HN user

ropable

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Likes: speculative fiction, comics, woodworking, interesting computer games, rock climbing, bouldering and resistance training.

Data > anecdote, but story-telling is still fun and has value.

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www.bretfisher.com 6mo ago

Silent Rebuilds: Keeping Container CVE Counts Near-Zero

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analyst1.com 9mo ago

Devman's RaaS launch: the affiliate who aims to become the boss

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www.spp.gov.cn 9mo ago

China sentences Ming crime family group members in relation to scam compounds

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www.zetter-zeroday.com 10mo ago

How the infamous APT-1 report exposing China's PLA hackers came to be

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energiteknikk.net 1y ago

Hackers breach Norwegian dam, open valve at full capacity

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huntdb.com 1y ago

Website to track and monitor CVEs in real-time

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www.bmj.com 1y ago

Results may vary: the imprecision of medical measurements

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perilous.tech 2y ago

The Misinformed Landscape of AI Usage

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moral.net.au 2y ago

Making Powerline Ethernet Faster

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www.homeaffairs.gov.au 2y ago

2023-2030 Australian Cyber Security Strategy

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www.orchardandvine.net 3y ago

John Deere 'Kill Switch' renders stolen tractors useless (2022)

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gadi.fm 3y ago

My First Recession

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www.theautopian.com 3y ago

Ford Lightning Is Just a Standard F-150 with an Electric Powertrain

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www.moserware.com 4y ago

A stick figure guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) (2009)

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esghound.substack.com 4y ago

The Environmental Impacts of SpaceX's Oil and Gas Gambit

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en.bitcoin.it 4y ago

Casascius Physical Bitcoins

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thecastledoctrine.net 5y ago

The Crypto Doctrine, the Castle Doctrine paintings as non-fungible crypto tokens

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www.strongerbyscience.com 6y ago

Improbable Data Patterns in the Work of Barbalho et al.: An Explainer

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www.youtube.com 6y ago

Video lecture: F-22 Flight Controls

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www.ben-evans.com 6y ago

Ben Evans: annual presentation looking at macro trends in the tech industry

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who.maps.arcgis.com 6y ago

World Health Organisation novel coronavirus situation dashboard

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musicforprogramming.net 6y ago

Music for programming – mixes to aid concentration

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www.dreamsongs.com 6y ago

The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

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picoctf.com 6y ago

PicoCTF – Carnegie Mellon University free info security competition

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thehonestphysio.com 7y ago

The desperate patient causes the desperate clinician to do desperate things

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www.reddit.com 7y ago

Reddit Is Down

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securecodewarrior.com 7y ago

Secure Code Warrior – gamified online security training for software developers

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danwang.co 7y ago

How Technology Grows (a restatement of definite optimism)

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www.pcgamer.com 7y ago

The biggest battle in Eve Online's history is happening now and you can watch

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www.hoover.org 8y ago

A Rubicon: cybersecurity and the future of humanity are now conjoined

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It's almost as though people and culture change over time.

To be less glib, that amount of time is more than ample to see a generational change in a sector as fast-moving as technology. Perhaps some robust push-back on his ideas better represents the a zeitgeist of people being less happy with a maximalist winner-takes-all attitude to business or personal success.

I have no idea why this post got such a large volume of upvotes. It's a clever remix on the original story, but that's about it. There's no great insight to be found here, IMO.

Never, ever ask for forgiveness for, purely for the love of it, learning skills and creating by hand anything that can be mass-produced. Learning and craftsmanship are their own rewards.

Wake up! 16b 2 months ago

Really, really small generative code like this has me shouting "Witch!"

Bravo.

Rotten Dot Com 2 months ago

Oh my word. This site, orsm, ebaumsworld, etc. I'm glad to say that none of these were formative for me, but that were always morbidly entertaining to a young man still firming up his prefrontal cortex. They were like reliable garbage fires that you couldn't help but go look at sometimes.

Yeesh, the things we put on the internet.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a game that I played, and then replayed, purely on the basis of recommendations by trusted reviewers. The genre (visual novel) and theme (anime pin-up schoolgirl) are ones that I have no interest in. I was extremely glad that I did play it, though; it was a profoundly thought-provoking experience. It was extremely disturbing in the best possible way.

