HN user
I knew it was coming but I didn't expect my post to age so fast! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46027642 Less than a week a go I praised AI chatbots for their lack of intrusive content. It's the number one reason I'm a plus subscriber to ChatGPT. I hope they won't force me to seek out an alternative LLM experience.
Cybersecurity is not my main field but this sounds beyond suspicious.
Berulis [...] and his colleagues grew even more alarmed when they noticed nearly two dozen login attempts from a Russian Internet address (83.149.30,186) that presented valid login credentials for a DOGE employee account — one that had been created just minutes earlier. Berulis said those attempts were all blocked thanks to rules in place that prohibit logins from non-U.S. locations.
“Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating,” Berulis wrote. “There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.”
Somehow each paragraph reveals something even worse than the last.
Berulis [...] and the associate CIO were informed that “instructions had come down to drop the US-CERT reporting and investigation and we were directed not to move forward or create an official report.” Berulis said it was at this point he decided to go public with his findings.
New readers might enjoy the tale of Emperor Sh and the Traveller: https://sanctum.geek.nz/etc/emperor-sh-and-the-traveller.txt
I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I enjoyed browsing through sfw boards like /tg/ (tabletop media), /ck/ (cooking) and /fit/ (fitness). I had long discussions about the SW sequels on /tv/ back in 2015-19. The readership was surprisingly diverse and the anonymity lead users to provide more focused replies. With bodybuilding.com gone, the blue boards felt like the last bastion of the old internet.
The advancements in medical science alone make the comparison a non-starter. 200 years ago, around 40% of children died before the age of 15±. Any fracture, cold or bruise could devolve into a matter of life and death. And good luck coping with a deteriorating eyesight or tooth pain. Most of your diet consisted of whatever crops didn’t fail that year. Most workers had no rights and only limited ownership: farmers paid rent or labor services to the nobility in exchange for their right to survive off that land! Pre-industrial processing facilities – like a tannery or a forge – were not bound by workplace safety regulations. Before the newspaper and modern means of transportation, you had no way to witness a world different than your immediate sorroundings. Your 'culture' was whatever the village you were born into believed in. If you didn't fit in, you didn't get second chances: your community was your safety net in case of permanent injury or illness. In a way, individualism is a byproduct of the industrial revolution.
± Sweden, 1750-80: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
Because the US is the de-facto leader of the Free World, the wealthiest country in the Western hemisphere and the winner of the Cold War. Heavy Lies the Crown. Especially when it's about fighting the deadliest infectious disease known to man.
For context: Tuberculosis treatment requires strict, months-long medication adherence. Even a brief disruption means patients may not complete their courses, allowing drug-resistant TB to emerge. These strains are far harder and more expensive to treat, spreading across borders and undoing decades of progress.
I believe most people feel like this. Don't chalk it up to "the crisis of the 30s". That's media-talk. That's years of movies and tv series teaching you that men looking for purpose after 30 are somehow cringe. If there's one bit I want you to take away is: never gaslight yourself. You feel like your job is fake because IT IS fake. Chances are, your work is boring, repetitive and meaningless just as you described. For all the material comforts and advances in health-care, there's something deeply unsettling about the modern world. My advice is to accept that, on some level, happiness is about taking care about your biological needs. Go back to basics: do you sleep well and long enough? What is your diet comprised of? How often do you have sex? Do you practice any sport? How much time do you spend in nature? When you feel truly alive, you also feel less pressured to find a purpose. At the same time, you will be mentally and emotionally equipped to seek one.
It was a real problem. I used to keep hundreds of bookmarks I felt forced to check out, tag and archive. It was mentally draining and time consuming. I was never satisfied with the way I sorted them and I would often move them around, trying new categories and labeling strategies. Overall, I likely spent more time managing bookmarks than reading their content. It wasn't sustainable and I ended up deleting most of them.
Now I keep it to the bare minimum:
1) Favorites bar: up to 10 websites I visit on daily basis.
2) Inspiration folder: where I put things I like. 330 as of today. Website layouts, painters, dev blogs, Youtube videos, anything that has good vibes. That's the only criteria. I make it an effort not to add any subfolder. The only exception is "Favorite projects" which is my little Hall of Fame for quality content. https://ciechanow.ski/ is up there.
3) Trashcan folder: where I place temporary bookmarks I don't care about and will delete in the next few days.
I periodically export my bookmarks so I don't feel guilty when I delete entries from the browser. You could do the same. Put the exported files in a usb stick and forget about them.
