Hacker News Reader

case0x00on Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over U.S., Pentagon says

https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/...

"And, I'm sorry, how long have we been tracking it. I'm not going to go into all the details because I don't want to reveal sensitive information. But I will say we have been tracking it for some time. And we have had custody of it the entire time it has been over U.S. airspace, entered the continental United States airspace a couple of days ago."

case0x00on Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over U.S., Pentagon says

thats basically what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC was mostly for I think. its a really good idea though, and pretty cool technology.

I think it only makes sense for battlefield surveillance if its augmenting some small gap in existing ISR operations, combined with UAVs + satellites + whatever other aircraft. it definitely would not replace any of those aforementioned vehicles/technologies wholesale.

case0x00on Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over U.S., Pentagon says

I don't think so. I don't know what altitude its at but I imagine aerodynamic control surfaces would not be that effective. F-22 would be better, which is what we deployed.

case0x00on Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over U.S., Pentagon says

the ISR payload tends to be massively less as well, with a balloon compared to a satellite, since balloon payloads need to be really small. they are basically an obsolete technology since the development of reconnaissance satellites, UAVs, etc, so I really doubt this is collecting much valuable intelligence. also shooting down satellites is definitely a sketchy area (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon) because of in-space collisions etc.

case0x00on Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over U.S., Pentagon says

common != it has happened before.

also note in the DOD press briefing they stated that this was markedly different than previous incursions due to primarily the duration of loitering.

also what are these comments..? openly lauding an adversarial state which is conducting flagrant surveillance operations in the continental united states? yikes.

case0x00on The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

if after reading those things you honestly can't see the difference then you are definitely part of the problem.

case0x00on Narco Subs 101 (2020)

Not that I know of, but I guess elements of the USCG can be seconded by the USN to assist in a law-enforcement capacity? it makes sense that the maritime forces get to play together though.

case0x00on Narco Subs 101 (2020)

Thats interesting. I assumed narco subs fell into DHS/USCG jurisdiction and since they have no ASW/ASuW functionality (I think?), getting the USN involved seems kinda overkill? Am I wrong?

As an engineer I can't help but be kind of impressed with narco subs, especially traversing the atlantic from south america to europe. I wonder where this arms race will go: unmanned narco subs? weaponized narco subs?? yikes.

case0x00on Why hundreds of thousands of kids in the US dread their 21st birthdays

kind of amusing to say that, given the reason this is occurring is because the US is an incredibly popular country for immigrants to flock to improve their QOL and give their kids the best opportunities even though they know they're entering on non-immigrant visas. Yeah USCIS is infamously glacial and the visa situation these people are in is extremely frustrating, yet they persevere to live in the US.

case0x00on Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO.

Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) if you want autonomous cars to work with anything less than AGI. Until companies start pursuing that, they are actually unknowingly using all that money to push for AGI and obviously coming up short because they don't even understand what they are trying to do.

case0x00on TikTok has an open computational chemistry position

[techcrunch article from 2020](https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/23/bytedance-ai-drug/). I guess its not actually tiktok, but bytedance

case0x00on A modern Fortran scientific programming ecosystem

Modern Fortran is honestly a joy to work with. A large part of this is due to FPM; I've had a lot of problems in the past with building more complex Fortran projects (with FoBiS mainly) and dependencies have always been a bit of a hassle.

Also the author of the post has worked on some really cool stuff. They work at NASA JSC and their Fortran code is being used for the Artemis I mission (https://twitter.com/DegenerateConic/status/15615313400670617...) which is gnarly.

case0x00on Joe Rogan Interviews Steve Jobs

The flow of Jobs' voice is a little off, but wow this is incredible. But also incredibly concerning. Its cool tech, and I guess nothing can stop the inevitability of new technology, but the ability to replicate people's voice, speech patterns, and how they look to a pretty accurate degree is mega sketchy. I guess to future proof yourself, just minimize your audio and visual data online...

case0x00on Saudi Arabia sentences tribesmen to death for resisting displacement

? nice non-sequitur and nice antisemitism?

case0x00on Bai Juyi: The Tang dynasty’s baldest poet

It's interesting the very different roles hair has played in philosophical movements: the bald Buddhist monks, the beard-growing Greek philosophers, and here the growing of long hair in Confucianism.

