HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

m3047

784 karma · joined November 2, 2019

Internet Plumber, Data Sous Chef, Python Ninja

https://github.com/m3047/

    ...or...
hackernews3047as@m3047.net

meet.hn/city/us-Tacoma

Socials:

- github.com/m3047

---

submissionscomments
m3047··on Hurricane Electric (HE.NET) IPv6 tunnelbroker page offline due to expired domain

   Updated Date: 2026-03-11T07:13:31Z
   Creation Date: 2001-03-09T23:23:30Z
   Registry Expiry Date: 2027-03-09T23:23:30Z
There is also this:

https://www.infoblox.com/blog/threat-intelligence/abusing-ar...

m3047··on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
Sometimes you squeeze clay and it comes out the oddest places. There were other stressors last week.https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-cloud-services-disrupted-i...
m3047··on We are building data breach machines and nobody cares
Goes to a lot of trouble to build a mental model / map / landscape of how agentic ops work. Worth the read if you're looking for one, reasonable people know the map is never the terrain.
m3047··on Device that can extract 1k liters of clean water a day from desert
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/omar-yaghi-wat...
m3047··on 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
Stucke's talk about DNS being hazardous to your health is one of my all time favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PSc9BJDWhM
m3047··on Rydberg atoms detect clear signals from a handheld radio
"The key here is that the radio frequencies used in handheld radios are far from the natural resonances of the atom, so while the atoms can sense the radiation, they don't respond to the frequency modulation on which the audio is encoded,"
m3047··on Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer
The thing which blows my mind is that the NIC handle database is simply gone. This was the database of everyone who was responsible for some internet asset (typically a domain name) in some fashion such that it was recorded for operators' use. You could look it up, it was public. Now it's simply gone. (I'm FWM6)
m3047··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
An analysis based on linear distance fails the essential geometric test:

> Humans walk at roughly 2.1-3.0mph. "European cities" are listed as having bus stops 984-1476 ft apart, which would imply you'd typically walk half that to reach the nearest one (492-738 ft), which for a fit 3.0mph person is 2-3 minutes, and for a frail old 2.1mph person is 3-4 minutes.

> Of course, people can be further away than that (they live orthagonally to the bus route), but you get the point. If you doubled bus stop distances to 1476ft apart, it would not add many walking minutes for the users.

Given four "bus stops" spaced at the corners of a square of dimension d, and a linear relationship of distance and time such that d == t, the distance to a stop along the edges of the square is at most d/2 == 0.5d. As the crow flies (straight line) the distance from the center of the square to any of the corners is sqrt(2*(d^2)) / 2 or (approximately) 0.71d.

But people don't fly, rather geometric physical reality is something sometimes called "manhattan distance" which essentially means that they need to walk to the edge and then along the edge (or zig-zag block by block, which amounts to the same thing just repeated at smaller scale). In this case the distance walked to any of the corners from the center is exactly d. Unless you live in the middle of a park (with stops at the corners) d is the best outcome. In a physical environment other obstacles may present which require backtracking; indeed, the bus routes (and hence stops) are likely optimized to avoid backtracking, acknowledging this physical reality.

m3047··on Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet
I would discuss this with you in some detail privately, with bona fides. You should consult with an herbalist. The herbalist I see doesn't mix themes / traditions. The one we've chosen, together, to work with is TCM. Inside of TCM there are "strategies" or themes. We tried a few, the gou teng + tian ma theme seems to work, minor changes happen seasonally. Underneath that are herbs addressing inflammation (ability to settle / get comfortable), immune system (allergies) balancing (post nasal drip / congestion / anxiety), circulatory health (e.g. cold feet), and tonifying some of the major metabolic / detoxifying organs (sweating / digestion). I have a renewed commitment to exercise and making sure I eat the right things for my body.

In the beginning I got hit with something and was misdiagnosed, and almost died; hypertension didn't fit the narrative so was initially ignored. By the way, when you don't sleep for three months it fucks you up. No attempt was ever made to even acknowledge that there might be a root cause for the hypertension. The hypertension drugs worked until they didn't, and they started gaslighting me about it. Bear in mind, in the context of the theme better sleep will help with hypertension (demonstrably true!).

