Hacker News: joshfraser

New comment by joshfraser in "Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead"

joshfraser — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:49:30 +0000

Bet Claude could build that for you in 5 mins

New comment by joshfraser in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

joshfraser — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:47:28 +0000

data centers drive up the cost of power. basic supply and demand.

instead of blocking data centers, we need to scale up energy production. the solution is to get rid of all the red tape that makes it so impossible to build in America.

quality of life metrics are highly correlated to the availability of energy.

New comment by joshfraser in "Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead"

joshfraser — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:40:23 +0000

Just cancel your subscription. Resubscribe for a month if there's something you really want to watch. You won't miss it.

New comment by joshfraser in "Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says"

joshfraser — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:11:18 +0000

It's wild to see how much people allow their dislike for Elon to impact their critical thinking skills. There aren't some mysterious or unknowable stats. They're being constantly collected and shared with regulators and the general public alike.

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/ https://www.tesla.com/fsd/safety

New comment by joshfraser in "Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says"

joshfraser — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:04:42 +0000

They do. https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

"90% fewer serious injury crashes for Waymo vs humans"

I said "self-driving software" because I was trying to avoid eliciting a knee-jerk reaction from all you Elon haters.

New comment by joshfraser in "Tesla has to pay historic $243M judgement over Autopilot crash, judge says"

joshfraser — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 07:00:11 +0000

Sorry, 8x not 10x

https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/tesla-releases-new-fsd-safe...

New comment by joshfraser in "A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine"

joshfraser — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:53:25 +0000

I miss the days when Hacker News would root for startups and brave innovators instead of the stogy old incumbents

New comment by joshfraser in "A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine"

joshfraser — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:45:38 +0000

You're telling us that data centers are more sensitive to downtime than airplanes??? That makes no sense.

All of the aeroderivatives were designed in the 70's before we had computer modeling to help optimize the designs. It's not that crazy to assume that we can design a better and more efficient turbine today with all of the help of modern technology.

New comment by joshfraser in "A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine"

joshfraser — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:40:54 +0000

We have an abundance of natural gas and a shortage of electricity.

New comment by joshfraser in "Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables"

joshfraser — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 07:57:19 +0000

What other options do they have? They've been sanctioned to the point where they have few options left but to turn to crime.

New comment by joshfraser in "Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)"

joshfraser — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 04:23:41 +0000

"creating software for free that largely benefits large corporations"

Who cares. The end result of this is that we all get to use amazing software, often for free.

Think of your open source contributions as a gift to all of humanity. I wouldn't get too hung up on the fact that bad people can use it. Hammer makers don't add conditions on who can buy their products, even if it could be used as a murder weapon. Take solace in the fact that your work is creating far more good than evil.

You're increasing the rate of innovation in the world. And we're all grateful for it.

New comment by joshfraser in "Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server"

joshfraser — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 23:00:56 +0000

I love the convenience of Heroku but hate their predatory pricing. Who's fixing this?

New comment by joshfraser in "Find SF parking cops"

joshfraser — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 03:42:28 +0000

There are a ton of interesting use-cases for public city data. When I was an Airbnb host, I built an early alert system to send me email if my address was ever reported or under investigation. The government moves at a snails pace, so anyone who was paying attention would have plenty of time to cure any issues before any formal investigation was even started. I even had a personal dashboard showing how the enforcement office operated, how many investigators they had, which neighborhoods were getting the most enforcement actions, stats on how cases were resolved, how long they took, etc.

New comment by joshfraser in "Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year"

joshfraser — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:55:55 +0000

I switched from Slack to Discord back in 2017 and I can't imagine ever going back. Their free offering is better than what you get for $$$$ from Slack.

Slack is designed for small groups of people that all know and trust each other. That security model falls apart when you scale to large low-trust organizations. Discord was designed for strangers and offers far more granular controls.

They offer infinite search. Unlimited users. And it's free! Can't recommend it enough.

New comment by joshfraser in "U.S. Government Disclosed 39 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in 2023, First-Ever Report"

joshfraser — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 23:15:58 +0000

Modern software is layers upon layers of open-source packages and libraries written by tens of thousands of unrelated engineers. How do you write a spec for that?

New comment by joshfraser in "U.S. Government Disclosed 39 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in 2023, First-Ever Report"

joshfraser — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 19:04:00 +0000

Yes. Except our government is the largest buyer.

New comment by joshfraser in "U.S. Government Disclosed 39 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in 2023, First-Ever Report"

joshfraser — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 18:58:11 +0000

I've seen the invite-only marketplaces where these exploits are sold. You can buy an exploit to compromise any piece of software or hardware that you can imagine. Many of them go for millions of dollars.

There are known exploits to get root access to every phone or laptop in the world. But researchers won't disclose these to the manufacturers when they can make millions of dollars selling them to governments. Governments won't disclose them because they want to use them to spy on their citizens and foreign adversaries.

The manufacturers prefer to fix these bugs, but aren't usually willing to pay as much as the nation states that are bidding. All they do is drive up the price. Worse, intelligence agencies like the NSA often pressure or incentivize major tech companies to keep zero-days unpatched for exploitation.

It's a really hard problem. There are a bunch of perverse incentives that are putting us all at risk.

New comment by joshfraser in "0-click deanonymization attack targeting Signal, Discord, other platforms"

joshfraser — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 20:06:47 +0000

It's a classic timing attack. You can detect which Cloudflare datacenter is "closest" (ie. least network latency) to a targeted Signal or Discord user.

The speed of light is the main culprit here.

New comment by joshfraser in "DoubleClickjacking: A New type of web hacking technique"

joshfraser — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 22:18:26 +0000

Back in 2013 I discovered that you could use clickjacking to trick someone into buying anything you wanted from Amazon (assuming they were signed in). It took them almost a year to fix the issue. They never paid me a bounty.

https://onlineaspect.com/2014/06/06/clickjacking-amazon-com/

New comment by joshfraser in "DoubleClickjacking: A New type of web hacking technique"

joshfraser — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 22:10:44 +0000

You can change the visibility of the target page so they wouldn't know