Hacker News: mixmastamyk

New comment by mixmastamyk in "28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days"

mixmastamyk — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:53:02 +0000

Correct, and don't complain about it or you will be lightly punished by the mods.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts"

mixmastamyk — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:11:53 +0000

It's a gorgeous park in a place with very little space left. ILM already takes up some of its space. That's probably enough reason.

Need to leave some room for Starfleet Academy as well. Anyway I'm glad it came to Exposition park, which needed some love.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "What It's Like to Work in One of America's Data Centers"

mixmastamyk — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:28:04 +0000

Sounds like AC and airflow does not remove it?

New comment by mixmastamyk in "What happened to the Snowden archive"

mixmastamyk — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:01:35 +0000

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Believe here that all the tech was available by y2k and security was even worse than now. Just needed the funding and a willingness to break the law, which the govt had in abundance after 2001.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to"

mixmastamyk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:47:16 +0000

Yes, I don't feel like the top comments have actually read it. It was a bit too long unfortunately. They seem to be discussing their own ideas on FOSS funding.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "What happened to the Snowden archive"

mixmastamyk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:39:59 +0000

I don't think the compute/indexing were extraordinary, what may have been was the storage required. There was a large NSA facility built for purpose early in the century, and the cost of storage dropped significantly at the time.

Google had already demonstrated such a system by the late 90s, using off the shelf technology.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "What happened to the Snowden archive"

mixmastamyk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:19:25 +0000

I wasn't there and have never had a security clearance. But I doubt Dick Cheney would have been satisfied with a non-functional query system during the war on terror, many years after giving direct orders to build one. Yes, I believe they were active.

I highly recommend the documentary "The United States of Secrets" by PBS Frontline, it digs into this time period and government motivations after 9/11. Usually free on Kanopy.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "What happened to the Snowden archive"

mixmastamyk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:56:23 +0000

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

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

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

The first one existed from the 90s. The second was built in response to 9-11, removing privacy protections early 2000s. The third is an interface for searching. As far as I know no one tried to deny XKeyscore exists, then or now.

Snowden built none of these. His document retrieval system allowed him to find out that the programs above were not following the law.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "What happened to the Snowden archive"

mixmastamyk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:48:28 +0000

There's this weird dichotomy where people think the folks that work in government are either evil geniuses or drooling cavemen. They are neither. I assure you that the NSA (with unlimited funding) is capable of running a MySQL cluster to index email and keep it up, most of the time anyway.

Also, Snowden didn't build the query system, he just used it. He built a document gathering system, which I described in my other response. These are different services.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "What happened to the Snowden archive"

mixmastamyk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:41:38 +0000

Sysadmin with root who does some scripting. From memory it was something like a number of cron jobs to download from rss-like feeds to a central location, and maybe index them too. Show results on a web page.

Until that time it was difficult to get updates and folks were out of touch because info was too compartmentalized. Later something made him take a peek above his clearance, as the data was there.

He explained it in detail in the book Permanent Record, which is available at the library and/or ingested into a model by now.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "What happened to the Snowden archive"

mixmastamyk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:51:52 +0000

He was a sysadmin who built a system that gathered the documents. Why do you think that SQL is not capable of searching email? Also an anonymizing system already existed before 2001. The safeguards were dropped afterwards.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "The senior engineer death spiral"

mixmastamyk — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:59:52 +0000

Did good work, but haven’t had any since the last contract ended two years ago. What would you suggest?

New comment by mixmastamyk in "Ask HN: How to recover Google auth after phone stolen?"

mixmastamyk — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:52:06 +0000

Does your browser have the email password saved?

New comment by mixmastamyk in "The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve"

mixmastamyk — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:42:36 +0000

I don't know, the article mentions having to deal with brine. Let it evaporate in a pool and you've got plenty.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "Homebrew 7.0.0"

mixmastamyk — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:32:21 +0000

Per unit costs are pretty low, and old Intel gear particularly energy guzzling.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils"

mixmastamyk — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:17:07 +0000

I did, and the original dev of the component fixed it within a few days. It was straightforward, a backwards reading of a spec, reordered.

The fix is still sitting unmerged many months later.

This surprised me since I thought the project was in heavy bugfix/compat mode. I won’t touch it until I see some velocity on open bugs.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "Ask HN: In The Matrix, the bad guys are the 'agents'. Coincidence? Clairvoyance?"

mixmastamyk — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:26:42 +0000

Fights for the user and against the MCP!

New comment by mixmastamyk in "Homebrew 7.0.0"

mixmastamyk — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:47:36 +0000

Electronics recycling exists, plus a few dollars for the aluminum case.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "Homebrew 7.0.0"

mixmastamyk — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:45:43 +0000

In general I agree, but recycling old power hungry gear may be better for the environment in the long term.

New comment by mixmastamyk in "Data collected by cars and sold to third parties"

mixmastamyk — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:28:42 +0000

Cable ISPs such as Spectrum sell capacity on their customers routers for such situations, including ‘smart’ appliances.