Is there a "detect infection and clean it up" app from a reputable source yet (beyond the "version 8.8.8 is bad" designator)?
7,831 karma · joined January 2, 2013
There are news stories that are of particular interest and relevance to the type of system designer that makes up much of the HN audience. The community should be allowed to discuss them intelligently and politely.
These are clearly important times, regardless of your politics. The HN guidelines define on topic as "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."
Up-votes are a measure of what is found interesting. Posting the topic and receiving no up-votes (the "posted but not interesting to good hackers" case) means no presence on the front page, which means no one is impacted, aka the cost is low.
Alternatively, pre-emptively censoring something that might have been of interest (the "not posted but interesting to good hackers" case) means no discussion about a topic people would/do find interesting, aka the opportunity cost is high.
The site self-corrects, so we shouldn't live in fear of topics.
I'd recommend starting with Stratechery's articles on on Platforms and Aggregators[0], and a semester long course on Porter's Five Forces[1].
[0]https://stratechery.com/2019/shopify-and-the-power-of-platfo...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysi...
Not taxes. Authoritarianism.
There was this HN post[0] last week on a tool for automatically shutting down the codespace container when idle.
Probably a good time to read up again on Poe's Law[0], which does always pertain to attempted sarcasm in online forums.
(1) Are you able to send a push message to the phone when Claude Code is waiting for a permission approval or other user input?
(2) Any thoughts on making this available on desktop as well, so we can access the session from either phone or laptop depending on where we are in the day? (I'm assuming we could just connect directly to the session from a laptop, but the auto-shutdown-on-idle is a nice feature of catnip)
Nope. It turns out you need astronomical amounts of spent waste to noticeably impact a large population.
The trial of Jose Padilla (aka "the dirty bomber") has the best data on this. He went to Al Qaeda, offering to build and detonate a dirty bomb. Al Qaeda wasn't at all interested. They had run the actual numbers from an engineering standpoint (unlike everyone else who had just said "ooh scary bad!"), and demonstrated clearly that dirty bombs aren't actually a viable mass casualty weapon.
Before the Jose Padilla trial, we used to hear lots about dirty bombs. Since then, not at all. It's not that people forgot about them. They just aren't actually a credible engineering threat. It's too hard to get enough material distributed over a large enough area to measurably impact health outcomes for the impacted population. That was a surprise that came out of the trial.
There are lots of attack types to worry about. Dirty bombs are very far down that list.
The moderators (and the algorithm they support and tune) are why the conversation on HN is compelling enough to attract 99th percentile experts on just about every subject.
There are lots of distributed agent orchestators out there. Rarely is any of them going to do exactly what you want. The hard part is commonly defining the problem to be solved.
Physics rules everything, once you start trying to run at scale.
The density of carbon per unit volume in solid materials of interest doesn't vary that much, whether you sink it in trees or in exotic materials like diamonds. That means you can calculate the volume of material required so sink a desired amount of atmospheric carbon.
If you want to have a measurable impact on the atmosphere, say dialing it back to 1980 CO2 levels, you're talking not about making a pile of stuff but about making a mountain range that's a mile high and hundreds of miles long.
Now figure out how many trucks you're going to need to move that much material from where your sequestering machine is to where your pile of stuff is.
Or if you want to dump that material in the ocean (which someone else will certainly object to), extend your calculation to figure out how many container trucks worth of material you need to dump into the ocean every hour to accomplish your atmospheric cleanup in whatever amount of time you choose (a decade? If it takes a century, that's not fast enough).
And finally think about surface to volume ratios. You're trying to sink it into a volume, but you can only get the gas into the volume through its surface, so the speed of your process is limited by surface area.
If you want to do it with trees, my personal spitball estimates are that you probably need to plant somewhere between the entire state of Connecticut and the entire state of Colorado to have the kind of impact one would want (there's more subtlety to tree calculations than one generally likes to admit, so feel free to come in with way higher numbers than I did).
Which brings us back to economics. If you have a well-managed forest of that size and scale, someone is eventually going to come along, maybe in 100 years, maybe in 500 years, and say "hey if we cut this down, we could burn the wood to heat our homes" and all that carbon goes back into the atmosphere, so you actually need to sink it into something that is energetically unfavorable for recovery, which means you also need to expand a huge amount of energy to sink the carbon into that energetically unfavorable state.
You should probably put some time into communicating what your app does. At present, with no sample images, there is nothing to suggest it's worth the investment of time a visitor needs to sink into your site to figure out if the app is worth exploring.