I have used Lua a long time ago and I don't remember ever touching C/C++. You can even make simple games without ever going low level thanks to https://love2d.org/! If I recall, most https://stabyourself.net/ games are based on Love2d.
If you're using Linux/MacOS, you can copy-paste these commands on the terminal and you should be settled:
curl -L -R -O https://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.4.6.tar.gz
tar zxf lua-5.4.6.tar.gz
cd lua-5.4.6
make all test
Agree on what? OP didn't even know the bare minimum (who's the author, what did the author write) to speak up on the subject. You're saying that a pebble is "more or less" like a mountain. OP dismissed an entire philosophy with a quip while your sources are telling a more nuanced – and actually different – point of view.
That's a complete mischaracterization of the stoic philosophy. I don't even know where to begin and I don't have the time to write a detailed comment now so I just want to make a few points:
1) That quote comes from his private diary. We don't know if he ever meant to share those ideas to total strangers. If you read it, you'll find that many passages are open to misinterpretation because we lack the historical context and it feels like it was written for an audience of one. He didn't choose the title "meditations", it's just what the translators and scholars used to refer to his collected works.
2) Marcus Aurelius likely didn't write that quote from the luxury of his own palace. Those writings come from his time at the frontlines of the Marcomannic Wars which lasted almost as long as his own reign. The bulk of his writing was probably written in modern Serbia.
3) Many stoic role models are anything but quiet. They die for what they believe in. They understand their own role, accept their fate (amor fati) and pursue it to the end. Cato the Younger died as a political martyr against Caesar.
4) Epictetus is another major figure in stoic philosophy. He was a disabled slave from modern Turkey. He shares many of the viewpoints expressed by the emperor, which is why stoicism is such a compelling philosophy. For something to inspire both the rich and poor, the strong and weak, there must be something to it.
I just saw this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9mrbIxeBE and it sounded like an interesting topic to bring on HN. I didn't know about the "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana, but I figure most countries have their own alleys of death. I live in Italy and Taranto is notorious for this reason. The city was home to one of biggest steel producers in Europe. The local economy revolved around the steel plant, but people from the sorrounding neighbourhoods have suffered from abnormally high rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses for decades. After a trial which shed light on the environmental disaster, the government seized the plant in 2012. Long story short, its fate has been in a limbo since then.
I haven't played the original, but Lode Runner: The Legend Returns is one of my favorite games of all time. The later levels can be very challenging and I don't remember ever reaching the final stage but it was an addicting experience. You can download a faithful remake of Legend Returns here: https://mmr.quarkrobot.com/. Highly recommended!
Can you point to any place where integration between widly different cultures worked on the long term? One place where mass immigration didn't result in the erosion of social trust, safety concerns and political divide through ethnic lines?
It will surprise absolutely noone that the repeat offender was black. And yes, I mention the race because it does matter in a world where almost 60% of the violent crimes in the US are comitted by the same minority group. Remember Stop Asian Hate? I wonder what happened to that movement.
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It's not really a matter of opinion when everything is lost in translation. I know it can be hard to understand without a basic intro to ancient Greek, but it's like translating a reference to the "Titanic" with "some boat, I dunno".
I disagree about Emily Wilson's Odissey. She translated the first line of the poem as "Tell me about a complicated man". She almost went with "Tell me about a straying husband". Neither complicated nor straying husband appear in the original text. Pope's description (The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d...) is closer to the epithets we are taught at school (ricco d'astuzie or dal multiforme ingegno). πολύτροπος means resourceful, of many skills, well-travelled.
That's the first line and complicated tells us nothing about the protagonist. Everyone can be complicated, but only Odysseus is πολύτροπον. It's a quality of character few people possess.
Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25525457#25531307
Individual solutions are mostly a fantasy. It's what we tell ourselves because the real solutions are fundamentally at odds with democracy and freedom. A few exceptions aside, people have never voted for a lower quality of life and personal degrowth. Instead, we prefer to slice and shift the blame around until no one is really responsible anymore. Your vision hangs on some sort of mass enlightenment that's just not going to happen. How many tragedies of the commons have been solved this way irl? Imagine being a fisherman in a Chinese trawler off the coast of West Africa. You could decide to stop overfishing. What then? You'll get fired and replaced by someone more desperate than you. The real world is a lot more complicated that "building a bird-friendly yard".
All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".
That's the entire point of having concentration of power though. The decision makers can coordinate and manage things in ways the individual cannot. That alone gives them the responsibility to seek out a solution for worldwide issues. The lone individual is bound to follow basic instincts, rule of law and economic opportunities.
