeed in the US since we've got a holiday break.

leetrouton The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

He accidentally got caught.

leetrouton Cartesian – AI 3D Modeling for Design

Is the site owners are here: that background and scroll effect is terrible.

leetrouton Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster

Can we put "Automattic" I. The title? I had no idea who this was. (Yes it is comfortable under my rock)

leetrouton Diesel prices in U.S. top $6 a gallon for first time

> If they can do it in mining and construction, why can't transportation...

Because supply side. Can't have our oil barons losing out.

leetrouton An overview of how our family is prepared

This is the way. And I have no shame when I warm up a can of ravioli in the microwave at coworking.

Even though the campbell's exec declared it "poor food" the jazzy jambalaya has replaced our instant pot recipe. We buy two cans of it, add a package of microwaveable ready rice and have decent (although very carb and sodium heavy) dinner in ~3 minutes.

It also cooks up great in a small pot on a pocket rocket and tastes great right of the can as far as it being suitable for emergency food.

leetrouton I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again

Counter point: How many paid auth providers force you to create an entirely new deployment and then use a lambda to migrate within their own system? Especially for something as seemingly simple like adding another metadata field?

I think they allow export because they drew some interesting lines around their own mutability concerns.

I also would never use cognito again.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/co...

leetrouton AWS billing bug causes 1000x increase in token prices

We got hit with this as well. Minor heart attack.

Second billing issue in the past couple weeks... wonder what is going on? AI code? Rapid product additions?

leetrouton Starbase, LA

It's in the comments here tho.

leetrouton Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

Promnesia was a prior attempt at this

https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

leetrouton The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

Glad this one is getting the "second chance" bump back to the front page. It's great content and it's timely. It's a great video.

If you're not inclined to watch the video I'll save you a click to the youtube description and add a bit more detail than the earlier sibling for the devices shown:

Simulacra

"Simulacra continuously fabricates a churning crowd of plausible-but-fake wireless devices around you — drowning your real devices in noise so that passive trackers, ALPR add-ons, and co-travel correlators can't reliably pick your signal out of the crowd — while passively watching for the trackers that follow you."

https://github.com/Em3ritus/simulacra

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Biscuit Ultra

"Wardriving Platform: A Full WiFi & BLE Security Toolkit. A headless wireless security research platform controlled entirely from your phone via Bluetooth. The platform supports dual-band WiFi (2.4GHz + 5GHz), Bluetooth Low Energy scanning and attacks, wardriving with GPS mapping, packet capture, and much more"

https://biscuitshop.us/products/biscuit-ultra

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Rayhunter

"Rayhunter is a project for detecting IMSI catchers, also known as cell-site simulators or stingrays. It was first designed to run on a cheap mobile hotspot called the Orbic RC400L, but thanks to community efforts, it can support some other devices as well."

https://github.com/EFForg/rayhunter

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OUI Spy

"ESP32-S3 multi-mode surveillance-detection board"

• Foxhunter — single-target RSSI-proximity tracker for radio direction finding

• Detector — multi-target BLE scanner with OUI filtering + web config portal

• PCAP — raw 2.4GHz Wi-Fi packet capture, Wireshark-ready (dev branch)

• BLE Sniff — raw Bluetooth LE advertising capture, Wireshark-ready (dev branch)

• Flock-You — Flock cam detection with GPS wardriving, JSON/CSV/KML export

https://colonelpanic.tech/

https://github.com/colonelpanichacks/oui-spy

leetrouton Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation

maybe they are easy but "everyone has to have them" doesn't change the amount of time and money invested in getting them. The real compensation under that is stagnating with inflation. NC is particularly bad because state law forbids collective bargaining and they are at the whim of the legislature (which stalled a budget for 1000 days).

The signal of supply and demand the cost (and debt) of an advanced degree is not reflected in the marginal salary bump over bachelors degree given the rising costs of tuition. From same site you used 46.7% of public university masters degree completions used debt so basically half.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_332.45.a...

leetrouton Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma

My dad died 30 years ago after it spread to his liver. He was in the study at duke for what is today the standard treatment line for immunotherapy. I hope he was able to help. He died 9 months after his diagnosis.

