Hacker News Reader

minkleson Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

It looks like a command structure attack. There’s now 98,000 people with no orders.

minkleson Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

Looks like they were using Gold AL-A25 / Apollo 929 pagers which are 100% passive.

minkleson Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

Their comms and command infra is now hosed and all the operatives concentrated in hospitals. They are dead in the water.

minkleson Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

I would wait for confirmation on even those things before placing any trust on it. There is a lot of noise and misreporting at the start of a story like this because all parties involved want to set a political agenda which is convenient. The truth will never be 100% established but will be somewhere between both polarised stories.

minkleson Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

A pager is passive receiver only. It never transmits. So you can't track it. That allows an operative to get to a secure line or obtain a burner device.

Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.

minkleson Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

Well nothing which is why people are spreading stuff about it being a hack causing the batteries to explode. Which disrupts everything with a network connection and battery. Adds confusion to the situation.

As I said elsewhere this is a one shot attack. They would never be able to pull this off again at this scale.

minkleson Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

This is a one shot attack. They will never be able to do it again. And I don't think most of the world has pissed off Mossad quite as much as Hezbollah. Assuming they even did it!

minkleson Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

Exactly that. There is a video of a hole blown through a table surface with one. That is not happening with any off the shelf battery technology as is currently being heavily misreported. They were modified with explosives clearly.

Of course there is paranoia being sewn now about hacking and the batteries which is likely part of the ongoing operation as it will disrupt anyone they didn't explicitly target.

minkleson Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

I suspect that is an intentional side effect against the whole pager network. It is now totally compromised which means they can no longer use passive channels as a communication medium. This effectively shut down their comms structure.

As for aid workers, they mostly use whatever low ball android phones they can get their hands on I know someone who volunteered out there and everyone uses them and Telegram). I don't think that will impact them at all.

minkleson The centrality of stupidity in mathematics

I have colleagues for that.

minkleson The centrality of stupidity in mathematics

I don't disagree with that. I've argued with all my kids' ones at least once!

minkleson The centrality of stupidity in mathematics

> It’s cool that AI is making that accessible.

If you want to be taught by a hallucinating crack head that gets only 60-70% at best of what it says right, then yes. As a qualified mathematician, I would suggest that the best path to teaching is small steps in a properly defined hierarchy of knowledge and practice practice practice.

Most of the teaching is seen as rubbish because people didn't get enough practice further down the tree to be able to do it instinctively so higher level concepts can be retained.

minkleson 47-year-old Voyager 1 fired up thrusters it hasn't used in decades

I still fuck them up after 20 years.

Fortunately we have ILO / RAS cards in everything.

minkleson Python in Excel – Available Now

I worked for a place a few years back that had stuff that was in C++/DCOM and written by someone snooting cocaine all day (both performance boosters) that the front end was an Excel spreadsheet. Now that was fragile.

minkleson Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

Sounds about right. A couple of the things we rely on appear to be run by two guys in a trailer somewhere who can't even get basic fixes out without a 6 month lead.

minkleson macOS Sequoia is available today

Installed it on test machine. Fine. Installed it on main machine. Fine. Very boring. Can't find any issues to complain about.

minkleson The Waterfall Model was a straw man argument from the beginning (2015)

We use extreme waterfall. All the disadvantages of agile and waterfall in one process. Nothing gets to production due to meetings so the customers are happy we aren’t fucking anything up.

minkleson 18 Months with a Framework 13

Well you still can upgrade the RAM on an Intel Macbook (not sure about M1+) and the SSD on all of them. It does require a hot air station and some skills though. Having done that stuff for years it doesn't bother me but it's an obvious barrier to anyone who hasn't done anything like it.

Not that I've had to upgrade a machine for about 10 years and never had one fail on me.

minkleson 18 Months with a Framework 13

I did that with my previous MBP (2015 15" retina). The lid cost a lot more but was quite easy to replace. Also I've replaced many many bits on thinkpads before for myself and other people.

minkleson Fuck founder mode. Work in "Fuck off mode"

Yeah that. We just do what everyone else does in our sector. And do a 20% less shit job for 20% less money. And that not a hard bar to meet when everyone else’s products are dire and incredibly overpriced.

minkleson The Tippy Type makes typing with long nails less tedious

I just angrily chew my nails off and get back to what I was doing.

minkleson Everyone says Chrome devastates Mac battery life, but does it? 36 hour test

My Mac battery is considerably more amazing than its default amazing state when I don't have any browser open or any Electron crud running.

I blame the modern web. The browser is just the universe it runs in.

minkleson Terence Tao on O1

Yes that's exactly what they are doing.

I literally had someone with the balls to tell me that it was ChatGPT's fault.

Due diligence and intelligence has shit the fucking bed quite frankly.

minkleson Terence Tao on O1

That’s fine until your code makes its way to production, an unconsidered side effect occurs and then you have to face me.

You are still responsible for what you do regardless of the means you used to do it. And a lot of people use this not because it’s more productive but because it requires less effort and less thought because those are the hard bits.

I’m collecting stats at the moment but the general trend in quality as in producing functional defects is declining when an LLM is involved in the process.

So far it’s not a magic bullet but a push for mediocrity in an industry with a rather bad reputation. Never a good story.

minkleson Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?

apache -> nginx. Python versions. postgres. All fine.

minkleson Show HN: A whiteboard that writes math equations

it's still better than my handwriting :)

minkleson Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?

I did CentOS 3 -> 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> 7 -> Debian. Very few problems.

(30 nodes)

minkleson Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?

LOL we have 2 full time people managing the production monitoring stack. And it costs money. And it generates a lot of internal traffic. Nope!

rsyslog + knowing what the fuck you are doing is much better.

minkleson Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?

It's not terrible in my experience of doing it several times now.

It is definitely less terrible than trying to unfuck tangles of terraform / terragrunt / yaml / bits of cloud infra.