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afn

27 karma · joined February 24, 2014

Software artist
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afn··on Aliens.gov ~ domain registered 17MAR2026
I was curious about this, so for anyone else who’s interested, here’s a KrebsOnSecurity article from 2019 about how easy it was to fraudulently register a .gov domain:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/11/its-way-too-easy-to-get-...

I haven’t seen any follow-up reporting, but it looks like the process now requires some semblance of identity verification:

https://get.gov/domains/before/

afn··on Releasing rainbow tables to accelerate Net-NTLMv1 protocol deprecation
Tangent: this link looks like a right-wing propaganda site; I wouldn’t trust any information there without verifying it with trusted sources.

> Thanks to the President’s decisive leadership in the face of radical left-wing obstructionism, the Department of the Treasury has now resumed normal operations.

afn··on The FTC Is Disappearing Blog Posts About AI Published During Lina Khan's Tenure
https://archive.ph/2025.10.20-102309/https://www.wired.com/s...
afn··on Whole-body magnetic resonance imaging at 0.05 Tesla
Good gravy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4wh-Pbxgok

afn··on React has grown beyond its original promise and it's causing more harm than good
> (Just be careful, if your regular expression matcher uses backtracking, you might get pathological behaviour. Though memoisation makes that less likely to hit by accident in practice.)

Doesn’t that exactly demonstrate why using the tool effectively requires an understanding of the implementation (or possible implementations) behind the abstraction?

afn··on A recent software update was not successful. Your vehicle cannot be driven
Can’t recommend highly enough: https://www.howacarworks.com/
afn··on Ask HN: What's a good credit card to own?
Nerdwallet[1] is an excellent resource for comparing credit card options.

My recommendation would be to get only no-annual-fee cards, and to get one with purchase protection benefits and one with high cash-back. The former would be for purchases of products that might benefit from extended warranties, return protection (covers you when vendors don’t have a good return policy) and purchase protection (if you break your new toy in the first 90-120 days). American Express has a number of no-annual-fee cards that carry these benefits.

The other card would be for purchases that don’t benefit from these perks: groceries, cable bill, medical copays. Here the best perk is getting cash back on your purchases.

Good luck!

[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com

afn··on Warner Bros shelves finished ‘Coyote vs. Acme’, takes $30M tax write-off
I feel like I’m missing something, so perhaps there’s an aspect of corporate taxes here that I don’t understand. I would expect a write-off like this to reduce the assets of the firm on paper, perhaps having an impact on the market valuation, but don’t see how it would impact taxes.

Wouldn’t the actual expenses of production reduce tax liability immediately when they are incurred, regardless of whether or not the corporation later is able to make a profit off of the product? Or do they treat the production of a film as net-zero from a tax perspective because they had $X million in expenses and gained $X million in assets in the form of the finished film?

afn··on Why are there no startups in the real estate construction sector?
FYI, you can rent the press tools reasonably cheaply if you’re not a plumber by trade. I rented one for $80 for a plumbing project a few years back and it was worth every penny. A million times easier & faster than sweating joints.
afn··on A proto-pizza emerges from a fresco on a Pompeii wall
Whoa, take it easy, Cookie Monster!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9PenLqJyHU

afn··on Pickleball is bad news for health insurance stocks, UBS says
https://archive.is/YDHkv
afn··on Show HN: A simple echo server for testing HTTP clients
By default, curl interprets braces and square brackets to expand into multiple URLs (similarly to bash and other shells). You can disable this, and use literal braces & brackets in URLs, by passing ‘-g’ (‘--globoff’).
afn··on I’ve Struggled with Suicide My Whole Life–But Not During the Pandemic
https://archive.is/Bhs8E
afn··on Heroku Down for Anyone Else?
Ours was almost completely unreachable for about 20 minutes, and is now mostly back online, except that ~10% of requests hang for ~5-15 seconds before being fulfilled. (This time is not accounted for in the 'connect' or 'service' times in the heroku/router log line.)
afn··on Heroku Is Down
It's down again, for at least the past half hour. I submitted a support ticket at 15:56 UTC, haven't gotten a response, and as usual, they only updated the status page to indicate that there's an issue ~20 minutes into the outage.

Is it just me, or has Heroku gone from five nines to nine fives over the past year or so?

afn··on Benedict Arnold's body lies in the wall of a British kindergarten
> Had he not become the most famous turncoat in U.S. history, his remains might have been interred in a grand or historically meaningful tomb, visited by thousands every year. Arnold's betrayal, however, overshadows any contribution to American independence, and his tomb is visited by only a dozen or so every day.

What’s the difference between thousands a year and a dozen a day? Sounds to me like he did pretty well in terms of building up a following...

afn··on List Of Adhesive Tapes
OK but did anyone saw a boat in half to prove the power of these adhesive tapes?
afn··on Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training
Reminds me of this classic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QyNgrZX9Nzc
afn··on AT&T says it has big problems. A T-Mobile salesman showed me how big
It’s the T-1000 of corporations.

http://www.phonenews.com/images/2007/1/colbert-report-roasts...

afn··on Heroku Dashboard and CLI not working
Incident here, but no details: https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2218

API is back up now although dashboard login is still not working.