Hacker News Reader

lexarflash8gon North Korean fake job interview led to $6.3B Binance heist

It seems like these North Korean IT guys are actually pretty tech savvy and can actually do the job and work -- but they are doing recon at the same time with malicious intentions. An unskilled scammer would get caught every time and couldn't do the work.

I mean it would make sense to hire these NK guys to consult DevSec teams if it wasn't for the travel restrictions in NK -- sort of like how reformed black-hat hackers get legit jobs in the IT sec industry.

lexarflash8gon North Korean fake job interview led to $6.3B Binance heist

This was a big time process failure -- almost every company I worked for you have to authenticate with SSO and MFA and never have static credentials for important services like Github, Google cloud, etc. They don't seem to have least-privilege in place and if they did are not consistent about applying the policy to everyone.

I wouldn't be surprised if the guys they compromised were high-level staff engineers with the keys to the kingdom so to speak so they found a loophole. Security is hard because the attack only needs one chance to get it right -- and defense needs to get it right every single time.

lexarflash8gon MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch

Apple said its skipping M6 for Macbook Pro -- there is no m6 pro/max -- so the next chip MBP will get is m7 in 2027. So I would hold off on buying one until next year. This is essentially a 2025 product refresh.

lexarflash8gon GPT-5.5

None of them have the pelican's feet placed properly on the pedals -- or the pedals are misrepresented. Cool art style but not physically accurate.

lexarflash8gon Claude Opus 4.7

What if it’s raining though? Car wash wouldn’t be open though it would waste gas

lexarflash8gon Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

Silicon Valley just means a concentration of influential and powerful actors including venture capitalists, executives, entrepreneurs who decide the fate of the technology industry. Basically the elites of the XYZ sector.

Same can be applied for DC (politics/military), NY (finance), LA (entertainment).

SV was around since the 60-90s but didn't get much attention until beginning of this millenium due to the huge value creation and control they had over the US economy. They just happen to be relevant in recent times. 100s of years ago it was the railroad and oil conglomerates, 1000s of years ago kings and feudal lords. So there is always a powerful influential class who controls the strings -- its a feature of human society.

lexarflash8gon Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire

Sort of like a troll blocking a bridge and asking for payment to cross but armed with machine guns and mines

lexarflash8gon M5 MacBook Pro

Big fan of the podcast Late Linux Linux btw

lexarflash8gon America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy

I notice the trend that people are reading much less in public and on public transporation -- before if you went on a long-haul flight you would bring a couple of books or magazines, now people much prefer to consuming video content. On a flight every row I saw passengers either watching a movie on their phone/laptop/ or screen seat.

If you walk into a cafe it would be odd to see someone reading a book. And its almost impossible to buy physical newspapers even the Sunday edition for the NY Times as most grocery stores or convenience stores don't carry them.

Personally I'm also guilty of listening to more podcasts and background play -- but I only watch YT visual content when its interesting there is just too much stuff out there. I consume most of my news online -- so my reading comes from mostly articles. Its just more convenient and practical now -- though requires much less effort than say reading longer form content of a book or long essay.

Lately I've been going on TikTok just out of curiosity for entertainmentto watch amusing or funny videos. Its basically like digital crack -- before you know it you spent an hour just watching mindless content and its designed to get you hooked. It really is low-effort instant gratification at its worst (probably worse than porn -- because you stop after a while once satisfied.)

And you see kids as old as 1-2 years old with personal devices watching videos -- so it seems to be a disturbing trend And I heard that professors don't even assign books since they know their students won't read them and will just ChatGPT for summaries.

lexarflash8gon There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

Most companies aren’t Apple, Nvidia, or Google chasing the top 0.1% of “elite” talent. Outside of a few AI-focused startups, the reality is that 90% of companies are sitting on legacy codebases, still running VMs, or duct-taping CRUD apps together with APIs.

If you happen to be a superstar with a rare niche skill (like building frontier AI models), you basically skip the interview loop and get fought over with million-dollar offers. But that’s a tiny fraction of the market.

For everyone else, hiring looks a lot like dating: both sides aim for a “10,” but usually settle for a “6 or 7.” And the whole process is signaling—candidates overstate their skills, companies oversell their culture and tech stack, and the match lands somewhere in the middle.

Probably the most important non-technical skill is dealing with the egos in the industry since you will come across a lot of them.

lexarflash8gon There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

Anyone who thinks their boss/coworkers are their friend is surely deluded. There is no loyalty in this day and age-- both from the employer and employee side.

Even asking "how was your weekend?" -- its implied that you just say good rather than sharing details of what you actually did -- they don't really care.

lexarflash8gon Claude Sonnet 4.5

Just tested this on a rather simple issue. Basically it falls into rabbits holes just like the other models and tries to brute force fixes through overengineering through trial and error. It also says "your job should now pass" maybe after 10 prompts of roughly doing the same thing stuck in a thought loop.

A GH actions pipeline was failing due to a CI job not having any source code files -- error was "No build system detected". Using Cursor agent with Sonnet 4.5, it would try to put dummy .JSON files and set parameters in the workflow YAML file to false, and even set parameters that don't exist. Simple solution was to just override the logic in the step to "Hello world" to get the job to pass.

