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Illniyar

4,825 karma · joined February 17, 2013

If you want to contact me you can send an email to me.at.alonbd.dot.com
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Illniyar··on Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain
Probably got better publicity with this ban then if they actually showed the ads.

My money is that this is manufactured by some PR team.

Possibly the Ad's text was purposely inflammatory (something like "overthrow the patriarchy" or something) so that they can say it was banned.

Illniyar··on Charterra – a weekly world tour of local charts
I've made this little side project to get exposed to popular music from around the world.

Basically every week I take the top songs for every country and filter out artists from out of the country.

I've found some songs I really like. Thought it'll be nice to share. There's also spotify playlists there.

Illniyar··on ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs
https://41labs.ai/

I think this is the most obviously AI designed website I have ever seen.

From the nonsensical logo, the bland generic design language, overlapping support chats to mix and match of different landing page patterns. Misaligned avatar circles.

Illniyar··on Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
More load does not just mean needing to increase capacity, which would be simple for Microsoft to do.

Additional load reveals limits and breaklines that were never known before - your temporary integer IDs are suddenly too small, you reach the maximum file descriptors in a Linux distro, your hash function suddenly has repeating conflicts, your DB index is suddenly oversaturated.

Having massive exponential growth of your traffic would probably require constant refactoring to meet the ever changing system limits.

Illniyar··on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
They are supposed to make sure this doesn't happen. Or if it does have better recovery.

Don't skimp on maintenance, make sure you have planes that can do divert in time.

If there was engine troubles in the middle of the ocean would it still be okay?

Illniyar··on The development pipeline is a production system
I have never worked in a company where it is okay for production to be down at any time. Critical hours or not.

And if production is down even if there is just one user, it is all hands on deck.

Illniyar··on The development pipeline is a production system
No it's not. If the development pipeline breaks on Saturday night there is absolutely no need to go fix it right away.

You should have a method to deploy hotfixes to code that bypasses your development pipeline though, in case the development pipeline breaks while you need to fix production- because you must be able to fix PRODUCTION even if your dev pipeline is broken ( because again your dev pipeline, while important, is not production)

Illniyar··on Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day
This is a pretty weird article/movement. The greatest hurdle is almost definitely a domain name, which if you want to own the content you have to get. Which even the cheapest would cost you around 6$ a year. (I'm ignoring the "tk" tld, which is kind of a honeypot)

And you can host for a static site for free in a million places. CDNs free tiers are enough for individuals.

I don't get the preoccupation with hosting your own server, what matters is that you own your own identifier (in this case a domain name) whatever it points is vastly less important.

Illniyar··on Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left
Ostensibly you've ran git before and never saw something like that, seeing a security warning on running git should raise some eyebrows.
Illniyar··on Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left
you would only need to open it to be exploited, not edit or prompt. Allegedly
Illniyar··on Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left
It's pretty weird for cursor to run arbitrary exe file without prompting, and alarming that the researchers did not get a proper response for months.

But the example with calculator is a bit misleading I think, you'll have to have a malicious exe already in the system and downloaded, and if cursor tried to run my understanding is that ACL should immediately kick in and you'll be asked for permission to run a new, unsigned app for the first time.

You'll have to have ACL disabled completely for this to be exploitable.

Illniyar··on Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
The article headline makes it seem like the factories couldn't make the gloves.

But further down it says that the cost was double and factories couldn't get buyers.

These are very different failure modes, and speak to very different solutions.

Illniyar··on Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
I think Fable is predisposed to try and verify it's changes. Which is a very good thing. It takes a lot of prompts to get Opus to do what Fable does unprompted.

That is exactly what I would want from a junior developer - make sure the bug exists, find a way to fix it, verify the bug is fixed.

The problem, as was correctly identified in the blog post - is that instead of stopping and asking for elevated permission it relentlessly tries to find a hack on it's own. (An equivalent situation for a human developer would be needing some access to a third-party sandbox, and instead of asking a senior for credentials, tries to setup his own sandbox from scratch)

Illniyar··on The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen
Based on what we know, it seems like Meta has given AI access to a service with guardrails built for human agents, while it should have built guardrails appropriate for the current state of AI.

Since everyone should already know by now that you can't strap on an AI on an existing system without a lot of guardrails this feels like a very high level of incompetence.

No one should be putting AI on top of any production system without having a default deny policy on actions and slowly adding new capabilities with proper guardrails.

Illniyar··on Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension
If you are unable to use IaaS directly. You need to accept that your service might be down.

Even if you use AWS and the like, if you aren't building your app with redundancy across multiple AZs, then you'll have some downtime occasionally.

And even if you do build redundancy with multiple AZ, some services might fail anyway as AWS is not entirely isolated. So you might have downtimes.