You need to cultivate awareness as well as evidence-based skepticism for this to work. One of the herbs I take interacts with the beta blocker I still take, and if you weren't paying attention it could kill you (nobody told me, or the herbalist, about it). Some of the herbs are pricey, but none are over $80/pound. All in, it costs me about $100 / month, and two hours of my time every three days (to boil herbs). Quite frankly, if the pills work then just do that; but don't treat it as a "solve", get to work and identify some of the root causes and what can be done about it... before they stop working or start making you sick.

m3047··on Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet
Disturbed sleep / inability to settle / anxiety can have physical causes although these are poorly recognized / diagnosed by regular allopathic medicine where I live.

Anecdata: 1) A good friend whose anxiety was largely alleviated (and sleep improved) by recognizing and treating their iron deficiency. 2) I have to (can't take the Western drug which was prescribed any more, and the Western doctors can't seem to bang the rocks together) take herbs for my hypertension but as opposed to the side effects I was experiencing from the drug I joke that all of the "side effects" from the herbs are good, they're targeting imbalances which were not recognized / treated previously and lo and behold I settle and sleep better... which helps reduce the blood pressure.

m3047··on Japan's Dododo Land, the most irritating place on Earth
Be sure to ask for a tip for the "valuable service" you're providing.

(I accidentally ended up in what I can only describe as a beer automat some months ago. It was billed as some sort of friendly living room to the meeting organizers, and was loaded with propaganda pushing that premise.)

m3047··on AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
Interesting site. The proper "Rose" comes (in a variety of forms, I suppose this is close to what I believe is the canonical one) from Leary's 1957 work _Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality_ and his pioneering work on group psychotherapy / interactions. He used (variants of) this wheel / rose as radar charts, scoring interactions in group situations. The actual wheel has a middle stripe / ring about "provokes", and arguably the behavior becomes pathological when provocation takes place.

As a term of art the "deconflicted", neither dominant / submissive, middle-right is sometimes referred to as the "Dale Carnegie quadrant".

I've been using it for a number of years to diagnose the personality dynamics humans erect around software and tech stacks. I had mused about it, but done nothing, until I came across a SxSW talk about Lacanian analysis of the personalities of various computer languages... just for fun of course.

(Compare Nanos and Docker... see what I mean?)

m3047··on When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown
This is exactly why I have a number of "appliances" which never get clown updates: have addresses in a subnet I block at the segment edge, have DNS which never answers, and there are a few entries in the "DNS firewall" [0] (RPZ) which mostly serve as canaries.

This is the problem with the notion that "in the name of securitah IoT devices should phone home for updates": nobody said "...and map my network in the name of security"

[0] Don't confuse this with Rachel's honeypot wildcarding *.nothing-special.whatever.example.com for external use.

m3047··on When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown
Rules are just rules. You can put things in a domain name which don't work as hostnames. Really the only place this is enforced by policy is at the public registrar level. Only place I've run into it at the code level is in a SCADA platform blocking a CNAME record (which followed "legal" hostname rules) pointing to something which didn't. The platform uses jython / python2 as its scripting layer; it's java; it's a special real-time java: plenty of places to look for what goes wrong, I didn't bother.

People should know that they should treat the contents of their logs as unsanitized data... right? A decade ago I actually looked at this in the context of a (commercial) passive DNS, and it appeared that most of the stuff which wasn't a "valid" hostname was filtered before it went to the customers.

m3047··on Rev up the viral factories
Intracellular viral particle factories in a particular class of viral families.
m3047··on Aging muscle stem cells shift from rapid repair to long-term survival
There's some rather woo woo stuff out there about an evolutionarily conserved mechanism for intercellular signaling as a danger response which involves the mitochondria shifting their metabolism to help cells repel invaders, but which also interferes with the cells' normal activity. TLDR: if there's chronic inflammation cells go into this mode but never get the "all clear". Could this be the qi? Pun intended. It's just anecdata, haven't spent any time looking into it per se.

Stumbled onto this because I've been using TCM (in consultation with an herbalist) for blood pressure, relatively successfully, for a couple of years. Of course they didn't have blood pressure cuffs in the Ming or Han dynasties, so we're not really treating blood pressure... Researching astragalus and di huang is what led me to it.

m3047··on My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
Yeah it's bad. That doesn't mean it's necessarily uniformly bad. But if it's bad where you are, yeah it's bad.

You can see multiple doctors (among the ones you're allowed to see by your insurance). The doctors are all in an echo chamber which reinforces their thinking. Their cognitive load and goal seeking is burdened by what they can determine they can bill insurance for (there is still no price transparency). You don't have a "regular" / primary care physician because they rotate through the provider network constantly.

