Hacker News: itintheory

New comment by itintheory in "Civic Hygiene – avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state (2013)"

itintheory — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:39:44 +0000

On the other hand, it may be worth publicly and unambiguously stating a position even if unenforceable. This seems to be what most modern protest movements are based on. For instance, how many software repos "stand with Ukraine", even though they won't make an impact on frontline military reality?

New comment by itintheory in "Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco"

itintheory — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:44:16 +0000

> toeing the line I'm not sure that phrase means what you intended to say here. From Wikipedia, [1]: "Toe the line" is an idiomatic expression meaning either to conform to a rule or standard, or to stand in formation along a line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line

It's possible I misinterpreted your statement though, and if so: apologies.

New comment by itintheory in "AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira"

itintheory — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:50:16 +0000

> You could copy-paste the Jenkins job, but unless you have Jabberwocky v2018.3 installed in /home/JabberWock/RELEASE, the script will fail.

In my experience, containerization resolved this issue. Now you just need to be able to "docker run public.ecr.aws/carroll/jabberwocky:v2018.3 [etc]".

New comment by itintheory in "At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis"

itintheory — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:39:27 +0000

Deer ticks are hard to crush too. And I'd say typically closer to the size of a sesame than a poppy seed. I like to pinch them between the tips of two fingernails, but lighting them on fire is also an enjoyable way to end them.

New comment by itintheory in "At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis"

itintheory — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:35:52 +0000

I developed alpha-gal allergy. I've gotten many tick bites over the years, though none from 'lone star' tick afaik. I don't eat meat normally, so it was only a rare chance occasion when I ate something that triggered an allergic reaction: hives all over, tightness in the throat. It wasn't full anaphylaxis though, fortunately. After some research I thought it might be this allergy, but it wasn't until ~12 years later and an encounter with some pork dumplings which led to a similar reaction that I became convinced and got the blood test.

New comment by itintheory in "Show HN: We Implemented the IPv8 Internet-Draft in Linux, Libc, and BGP"

itintheory — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:05:58 +0000

I think those were release years. More like how we went from Windows 8 to 10.

(I understand that the real reason here is either a) OSX went to version 10, so don't want to be behind, or b) many systems would pattern match on windows version 9*" so Windows 9 would be treated as 95/98.)

New comment by itintheory in "We eliminated 1,400 CVEs in NanoClaw's container images"

itintheory — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:41:44 +0000

It's the opposite of NIH syndrome. Need to left pad a string? Just import a library from some rando on the internet!

New comment by itintheory in "Kubernetes on Oxide: How customer needs shaped our integrations"

itintheory — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:40:15 +0000

Does seem like that could be an issue for RWX PVCs, unless those volumes can be mounted to multiple nodes. Depending on the workload, you might be better off using NFS.

New comment by itintheory in "Why Addresses Have Numbers"

itintheory — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:11:06 +0000

I learned about this when standing at the customs counter in San Jose at two in the morning. I had an address for an AirBnB but the address as given didn't come up in google maps, or the system used by customs. They wanted to know where we were staying, and it was a bit of a sticking point. Eventually we were able to whatsapp the host and got a different way of addressing it that worked. Quite a memorable encounter.

New comment by itintheory in "São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest"

itintheory — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:33:41 +0000

I read his book Concrete Botany recently. It also mentions the deep mulch trick mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It's an easy read and a refreshing perspective.

New comment by itintheory in "Deep-sea vehicles spot 'alien' sharks deep beneath the waves in the Pacific"

itintheory — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:26:26 +0000

We sure can do things with nature. for instance, sustain any and all life on our planet. Viewing the natural world purely in an extractive mindset is the very reason we're in the dire mess we're in today.

New comment by itintheory in "Cyberscript"

itintheory — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:17:11 +0000

I'm guessing it's programming language, but I don't think I've seen it abbreviated that way before.

New comment by itintheory in "Google has abandoned Google News?"

itintheory — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:25:38 +0000

Sounds interesting, but 8/10 stories at the top are about local hazardous weather conditions. Maybe those could be filtered out somehow, but I feel like the default should be better...

New comment by itintheory in "The first watch featuring computer functions"

itintheory — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:27:37 +0000

Wearing the new Time 2 right now. It's as good as I remembered. So glad this story came around the way it did.

New comment by itintheory in "Worse on Purpose"

itintheory — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:20:11 +0000

I have two American Giant hoodies. One was a gift. After around 10 months the zipper broke, so they sent me a new one.

I eventually repaired the zipper (and have done the same for the other since). They are high quality and have respectable service. I think they're worth the price. These are probably 7-8 years old now, so things could have changed since then.

New comment by itintheory in "Never Enough"

itintheory — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:46:45 +0000

>Everyone is chasing the person ahead of them

This is part of what turns grasshoppers into locusts. They're attempting not only to eat the insect in front of them, but escape the one behind that is attempting to eat them. I'll leave it up to the reader to complete the metaphor.

New comment by itintheory in "How the FSF sysadmins block botnets with reaction"

itintheory — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:26:16 +0000

> The last time a server was failing to handle the pressure, we decided to temporarily ban IPs from some Asian regions.

This is something we've been forced to do at work, a LOT. Some weeks it's Huawei Cloud, Tencent, and Alibaba. Other weeks it's all China Telecom. We're using Anubis where possible, but a lot of it is just whack-a-mole with residential proxies. I looked at Datadome and HUMAN, but they would be hundreds of thousands a year at our traffic scale, and I suspect may also have false positives. We abandoned CrowdSec for that reason as well.

I'd love to find a decent k8s native solution to this problem.

New comment by itintheory in "Unauthenticated RCE in Motorola's MR2600 Router"

itintheory — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:43:17 +0000

Isn't just as illegal as exploiting them for nefarious purposes? That's a pretty big risk to take to help a few dozen strangers on the Internet. What happens if your fix has an unforeseen interaction with some configuration on a remote system and your actions cause outage or worse?

New comment by itintheory in "Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For"

itintheory — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:27:38 +0000

> the Switch 2 takes carts

I believe the switch 2 carts don't contain the actual game, just a license key. The game is downloaded on first run.

New comment by itintheory in "Pollen tried to remove my article and Google is assisting with it"

itintheory — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:54:23 +0000

Somehow not in the wayback machine or archive.ph. Probably just coincidence.