Hi dang. Sorry to ask you here but I wasn't sure how to get in touch with the staff. Have you had the chance to review the email I sent to hn@ycombinator.com? I know you're very busy so I don't mean to rush you. I just want to make sure the spam filter didn't get it first hahaha
It's a very myopic decision on their part if true, even worse than the API pricing update. This will stop any form of viral content on twitter from reaching non-internet people. Forget about sharing that one twitter link to friends or relatives. Instead it will make the twitter echo chamber increasingly detached and irrelevant to the larger discussion. On the long run, this decision changes the narrative of twitter from being a catalyst of political change (e.g. Arab Spring) to a tumblr clone with ecelebs. I don't have an account and never will. I followed a handful of accounts via nitter rss. Now I'll just wait until they build their presence outside the platform.
PHP is still the leading server-side language and it's not even close. 3/4 of the websites you visit everyday are powered by PHP in some form. I would argue that's the perfect server-side language to start solo on anything web-related for the foreseeable future. And if you'll ever need to scale up, there's no shortage of skilled PHP developers for hire. The language just keeps getting better, frameworks like Laravel and Symfony are high quality and battle-tested, most of the issues you might encounter are already documented all over the internet. Continuous learning is a reality for this profession but the "cult of the new" attitude in tech often leads aspiring developers into an endless quest for the perfect tool at the expense of gaining practical experience. Point being, PHP is faaar from dead. If you live in Europe, a solid knowledge of PHP and either Laravel or Symfony will open many doors.
Mutual respect for the public space is key. This is what I mean when I think about high trust environment. Basic example: that computer room full of nice iMacs. How many cases of theft or vandalism would it take for the school to shut it down? At first, it would be forced to surveil and severely limit its access (higher upkeep cost). But if the students kept stealing or smashing the equipment, eventually the computer room would be no more. And good luck having a wood/autoshop in some areas: that's begging for a lawsuit after someone ends up misusing the tools or straight dead. Now expand this reasoning to everything you see on this video. It's no wonder schools in bad neighborhoods end up costing more than schools like CHS.
The Western media loves to nitpick on Japan because it puts us to shame on almost every front. The country is clean, safe, efficient beyond anything the average Joe can imagine. Let me spell it out for you: Western countries are kind of a shithole compared to Japan. The issues the author wrote down pale in comparison to what we're dealing with. I just can't take this kind of criticism seriously with the sheer amount of filth, crime and misery that's part of any major Western city. I had the privilege to live in Japan for one year, the real culture shock was coming back home to what we call normal.
I have mixed feelings on calling him out by name. It sounds like the person is going through tough times. This obsessive behaviour doesn't describe someone who's living a happy, fulfilling life. The bug reports might be his flawed way to reach out and be part of the community. I'm not arguing for people to enable his negative behaviour. I just wish there was another solution than the nuclear option: this public warning might severely affect his mental state and career prospects. If he lacks any support network, this could mean years of downward spiral and isolation. Would you consider adding a sort of "way out" clause to soften the blow? Something along the lines of waiting for an apology and his public promise not to harrass other people?
Where have all the workers gone?
Changes to the structure of migration have had an impact on vacancies, which recently hit record high levels. In recent years many EU workers, who filled lower paid roles (especially in sectors like agriculture and hospitality), have left the UK. In numerical terms, their departure has been counterbalanced by the arrival of non-EU workers, who were granted visas under the new immigration system which prioritises skilled workers. This has contributed to a mismatch within the labour force, accentuating vacancies and labour shortages in certain sectors.
Good for them. I hope whoever filled those lower paid roles found a better life elsewhere. I can't stand the false equivalency between immigration and labour shortage. I live in Italy and our media is always sharing sob stories from tycoons who "just can't find hard-working employees anymore". The issue is that the very foundation of our economy is built on masses of disenfranchised serfs forced to e.g. pick veggies for 3€/h. but instead of questioning the dehumanizing working conditions of blue-collar jobs, the real problem is always finding more suckers who have no other choice.
Thank you for sharing your alternative approach. I checked it out and image dimming looks like a fitting addition to dark mode and late-night browsing.
Thank you for the recommendation. I'll give that extension a try as soon as I'm back home. So far I'm using the native options of Chrome: chrome://settings/content/images. From that page I can set the default behaviour and the whitelist/blacklist of websites. When I visit a webpage, I can view the images by clicking on the small lock to the left of the url bar. I didn't find the option to unlock only one image, it's all or nothing.