Symptoms which don't fit the diagnosis are ignored / dealt with by deflecting that you should "see your regular physician". "Stare decisis" rules the second opinion. In their minds they believe they have no place to write down e.g. drug interactions with things which they didn't prescribe and don't believe in (the one time I got a call from quality control working for the umbrella organization I utilized this as an example of why I was looking for a different doctor and the QA person, who was, they said, a licensed nurse, said "they can add that to the record, I'll do it right now").

You might get fired as a patient for passing out or having a seizure during a blood draw, hard to say whether that's because they failed to follow SOP and call the meatwagon or because you upset staff by acting unusually. You might get into a conversation with a physician which goes strange and they end up telling you that their clinic gets health inspections like a restaurant... they don't. There's a "wet work" inspection (just like a butcher shop) before occupancy is allowed, but there's no posted inspection report because... there is no inspection! But there's more. There are relatively "safe" and common procedures which still have ooopsies and people end up in the hospital or die. The hospitalization rate might be 1:5000 and the death rate 1:100000 but if you do a million of these there are going to be a few. If the procedure took place in a clinic it's supposed to be reported, and the reports are public record; but surprise surprise, the reported rates for serious complications are far far below what the actuarial tables show.

If you're seeing constellations of incidents similar to these, you need to get a second opinion from somewhere / somebody who is not caught up in that particular bubble. It can be very hard to see what's happening, and also to find a measurable proxy for "in / not in the bubble".

m3047··on Ode to the AA Battery
Ahh the Sony Walkman. Yes, still useful. I bought one specifically for the AM radio, I use it in conjunction with a radio frequency generator (so old it uses vacuum tubes) to trace wires. Had to tape gauze over the headphones, the foam is long gone.
m3047··on What came first: the CNAME or the A record?
That would be a Flag Day initiative. ;-)

Honestly, it shouldn't matter. Anybody who's using a stub resolver where this matters, where /anything/ matters really, should be running their own local caching / recursing resolver. These oftentimes have options for e.g. ordering things for various reasons.

m3047··on What came first: the CNAME or the A record?
DNS is a wire protocol, payload specification, and application protocol. For all of that, I personally wonder whether its enduring success isn't that it's remarkably underspecified when you get to the corner cases.

There's also so much of it, and it mostly works, most of the time. This creates a hysteresis loop in human judgement of efficacy: even a blind chicken gets corn if it's standing in it. Cisco bought cisco., but (a decade ago, when I had access to the firehose) on any given day belkin. would be in the top 10 TLDs if you looked at the NXDOMAIN traffic. Clients don't opportunistically try TCP (which they shouldn't, according to the specification...), but we have DoT (...but should in practice). My ISPs reverse DNS implementation is so bad that qname minimization breaks... but "nobody should be using qname minimization for reverse DNS", and "Spamhaus is breaking the law by casting shades at qname minimization".

"4096 ought to be enough for anybody" (no, frags are bad. see TCP above). There is only ever one request in a TCP connection... hey, what are these two bytes which are in front of the payload in my TCP connection? People who want to believe that their proprietary headers will be preserved if they forward an application protocol through an arbitrary number of intermediate proxy / forwarders (because that's way easier than running real DNS at the segment edge and logging client information at the application level).

Tangential, but: "But there's more to it, because people doing these things typically describe how it works for them (not how it doesn't work) and onlookers who don't pay close attention conclude "it works"." http://consulting.m3047.net/dubai-letters/dnstap-vs-pcap.htm...

m3047··on More sustainable epoxy thanks to phosphorus
> industrial uses of phosphorus

There seems to be a memory hole about what follows. Probably not the "key limiting factor for life" you had in mind.

There have been various incidents where soldiers or people generally in third world countries have developed neurological diseases when machine oil contaminates (or is mistaken for) cooking oil. This isn't new, it's been happening for 100 years. There have also been cases of pilots becoming, or allegedly becoming, disabled due to inhalation of jet engine lubricants which find their way into the cabin air supply (passengers are notably not mentioned in most reporting).

Although intentional use of the more toxic compounds is generally avoided, machine oils are subjected to harsh environments and compounds can change, new compounds created. Kind of like dioxin contamination in herbicides, I don't see much evidence that oil additives are rigorously tested for unusually toxic compounds incidentally occurring during the manufacturing process.

I'm glad they're burning that shit under an exhaust hood in the picture in the article, hope it's turned on!