Definitely not for kids, though, and it's worth taking the content/trigger warnings seriously.

It's very hard for me to see this war (regardless of final outcome) as anything other than a massive strategic loss for the USA. The US has spent a stunning amount of materiel and political capital to achieve nothing of lasting benefit to themselves, and have killed thousands while further destabilising and impoverishing the region. A catastrophic outcome.

It's absolutely possible for both sides in a major conflict to lose, and they've managed to do so in this case.

As evidence supporting the "bright side" outcome of this conflict, two separate people I know here is Australia have fast-tracked a decision to replace their ICE vehicles with an EV. It only took a week's sticker shock at the fuel bowser to take them from "Eh, sometime next year" and "comparing a hybrid with ICE" to "Buying a BYD car ASAP". I'd be curious to know if there has been any significant effect of the market for electric scooters and bikes, also.

You mean that there is a rule which prevents for-profit companies offering personal health insurance from pocketing more than 20% of revenue?

Those poor, benighted shareholders. What a socialist hellscape.

I have a colleague who (inexplicably) doesn't trust Postgres for "high performance" applications. He needed a database of shared state for a variable number of running containers to manage a queue, so he decided to implement his own bespoke file-based database, using shared disk. Lo and behold, during the first big (well-anticipated) high-demand event, that system absolutely crawled. It ran, but it was a total bottleneck during two days of high demand. I, who has made a New Years resolution to no longer spend political capital on things that I can't change, looked on with a keen degree of schadenfreude.

Just. Use. Postgres.

From my perspective, the US is foot-gunning itself into geopolitical irrelevance through the destruction of its soft power and undermining the NATO alliance. For all its many, many faults, the CCP's actions around establishing itself as the Asian regional superpower are patient, strategic and consistent over the long term. They're playing it far too smart to get into a shooting war with the US, and I'm in agreement that they'll probably end up consolidating Taiwan peacefully in a decade or so.

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing.

I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that most of the core technical questions had been answered. There was an enormous existing corpus of accepted answers around fundamental topics, and technology just doesn't change fast enough to sustain the site. Then the LLMs digested the site's (beautifully machine-readable) corpus along with the rest of the internet and now the AIs can give users that info directly, resulting in a downward spiral of traffic to SO, fewer new questions, etc.

Vale, Stack Overflow. You helped me solve many tricky problems.

A social circle is like a garden, inasmuch as you have to put in work to tend and maintain it. You have to put yourself in a position of potential awkwardness or rejection, which isn't easy. Interacting with people (especially strangers) also takes practice - small talk is a skill like any other.

If you already have a friendship circle, start being the one to propose meetups (cafe, pub, picnic, hike, etc.) If you don't, it's harder - join a social sporting league, group fitness class, dance class, DnD group, anything where people have to talk with each other. When you arrive, turn your phone off for the interval. It might take a couple of goes to find something that sticks or the right environment.

I think that the real trick of "solving" the loneliness epidemic is that it isn't spread evenly. Everyone has their own individual level of opportunity for social interaction, so the solution is hyper-local and individualised. There's no one size fits all solution.

I continue to be broadly in favour of this idea. I agree that there's some wiggle room around the specific age (15 vs 16), but for a population-level change you just need to pick an arbitrary value, implement, and re-assess later. I also acknowledge that 1) online age-gate mechanisms tend to suck, 2) the evidence of harm is weak, and 3) it really should be up to parents to manage at the individual level. But ultimately, I feel that a restriction like this would be a net positive for the mental health of the vast majority of young teens.

Make the change, assess the effects, adjust/repeal as needed (just like everything else). It seems like the kind of change that's well-suited to undoing later, in case of unintended consequences. It's not like we're going to be permanently stunting the growth of an entire cohort or something.

But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe.

Straw man argument, much? Might as well argue "We can't make any changes, ever, just in case something else happens!

We'll address the next issue when/if it happens, same as always.

Iran Protest Map 6 months ago

I came here to comment on this specific issue. The level of unsustainable groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry in Iran is just wild.