Hacker News Reader

alpbon Icanhazip: A simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users (2021)

> Their sponsorship of icanhazip.com has saved me tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Can someone please explain how does returning a few hundred bytes of plaintext response can cost thousands of dollars? Either I'm really bad at estimating things or there's some hidden cost somewhere I'm not seeing.

Also why could it not work fine behind a Cloudflare free tier?

alpbon Banned journalism housed in virtual Minecraft architecture (2022)

No oppressive government has gone through the lengths of blocking access to a Minecraft server. That's why. Many oppressive governments will actively block access to pages that post narrative countering their reality.

alpbon We replaced Firecracker with QEMU

Presumably this doesn't use the "microvm" machine type in QEMU? (also on front page right now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673945)

alpbon Show HN: Blogs.hn – tiny blog directory

Do you think blogs with most recent posts can be bumped up (instead of a static ordering)?

alpbon Google no longer automatically indexes websites?

How's it even hugged while being behind Cloudflare?

alpbon Using Google’s code history to write more code

This is signature Google blog post. Great research, not a product, so no you cannot use it.

Do they have no intention to make a product out of it? This is not something Microsoft would've done. They directly announced Copilot as a product from the get go instead of parading their tech.

alpbon OpenAPI v4 (aka Moonwalk) Proposal

> In this simple example, the moonwalk version has 20% less lines and one less level of indentation.

It doesn't sounds like a notable change given a lot of OpenAPI specs are generated and not necessarily read by humans?

alpbon Windows Snipping Tool is vulnerable to Acropalypse too

Note that this is not the "Snipping tool" but the "Snip & Sketch" (win+shift+s?) Though, I'm not able to reproduce it myself.

alpbon Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

People actually think that? I don’t see anything in that sort of deal for Microsoft. Lose-lose situation basically.

alpbon Build your own fast, persistent KV store

This reminded me of Terry A. Davis, thanks, got a good giggle out of it.

alpbon Twitter starts limiting how many tweets you can post per day

This is 100% in response to Turkey banning twitter in the middle of earthquake response, and Elon Musk bowing down to the terms of the authoritarian government. Instead of applying it locally, they applied it globally.

alpbon What is Google doing with its open source teams?

Xoogler here as well. A similar thing has happened me in the past. He threatened to shut down my personal repos by sending a DMCA notice to GitHub. Admittedly, those weren't released on my personal account by getting open source team's approval (it was a small Kubernetes related tool and I happened to work on Kubernetes at the time, so one can argue it's work related, but it really wasn't). As a junior engineer, it was asymmetric power play, and a level of threat/confrontation I did not have at any point during my time at Google for many years.

That said, Chris has done many great things for open source at Google and the open communities around the world overall (he oversaw many programs like Summer of Code, open source peer bonuses etc as well) so I'm sorry to see the best OSPO team out there getting gutted like this.

alpbon Surprising Consequences of macOS’s Environment Variable Sanitization

I am not sure why this person has not considered wrapping every command in /usr/bin/env? Regardless of the shell, env(1) would preserve that variable and do an execve.

alpbon Small Teams

Ken Thompson prototyped the first version of UNIX in assembly language for PDP-7 in three weeks, while his wife was away on vacation. One could argue Ken Thompson/Dennis Ritchie/Doug McIlroy have made a remarkable impact on laying out the principles behind the future of computing even today in such a short time.

alpbon Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

For those who don't know, this resulted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L....

alpbon Tell HN: Google Cloud lets anyone add you to a project without your permission

I think you can invite anyone, and you can assign them permissions but I don't think it actually shows up in your account unless you click an email from GCP containing an invite. I definitely remember adding other "domains" required invitations. (Maybe gmail to gmail doesn't.)

alpbon YouTube Transcript – read YouTube videos

> I feel for all information to be locked away in a YouTube video.

Google Search actually indexes transcripts of a video and shows you some YouTube results based on that even though the title/description of the video doesn't match the search query.

alpbon YouTube Transcript – read YouTube videos

Fwiw YouTube already has a feature for this. Click the "..." next to the share and click Show Transcript. There are also extensions like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-captions-s... that makes it easy to search them in a popup.

alpbon Tumblr to Add Support for ActivityPub

Anyone remember PubSubHubBub?

alpbon Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex

Haha they replaced the page entirely with a paragraph saying:

> Update: November 9, 2022 A liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.

alpbon What chroot taught me about containers

tl;dr the author uses "docker export" to squash a container image layers into a rootfs, and uses chroot to make it the root of that filesystem and runs a binary there.

This practically has nothing to do with the term "containers". Author says "Others will tell you containers are about namespaces [...] But for me, containers are just chrooted processes. " , however containers are very much about isolation, resource controls, and various network features like port mappings for many people.

So you really didn't build anything even remotely resembling a container runtime, you redefined the term and built something that does "docker export | tar zxvf && cd /dir && chroot /dir && /prog". :)

alpbon [dead]

Does not look like a verified account?

alpbon Show HN: Komorebi – A tiling window manager for Windows 10/11 written in Rust

Somewhat related: If you like hotkey-driven window tiling and positioning tools like macOS Spectre/Rectangle apps, I wrote https://github.com/ahmetb/RectangleWin for Windows a while back and mostly have been personally using it to position windows to 1/2, 1/3, or 2/3 of edges/corners of the display.

alpbon Gcloud storage: Faster data transfers for Cloud Storage

Does anyone know if the "gcloud storage" vs "gsutil" chart in the article uses "gsutil -m" (parallel mode of the tool)?

alpbon Kubernetes Hardening Guidance [pdf]

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30692794

alpbon The road to Zettalinux

There are plenty of OSes today capable of booting and running from RAM. Pretty sure we wouldn't be burning all the prominent OSes for something like that.

alpbon Canonical/Snapcraft websites are down

https://ubuntu.com/

https://snapcraft.io/

https://microk8s.io/

it appears all Canonical properties are returning error: 503 Service Unavailable No server is available to handle this request.

alpbon Microformats Wiki

It's worth noting Microformats is introduced 17 years ago, and was last updated about 12 years ago. It never really picked up traction, largely because players like Google have their own knowledge graph, and similar structured formats like RSS have lost their popularity since then.

alpbon Large scale Internet SSH brute force attacks seem to have stopped here

> [...] blocking of only a few IPs is disproportionately effective at stopping brute force SSH attacks here. Also, since we already block Internet logins to 'root', we're in almost no danger. No matter how many times they try, they have literally no chance of success.

This assumes OpenSSH, OpenSSL and other things in between the client and the server don't have ready to exploit security vulnerabilities. These large-scale scanners are a long term investment when there's a zero-day vulnerability to exploit in OpenSSL etc. That's why a layered/defense-in-depth approach is preferable.