So just accept downtimes and use the best tool for you (unless they are really bad, like GitHub level bad). If you cannot accept any downtime, you'll have to spend millions of dollars and months of work to have the confidence to expect no downtime. Something like Netflix's chaos monkey and infrastructure would be enough.

Illniyar··on Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us
'Narrow scope produces better findings - Telling the model "Find vulnerabilities in this repository" makes it wander. Telling it "Look for command injection in this specific function, with this trust boundary above it, here's the architecture document and here's prior coverage of this area" makes it do something much closer to what a researcher would actually do.'

So what, we take every function and every vulnerability type and just run the agents millions of times?

I would expect Mythos to be able to find vulnerabilities without pointing it out for him, otherwise it's no better from other agents. It's just has a better harness.

Illniyar··on The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
Because a lot of people upvote based on the title and not the content? That's my assumption at least.

The title is pretty enticing, even if the content is slop trash.

Illniyar··on The Utopia of the Family Computer
I was a kid when we had a family computer in the living room.

We mostly played games on it. It's really not fun playing games in the living room while everyone is around you doing other stuff.

It's like being the only one watching TV on the sofa while others are reading or working.

Illniyar··on €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
I think the logistics of calculating cost in real time is something that is extremely hard. I don't think there is one big cloud service provider that has hard limits instead of alerts.

As long as they revert the charge when notified of scenarios like this , and they have historically done so for many cases, it's fine. It's an acceptable workaround for a hard problem and the cost of doing business ( just like Credit Cards accept a certain amount of loss to fraud as part of business)

Illniyar··on Ohio prison inmates 'built computers and hid them in ceiling' (2017)
The extra line supposes that being smart reduces the chances of getting caught.

Which from what I gather isn't very true - being smart can often lead to over confidence and making mistakes, and also a lot of crime is not premeditated.

Illniyar··on Death to Scroll Fade
When a user wants to return to the navigation bar at the top he scrolls up. The navigation bar then immediately gets nearer.

The user discovery happens because the act he performs provides the exact intent you need to give him the shortcut.

Also for clarity this is only relevant for content based sites and not apps. It is vanishingly rare for users to scroll up when reading content unless they want to reach the top

Illniyar··on Death to Scroll Fade
Looking at the main site, seems like it's branded as a "no AI frontend consultant".

First time I'm seeing a "no AI" used to differentiate a work for hire.

Can't say this wasn't obviously coming. Boutique hand-coded consultancies/software-houses are probably going to spring up a lot.

Illniyar··on Death to Scroll Fade
This is literally the best ux pattern you can have. It is intuitive - user immediately discovers it when performing the obvious action, it increases the user experience (more text to read) without any real downside.

It is the first thing I suggest to anyone when I see someone didn't implement it.

I've never heard a complaint about it until now.

Illniyar··on ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
We are not. We are discussing what killed the teller jobs, which happened years ago, not now.
Illniyar··on Google closes deal to acquire Wiz
Apparently Israeli media is reporting that the price is so high that the government is requesting the founders will pay their taxes in USD and not Israeli Shekels in fear that such a large foreign exchange transaction will affect the exchange rate. ( Which is already unusually low and hurting exporters)

This would be the first time taxes are paid in a different currency in Israel history.

Pretty wild that it's such a large acquisition it can affect a nation's monetary policy.

Illniyar··on Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
I hate these studies. They make such bold claims and then when you dig deeper they basically gave a few students some questionuerre with leading questions and then claim they figured out how people work.
Illniyar··on When AI writes the software, who verifies it?
Building a C compiler should not have this problem. There is probably a million test suites coming from outside the LLM that it can sue verify correctness.
Illniyar··on Don't become an engineering manager
Are you saying principal engineers and tech minded PMs make lateral moves into director level manager without going through being entry level EMs first?

I've never heard of something like that. Usually the requirement for being director level manager of engineers is to at least have managed people as an EM for several years before.

Illniyar··on Don't become an engineering manager
Engineering titles at least have a few things that are nearly universally shared (such as actually needing to code, expecting to mentor).

Product manager titles can have completely disjoint scopes of work between organizations - in one org they might be what was once systems designer role - getting requirements and writing specs, in another they might basically be doing UI or UX (even creating pages in figma), in others they are basically project managers.

Illniyar··on Use the Mikado Method to do safe changes in a complex codebase
This is a good method if you are stuck and you don't know what you need to do. It also helps explore a project with a specific task in mind.

It is not very useful in giving you confidence your changes would not cause unexpected side effects, which is usually the main problem working with legacy code.

If you want confidence when working with legacy code, your best bet is to do a strangler fig pattern - find a boundaries for the module you want to work on, rewrite the module (or clone and make your changes), run both at the same time in shadow mode, monitor and verify your new module is working the same as the old one, then switch and eventually delete the old module.

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