Apropos the memory hole remark above, here are some articles I found briefly looking around although none of them were ones I remember previously seeing / reading (such as the "famous" case of the British machinegunners in North Africa).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_soldiers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organophosphate_poisoning

https://www.machinerylubrication.com/Read/30448/know-lubrica...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11254977_The_Toxici...

m3047··on No knives, only cook knives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Ant
m3047··on The recurring dream of replacing developers
Is that farm hands, or farm operators? What about corps, how do you calibrate that? Is a corp a "person" or does it count for more? My point is that maybe the definition of "farmer" is being pushed to far, as is the notion of "developer". "Prompt engineer"? Are you kidding me about that? Prompts being about as usefully copyrighted / patentable as a white paper. Do you count them as "engineers" because they say so?

I get your point, hope you get mine: we have less legal entities operating as "farms". If vibe coding makes you a "developer", working on a farm in an operating capacity makes you a "farmer". You might profess to be a biologist / agronomist, I'm sure some owners are, but doesn't matter to me whether you're the owner or not.

The numbers of nonsupervisory operators in farming activities have decreased using the traditional definitions.

m3047··on The recurring dream of replacing developers
Yes: farmers.
m3047··on Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory
For shiggles I searched the entire first page of comments for "testable" (looking for "how to write testable code" as a proxy for devs write testable code if they write tests) and this is the only mention.

So +1 to you!

m3047··on Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory
Well, strictly anecdata but there was a time when I worked on code which for $reasons had no dedicated test environment, and externalities were not our problem according to management. So we were reaching out to the big bad world for testing, but we didn't own the network between it and us. I ended up writing tests for the network. Caught a lot of problems with the network. Didn't make any friends.

DISCLAIMER: I've been around IT for probably the majority of y'all's lifetimes, so I'm not saying this happens often. But just because something is fundamentally wrong, doesn't mean that all fundamentally wrong things are the same. In my experience they differ more from each other than the possible good ways of doing the same thing. Don't conflate things without a good reason.

m3047··on Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk
Come on, really? Do you think April Fools came early? https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...
m3047··on Signal leaders warn agentic AI is an insecure, unreliable surveillance risk
In exasperation, people truly concerned about security / secops are turning to unikernels and shell-free OS; at the same time agents are all in on curl | bash and other cheap hacks.
m3047··on Why have death rates from accidental falls tripled?
I'm over 65 and I'm fabbing a ladder to permanently install on my high-aspect roof at the moment (out of iron. drilling, cutting, bending, welding, threading rods, oh my!). I'll get to install it myself, too. Every few years I get out a credit card and rent a 40' (overkill!) Z-lift for a week, it's much better than working on ladders for anything major, like repairing / replacing fascia or installing wire cloth over the gutters: America, gotta love it. And there's no OSHA inspector to worry about when you're the property owner as well as equipment operator.

I view it as exercise. If people don't need me to prep their data or fix their internet plumbing, I have other things to do (and it's possible someone will see the work and I get a side gig, it's happened before).

Ironically yesterday I was stapling wire cloth at the top of the stairs on the wooden deck because it gets slippery.

It is hard to find good handy help. They "repaired" a gutter by nailing it to the crown moulding, which is not structural (resulting in the failure of the fascia, but I digress); repaired copper supply lines with plastic; didn't tighten a slip ring on a sewer trap in the crawlspace. We just had a new roof put on, and overall they did a competent job but there is one leak, coming from a problem we explicitly paid them to solve, and getting that fixed is going real slow. The guy responsible for that aspect is obviously not a native english speaker; OTOH we prevailed on them to install some overhangs, and the carpenter worked with us and allowed us to paint the decking / sheathing / soffit which would be exposed before it was installed. During one of my burnouts I worked as an estimator for a high-end wood flooring company; literally over half of our competition was illegal, unlicensed, and sometimes part of an acknowledged criminal enterprise (not totally throwing shades at people who aren't from here, we had five crews and the Italian and the former Russian physicist (beautiful inlay work!) crew leads were class acts). But I digress.

I've done crazy shit my whole life, my dad died scuba diving at 52 (cause of death was inconclusive) but his brother lived into his 90s. A couple of years ago my father-in-law died after a fall; he was taking photographs in a park. Somehow when he fell he broke his neck; could have been a stroke, but he never really stabilized enough to find out, was dead within a week. He was in his 80s.

m3047··on Corroded: Illegal Rust
Did you let the LLM horde (it and its agents) compile Rust? Is the LLM allowed to flag problems with Rust? Rinse, lather, repeat...
← PreviousPage 6 of 28Next →