Hacker News Reader

maulion China is developing some startling new kit in its quest to invade Taiwan

Cannot edit my post in mobile. This is the link I am getting redirected to: https://www.economist.com/china/2025/03/20/china-is-developi...

maulion China is developing some startling new kit in its quest to invade Taiwan

Same for me, after an auto redirect.. (German IP) - maybe there is some shenanigans going on based on visitor location origin.

maulion Mazda has tested a synthetic fuel in an unmodified MX5 on a 1000-mile road trip

Same here, am excited for what happens in the coming year. I did read on HN some time ago and just checked, SWISS airline working together with Synhelion https://www.swiss.com/magazine/en/inside-swiss/sustainabilit...

maulion Ask HN: Can I see your scripts?

I started - but rarely update and kinda forgot pushing to github - some small scripts and knowledge snippets. One of them being a network/ssh based distributed unseal mechanism (using shamir algorithm) to allow machines to boot and decrypt their OS partition.

https://github.com/maulware/maulstuff

maulion Clever uses of pass, the Unix password manager

Hi, great question. Have not seen it being enabled break anything so far (only some cross user invouse written process monitoring scripts). Linux has a flag for this for the /proc mountpoint: hidepid=2

maulion Clever uses of pass, the Unix password manager

For the curl command though written like it won't show up in history, this will still show up in process parameters

To fix this as well pass it into curl as a config via eg: curl [...] -K- <<< "--header auth:$(pass mysecret)"

maulion Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?

I went from checking my spam folder, to creating a filter rule that moves all spam into the inbox. The filter is adding a label, so I can identify them, but still have them all visible for normal congestion.

Fun fact: from time to time I still have mails in my spamfolder... seems the filter does not always get applied.

maulion Do nothing (2020)

Nice idea coming to my mind reading your problem: time based growing circle visibility

The person's close cycle is seeing the post first, then his team, then sub-org, until everyone has it on the news feed.

Poster can choose to pause/stop the growth. Peiple getting the link are able to view all details, but do not immidiatelly have it on their timeline.

maulion Leaky pipes can be better for moving water

My highly uneducated guess on this would be that the water molecules moving up are cooling down a tiny little bit.

Being cooler would then be making it unable for them to climb further when a certain threshold is reached, meaning they would need the surrounding environment to heat it up a little again to allow it to move further.

maulion Duolingo S-1

I am currently using duo, anki, some textbooks and on-site courses with small groups (<10).

What apps are you using, for eg. grammar?

maulion Lessons from the use of personal knowledge questions at Google (2015) [pdf]

For cases where the questions are used by automation, it's okay. Not so much when humans come into play, that can be social engineered: A friend called his bank for something. They verified his idenitiy, him answering to 'what was your first pet's name' with: The answer is random letters, numers and symbols. He was verified to be the owner, not having actually told the support person a single matching character.

For those cases, generators for random answers that read legit would be better. I started putting in random word sentences like 'DoYouHaveAPetCalledPeter', stored in pwdstore metadata to the accounts.

maulion Indoor CO2 could cut our capacity for complex, strategic thinking: study

Have been using and giving away as gifts "TFA Dostmann AirCO2ntrol Mini CO2-Monitor" devices. Costs around 70 bucks. And sensor values are accessible over its usb data lane fairly easy (there are some python implementations out).

maulion Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed?

I came across more bird scare devices [0] lately and most are at ~19-23kHz at -20~30dB (personal measures, device ranges differ). I can hear them and it hurts. Fortunarely they are mainly only deployed near entrances and do not have a broad field of effect. Would be interesting to know how many people do not hear this and feel kinda weird/sick while standing at those places for a longer period of time.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Ultrasonic_scare...

maulion Xen Security Advisory: Information leak via crafted user-supplied CDROM

> Does this have to be a physical CDROM or could a crafted ISO upload exploit the bug? Are cloud providers that allow uploading custom images affected by this?

From the article:

> Only x86 HVM guests with a virtual CDROM device are affected. ARM guests, x86 PV guests, x86 PVH guests, and x86 HVM guests without a virtual CDROM device are not affected.

maulion A Golden Key Encryption Law

unfortunately even goverments are not able to secure the private key part sufficient enough. Adding the risk of outdated devices with compromised keys would be catastrophic and force everyone to buy newer overpriced hardware, without in the end adding anything to our privacy anymore.