Enjoy the time you have with him now and be grateful for all the years you've had. Nothing is going to make the loss of a parent "OK" and it will hurt no matter if you see it coming like you are or it's a surprise.

Remember to breathe.

leetrouton How Kubernetes Probes Work

many times i have said a company could be built to just make better google documentation.

leetrouton Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation

Sure, $62.5k for a 10 month contract is $75k over 12 (62.5/10 == 75/12) but my point about purchasing power remains.

As the other commenter called out it's low considering to get to this salary at 15 years of experience you also have to have a master's degree. Master degree holders have a median salary $95k in the US so this is off the mark by a considerable amount.

leetrouton Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things

https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

> When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.

leetrouton Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation

NC teacher salaries are terrible on their own but they are also outpaced by inflation.

The new budget just got approved. Last year a teacher with 15 years of experience made $58,270 and this year they will make $62,500 so right around an 8% bump but the prior two years was only a ~$1000 bump each.

So 2023 -> 2026 $56,250 -> $62,500 was roughly 12% increase in pay but adjusted for inflation $62500 in 2026 is ~$57,220 in 2023 so not even an actual raise of $1000 in buying power.

leetrouton Seven books I keep close because I love them

I use the New Living Translation (NLT) for casual reading and was unaware of the LSB. I'll have to get a copy, thanks.

Here's a brief comparison (Titus 1)

LSB: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Titus%201&versi...

NLT: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=titus%201&versi...

leetrouton Dear people who work at the airport

One of the best investments I ever made was the original Patagonia MLC wheelie. It stands for Maximum Legal Carry-on. They have a black hole version now which I am not familiar with but I assume is the same quality / usefulness. I had a few jobs where I commuted regularly on CRJ 200's and this bag fits in the overhead with no issue. The ability to pop out the straps and wear it like a backpack makes the gate agents much less concerned about the size.

leetrouton Crown 0.64 – Native and cross-platform game engine

There's a neat list of custom game engines on GitHub that I enjoy checking in on every now and then:

https://github.com/raysan5/custom_game_engines

leetrouton Choose Boring Technology (2015)

Over 12 years of popular usage at this point. I still think it's inappropriate for ~90% of the companies using it.

leetrouton How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story

The core of the idea is great. Sketch out an idea with someone else.

Interviewing with average interviewers ruined it.

leetrouton US hires over 2k video gamers as air traffic controllers

Of the controllers I have chatted with while they stream on twitch this is the answer. Many people don't realize the controllers have medical tests as well.

leetrouton Nvidia is pulling Wall Street into the AI buildout

It was always about the money we were just a (highly paid) means to an end. Now it's just out in the open and the greed isn't being hidden.

leetrouton Why Kids Can't Quit Roblox

Between this and instagram I feel bad for today's youth. My kid is already struggling with attention thanks to youtube kids and the ability to scroll through video after video and jump around to the parts she finds most interesting.

She (rightfully?) calls me out for watching videos and listening to audiobooks or podcasts at 2x

leetrouton Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents

It was copy/paste from my phone and when I posted there was no context / other comments and the github link was buried in the footer of the PDF of the paper.

leetrouton Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents

HANDBOOK.md is a benchmark for long-context agentic instruction following, modeled on how enterprise employees follow company handbooks in their day-to-day work. Each task is a unique RL environment with internal tools and external MCP servers, spanning five enterprise domains: Finance, Medical Billing, Insurance, Logistics, and HR.

The prompts reflect the actual jobs enterprise workers perform every day. Each task drops an AI agent into a live company environment, requiring them to cross-reference an extensive, multi-section handbook against a cluttered inbox, a multi-channel Slack workspace, Jira queues, and a stack of files (spreadsheets, PDFs), and working out both what to do and what the handbook forbids.

https://github.com/surge-ai/handbook/tree/main

leetrouton Some more things about Django I've been enjoying

Yea, I was unclear. That's what I meant by "you can't mix them"... just meant using jinja2 is drop it for the backend.

I believe you just set the dirs property in the backend config to look in whatever directory / directories you want it just defaults to jinja2 as you discovered.