Hacker News Reader

jamal-kumaron Writing A Job Runner (In Elixir) (Again) (10 years later)

The absolute facility with which you can do distributed applications in Elixir is the big thing that sold me in the first place. Nice to see this tutorial!

jamal-kumaron The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet

I definitely felt this guy was a little bit hyperbolic because the more social media gets the way he describes the more I see people disconnect from it

I don't know anyone other than people over 50 who still check their facebook feeds and the kids are out enjoying the sun today

jamal-kumaron Curl-impersonate: Special build of curl that can impersonate the major browsers

This tool is pretty sweet in little bash scripts combo'd up with gnu parallel on red team engagements for mapping https endpoints within whatever scoped address ranges that will only respond to either proper browsers due to whatever, or with the SNI stuff in order. Been finding it super sweet for that. Can do all the normal curl switches like -H for header spoofing

jamal-kumaron How one of the world’s major money laundering networks operates

That's great! Now try getting hired with nothing but a degree when everyone knows half the class did this shit.

jamal-kumaron Show HN: A terminal emulator in pure PHP

It's still a mainstay of certain malware for sure. Just pop in 'php shell' to your favorite search engine, and it's basically all stuff for either red teaming or shenanigans

jamal-kumaron HTTrack Website Copier

Is there anything that handles this smoothly?

jamal-kumaron HTTrack Website Copier

Does it not on a flag or am I just reading this wrong? From the man page:

    -k
    --convert-links

    After the download is complete, convert the links in the document to make them suitable for local viewing. This affects not only the visible hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links to external content, such as embedded images, links to style sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc.

    Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:

        The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget will be changed to refer to the file they point to as a relative link.

        Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the link in doc.html will be modified to point to ‘../bar/img.gif’. This kind of transformation works reliably for arbitrary combinations of directories.
        The links to files that have not been downloaded by Wget will be changed to include host name and absolute path of the location they point to.

        Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif (or to ../bar/img.gif), then the link in doc.html will be modified to point to http://hostname/bar/img.gif. 

    Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a linked file was downloaded, the link will refer to its local name; if it was not downloaded, the link will refer to its full Internet address rather than presenting a broken link. The fact that the former links are converted to relative links ensures that you can move the downloaded hierarchy to another directory.

    Note that only at the end of the download can Wget know which links have been downloaded. Because of that, the work done by ‘-k’ will be performed at the end of all the downloads.

jamal-kumaron Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good (2013)

In any LLM it helps to use simple tricks to give it a few extra prompts like 'No blabbling' and 'Keep your code example simple and to the point without adding anything exrta' still but there's all sorts of research on optimization for getting better results from just how you frame your interaction with it in different and more exacting and concise wording:

https://github.com/jxzhangjhu/Awesome-LLM-Prompt-Optimizatio...

Really a lot of stuff you'd find in any university/college English course for academic writing style for getting your point across clearly applies as well:

https://alum.mit.edu/succinct-writing-guide

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/...

https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/conciseness-han...

Personally though I've been avoiding its use in code and keeping it to where it shines. I've said this over and over. It's so good for writing drivel like copy and product descriptions and instagram posts and SEO-able text content. Stuff that people have been used to sounding kinda fake for decades if not over a century by now, that I have no heart to write myself but I can now literally just tell a robot to "increase engagement" and it shows in $$$.

Where I've found limits in what it can generate with code is with complex concurrency stuff that you really need to have knowledge about yourself to be able to prove isn't going to crash. The kind of stuff that you might pick up Elixr or Go for, specifically, I have always found it hits serious problems generating that kind of stuff. You need serious engineers who know stuff like TLA+, coq, spin etc to get that right if you're making systems that peoples lives or finances might depend on. I worry there's a lot of generated code being put out there in production which is not taking these things into consideration and people are just like 'wow it compiles, ship it'

jamal-kumaron Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good (2013)

Oh boy. One of the things I have been doing to test if an LLM is 'there yet' by my standards is if it can spit out solutions in elixir without hallucinating packages that don't exist to get the job done. Since I haven't tested since chatgpt 4 came out I dunno where it's at for that but always felt like a decent litmus test.