Unrelated to above, but I wonder how much beauty is lost in poetry with translation. Specifically, I wonder how much is actually changed between the original and the English translation... but I wouldn't even know how to quantify that. Blissful ignorance, perhaps.

case0x00on New Pegasus spyware abuses identified in Mexico

Maybe because the initial reporting got so much traffic, Citizenlab pushed far more resources into investigating NSO products? Maybe its political in nature? I can't imagine the reasoning is technical incompetence by NSO (have you read the FORCEDENTRY writeups? its insane). Maybe NSO's clients more haphazardly pursue targets, so there is a higher probability of recovering some forensic evidence?

case0x00on New Pegasus spyware abuses identified in Mexico

Even that comparison is a bit of a reach because the US does not have conscription, so the professional/education pipelines are just massively different.

case0x00on Paris Will Become ‘100% Cyclable’

Is it even tenable to attempt this for the entirety of Greater London? Should the focus be on just improving Central London I wonder?

case0x00on America’s Throwaway Spies: How the CIA Failed Iranian Informants

Precisely. Its easy to criticize an agency when one is only privy to the failures. What the public sees is such a tiny fraction of what actually goes on, including positive publications. Its a tough aspect of working in the intelligence community honestly, and especially concerning when many people want to de-fang US foreign intelligence.

case0x00on Iran’s Internet Shutdown Hides a Deadly Crackdown

I do wonder on the feasibility of such events. I don't know a huge amount about pre-revolution Iran, but I don't think the Shah had an exceptionally powerful security force (I could be wrong). But now at least, the IRGC makes a revolution/coup very difficult.

case0x00on Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

Yeah seeing this today is funny given today begins Rosh Hashanah, the Hebrew new year. But I imagine _most_ countries of the world use the gregorian, especially those on english-speaking sites

case0x00on Train Travel in the UK: A Foreigner’s Perspective

Having both traveled across the country and throughout Greater London on trains, it is actually really convenient. London is its own kind of beast with the tube/overground, but throughout the rest of the country its definitely pleasant. Going through London during peak hours, dealing with trains randomly stopping midway through a journey with a packed carriage, dealing with anti-social teens, or traveling in the middle of summer in the tube isn't super fun. But on the other hand, going through the countryside on a long distance train like going up to Scotland is great; I basically just watched the views go by for 4 or so hours.

That all being said, I can totally see daily commuting by train being the absolutely most miserable thing.

case0x00on Whistleblower: Pentagon purchased tool collecting Americans' web browsing data

The publics' attitude toward America's military, more like. It is easy to get people to spy on their own country if they already have a hatred for it, and that _is_ a national security risk. That is not to say you must be blindly patriotic, but if you hate your country, hate your military, and only want to burn everything to the ground rather than reform, that is a massive insider threat that is exploitable by our adversaries. If you don't think the excessively high number of america-hating americans is concerning, then I don't know what to say.

case0x00on Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

To what are you referring?

case0x00on Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

I agree, unless the alternative is to break apart the monopolies which I think is better.

case0x00on Of God and Machines

"An artificial general intelligence will probably look more like a whole series of exponentially improving tools than a single thing" cements how I feel AI will be. Also its amusing how GPT-3 wrote that, and I'm agreeing with it.

Its a good article, pretty accessible IMO, and quite poetic.

case0x00on Queen’s Funeral security plan is more complex than the London 2012 Olympics

I truly wonder how much raw data GCHQ will receive and how they even remotely attempt to sort through it, plus all the myriad sources of information to integrate into intelligence reports. What an interesting challenge.

case0x00on China Accuses the NSA of Hacking a Top University to Steal Data

mostly discussed [here](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725137). I dunno why this is really an article anyway, given the misleading headline implying the NSA is hacking some university, rather than an institution conducting military research for the PLA. Given the context of the DOJ article, its just espionage tennis: a constant back and forth.

case0x00on Twitter trackers jeopardize military aircraft?

Isn't this more of a point about OSINT as a whole? just practice better OPSEC and it becomes less of a problem, and from my semi-uninformed position I think its always possible to _somehow_ disable tracking/transponders, be it ADS-B or AIS.

That being said, it was pretty interesting to track military aircraft flying around during the opening weeks of the war

case0x00on Apple Introduces Apple Watch Ultra

36/60 hours still seems pretty low to me honestly in an adventuring context. Apple had a great opportunity to innovate the watch massively but this is kinda disappointing. Software is cool, as always, but hardware is the let down. The bands seem pretty cool though.