I don't understand why the models are so bad with simple thinking outside the box solutions? Its like a 170 iq savant who can't even ride public transporation.

lexarflash8gon Israel took control of Gaza cellphones to stream PM Netanyahu's UN Speech live

Yeah my initial thought would be it sends something like a Amber alert with messages -- a bit stretch of the truth

lexarflash8gon ChatGPT Pulse

I'm thinking OpenAI's strategy is to get users hooked on these new features to push ads on them.

Hey, for that recipe you want to try, have you considered getting new knives or cooking ware? Found some good deals.

For your travel trip, found a promo on a good hotel located here -- perfect walking distance for hiking and good restaraunts that have Thai food.

Your running progress is great and you are hitting strides? Consider using this app to track calories and record your workouts -- special promo for 14 day trial .

lexarflash8gon Claudia – Desktop companion for Claude code

I use WARP.dev CLI terminal that works as a coding agent and has all the models not just from Anthropic and works very similarly to all the CLI Coding Agents (Claude code, Codex, Jules, etc.)

It works very fast compared to Cursor -- biggest limitation is that it doesn't have workspaces where you can get context from several repos for building your application.

MCP servers also work as well just a little more complex.

lexarflash8gon US companies, consumers are paying for tariffs, not foreign firms

The biggest costs for businesses are labor costs and capex. So indirectly higher prices (inflation caused by tariffs) will demand higher wages for workers and cause higher prices for consumers for services seemingly unimpacted by tariffs.

lexarflash8gon Grok 4 Launch [video]

You have to go to the settings and view more models and select it from the drop-down list.

lexarflash8gon Ask HN: How did Soham Parekh get so many jobs?

Realize that a lot of candidates who followed the rules and told the truth were screwed out of jobs. Right now there are massive layoffs and lots of good people are out of jobs and this guy is being praised by sticking it to “corporate greed”?

Is Luigi Malione a hero and deserves to be pardoned by this logic ?

lexarflash8gon AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

https://archive.ph/IWjYP

He was covered on the Economist recently -- I haven't heard of him til now so imagine its not just AI-slop content.

lexarflash8gon AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

Apparently Dwarkesh's podcast is a big hit in SV -- it was covered by the Economist just recently. I thought the "All in" podcast was the voice of tech but their content has been going politcal with MAGA lately and their episodes are basically shouting matches with their guests.

And for folks who want to read rather than listen to a podcast, why not create an article (they are using Gemini) rather than just posting the whole transcript? Who is going to read a 60 min long transcript?

lexarflash8gon How to bike across the country

Well biking and cycling is considered generally a high-class sport in the US -- but when you are in a bike out in the middle of nowhere you are vulnerable. And it seems like the friendly firefighters or citizens he met on the way made were being generous and made offers to help rather than OP asking for requests.

lexarflash8gon TSMC 2nm Process Disclosure – How Does It Measure Up?

I think yields is the main reason, although I'm not an expert in that area. If its a standard deviation difference than it will increase their manufacturing costs. Nvidia got around this from Ada--> Blackwell by simply increasing TDP for their high-end cards and adding more cores. Their is no IPC/efficiency/node improvement, if I'm not mistaken, for the first time gen-to-gen.

lexarflash8gon How good are American roads?

Quality of roads in a city/town typically correlate with the income and socioeconomic status of the location. In the Bay area, affluent suburban areas have pretty good roads (believe taxes have an effect). While cities like Oakland, Vallejo, Richmond have streets full of potholes and very bumpy roads that can even damage your car while driving at a normal speed. For state with the highest income tax wonder where the funds go to. Good article on current state of US roads. I've seen other countries in EU and they seem to have much better or comparable roads in rural areas than the US.

lexarflash8gon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2024)

Location: Walnut Creek, CA, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possible

Technologies: Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, GitLab CI/CD, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS, Python, Bash, Java, Prometheus, Grafana, Istio, Anthos, ArgoCD, Helm, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Terragrunt, JFrog

Résumé/CV: bit.ly/48uV5ik

Email: See CV

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-tooryani

Summary: Senior Platform Engineer with extensive experience in Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps. I have a strong track record in cloud-native infrastructure optimization, Kubernetes orchestration, and automation with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines. Skilled in driving operational excellence and modernizing infrastructure for mission-critical applications with high uptime. Currently seeking full-time roles.

lexarflash8gon eBPF Documentary

I saw the airing of it at Kubecon -- also met the Finnish guy there in the video. I mistook him for another Finnish guy with blond hair. Didn't meet the Russian though.

lexarflash8gon Has anyone gotten out of daily 8:30am stand-up meetings?

Friday standups just don't work -- people want some day to do some tasks-- only hardcore engineers work that day which is probably norm at IT tech sweat shops

lexarflash8gon Three virtues of a great programmer

If you come at 5pm or past to work on an OSS project or your own side project more power to you. For a corp job why work longer than you need to when you are not paid for it? Bragging rights?

lexarflash8gon Three virtues of a great programmer

What is your biggest weakness: "I work too hard" -- humblebrag

lexarflash8gon Target Figured Out a Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did (2012)

I first heard about this story from an IT class at community college- I knew about data mining and collection it was well-known. Reading the story, the father goes to a local store to complain about something that corporate sent out and a store manager is forced to apologize. I think this happened in a low-education region -- this doesn't make a lot of sense.

lexarflash8gon Hello, stranger – Talking to random people

The writer assumes other people are also relatively privileged as a writer and not worry about money/job and have free-time for idle chit chat

Also seen this and doing "rejection tests" -- someone with too much freetime on their hands or who has ADHD. Other people would label this behavior as weird