jamal-kumaron Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel

It depends on the framework and other stuff around it but you're right about the API documentation issue, there's godoc if you want to document functions but for something like API endpoints it's not what you'd find from openapi/swagger unless whatever you're using is adaptable to that and then whenever I was working with it an older spec of it too. Always fun to run into a client who expects this from working with most of their people and you're just drooling like a gopher at them but for now if you're writing something in go for pure performance I'm not 100 on what balances best between that and auto spec... Definitely choose an API framework in go that works out of the box for that if it's important. This may be better than when I tried it a couple years back

https://github.com/swaggo/swag

And this one seems to generate documentation from code rather than annotations/comments etc

https://github.com/go-fuego/fuego

jamal-kumaron SQLite-on-the-server is misunderstood: Better at hyper-scale than micro-scale

I found the old wrappers to be really messed up and buggy compared to the new nodejs builtin that works charmingly well

Do you know any details about those tweaks you mention because it would be very nice to know what edge cases I gotta watch out for using any of these

jamal-kumaron Doc NTIA lead nominee criticizes "woke" and "socialist" fiber broadband subsidy

Honestly she could have done better putting it in those terms rather than attacking it the way she did but you nailed it. It's really expensive to cover large and disparate geographic areas with that kind of thing. There's definitely examples of smaller companies emerging and wiring up their entire rural towns with fibre optic, although the one I'm most aware of kind of foundered when the town ended up selling it to the big phone company after they couldn't pay something like 18 million in debt which gives an idea of scale and challenges for getting lasers to homes in just one town [1]. And on the other hand I've lived in much smaller third world countries where you can get FTTH pretty much everywhere even in small towns, mostly doable because the area to cover is just super small.

[1] https://www.thealbertan.com/olds-news/town-of-olds-selling-i...

jamal-kumaron Canada pledges billions for high-speed rail linking Quebec City and Toronto

Has anyone outside of China tried to tackle the kinds of long distances there are in Canada? If it costs this many billions to do it just from Toronto to Quebec City then yeah I could easily picture cutting through extant farmland across a nationas big as that one to be an incredibly expensive undertaking. Pretty sure Canada has worse problems than not having high speed rail right now in terms of money

jamal-kumaron Half-Life

It's still tons of fun but definitely different now, and since they came out with counter-strike 2 a while ago, it's me being specced out on my old gaming computer all over again - as with you I'm way too busy as a working adult to get too deep into it, was fun to play a lot during the pandemic though.

The craziest innovation I seen is counter strike 1.6 in the browser, fully playable multiplayer. Not sure how safe letting that much execution happen in wasm environment truly is but was still pretty funny to see how far the game has come in terms of graphics. Basically a bunch of the same maps still even though a couple have always been way skewed to one side or the other.

jamal-kumaron OpenBSD Innovations

It does the job great with the default install as long as you're comfortable with the console but if you're talking something with a web interface like what pfsense/opnsense on freebsd, there was one out of Sweden I think it was for a while that fizzled out called securityrouter. Nowadays these are what I've seen (But not tested):

https://github.com/sonertari/PFFW

https://github.com/sonertari/UTMFW

jamal-kumaron OpenBSD Innovations

Besides the clown nose on puffy it's honestly just realistic and not all just talking bad like I've seen some people do:

https://isopenbsdsecu.re/mitigations/pledge/

jamal-kumaron Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

Wow that's crazy. You know when Greenpeace is saying they messed going organic up that they probably really messed going organic up...

https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/story/on-sri-lankas-fert...

jamal-kumaron What about K?

Super interesting thanks for the tidbit

jamal-kumaron What about K?

""Arthur succeeded in getting it to run, but eventually got drowned in device drivers."

heh

jamal-kumaron Kevin Mitnik FOIA Final

After hearing his voice messages in a fake asian voice trying to mess with Shimomura, I kinda lost all respect for Mitnick.

jamal-kumaron Kevin Mitnik FOIA Final

This is pretty damn interesting, it's definitely the earliest example of a computer intrusion incident response report that I've ever seen. These reports detail stuff he was doing in 1980/1981 at the earliest I can see just skimming the top few pages. His own side of this particular chapter of his history is maybe worth a read, maybe not - he was known for embellishments:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090317050834/http://www.themem...

jamal-kumaron What about K?

I always thought it sounded super cool but it just doesn't exist in the problem spaces I work in. Like kdb+ was specifically designed to be run on bare metal without a full OS in the way of things going fast, and in quant environments where you're trying to shave off nanoseconds on the computations because your company's gone and invested in a dedicated fibre line to trading servers.

jamal-kumaron Scientists find links between Alzheimer's, herpes, and head trauma

Get in on a research study or good doctor who can read the research already done. Don't take too much stock in medical stuff from some rando on hackernews but definitely ask your medical practitioner about these things.

jamal-kumaron Malimite – iOS and macOS Decompiler

this is super cool thanks

running out of phone data in the middle of something important, the worst hahahaha

jamal-kumaron Scientists find links between Alzheimer's, herpes, and head trauma

It will bear out in studies when they start to see whatever results come from giving head injury patients and other at risk groups antivirals to hopefully measurably prevent these conditions from arising

jamal-kumaron Scientists find links between Alzheimer's, herpes, and head trauma

Oh yeah for sure. Other herpes link: It can be even worse if you somehow get it in your nose, where it could be a causal factor in "learning and behavioral deficiencies and violence in children and adults", as well as other risks from other forms of herpes like HHV-6 via that route, nice and close to the brain, and also possibly linked to the development of multiple sclerosis. [1][2] It's worth noting to those that don't know that this virus lies dormant in your spinal cord and can eventually travel to the brain, causing encephalitis and as the research has actually been saying for some time now is probably also linked to alzheimers, and there's also an increased incidence of alzheimers between spouses [3]. Lots of indications that we should probably figure out a way to stamp these viruses out if we're to totally be past these extremely debilitating and life ending conditions as a species.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8560783/

[2] https://www.livescience.com/15453-nose-gateway-virus-brain-d...

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2945313/

jamal-kumaron GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

I recently got hit up out of nowhere by somoene who was like i'll pay you to storyboard a music video of a famous dead rapper. Think tupac hologram but somehow even worse in terms of digging someone up from the grave. I was like ok sure why not, I know this generative AI stuff. Got paid like a hundred bucks to start on this storyboard.

Thing is the story was so fucking stupid that I stopped after generating one image. They probably didn't make the story itself with AI but it sure was ridiculous, I basically quit as soon as they asked me to somehow include a bunch of jailed celebrities like diddy into the next storyboard image, getting out of it saying that it went against my legal capabilities to include real living people.

I hope you realize that some people with millions of dollars just have really head ass ideas they're going to put through your thing and things are going to get weirder sooner as a result. Like that idea would have ended at the drawing board with a bunch of people talking each other down from it not that long ago but now it's basically like that WKUK sketch about a grape out here [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqgiEQXGetI

jamal-kumaron Hacker infects 18,000 "script kiddies" with fake malware builder

That's wild, because the only way we were able to mount network drives that had stuff hidden on them by other students in the know was "net use". The drives would be visible to us on the network but if we merely clicked on them it would give us access denied, but a little two line bat script would let us mount and open the drives with no problems. Must have been windows 2000 server badly configured. I remember some other kid getting in trouble for the net send thing but I think he was being obscene to someone else who got mad enough... Everyone saw the obvious viruses and didn't click them but that one kid. As soon as he did that they found our little secret network share and closed it off. We definitely referred to him as a 'skiddie' after that lol

We just used it for a place to run scorched earth from on the whole network without having to download it to our home folders where it'd get noticed and punished

jamal-kumaron Hacker infects 18,000 "script kiddies" with fake malware builder

They talk about this like it's a new phenomenon but I distinctly remember this being super common in the windows 95 to vista days. Like I went to some kid's house and he would do something like try and tell everyone he knew how to 'hack google' and he used use some obviously sketchy as hell tool which just ran a whois on their domain to show their address, and this was all the evidence that he was 'hacking', and we all clowned on him for it and how he probably just installed a virus on himself. He ended up finding some extremely obvious viruses some kid thought would be funny to leave on a network share at school called something like 'sexyporn.jpg.exe' and getting expelled for being daft enough to execute them

jamal-kumaron Climbers using xenon gas to climb Everest

There's a theory that the mechanism of action of xenon and perhaps other anesthetics is on the microtubules rather than the receptors, having implications for the neural correlates of consciousness itself

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09992-7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXElfzVgg6M

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15710...

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936