Hacker News: yabones

New comment by yabones in "Sorry, I'm in a meeting"

yabones — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:26:29 +0000

Takes me back. I remember there was a version of the fake Windows 8 update sequence that had it infinitely loop between "Working on updates..." and the frowny-face :( BSOD

New comment by yabones in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead"

yabones — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:16:24 +0000

An all-in-one solution would be far too heavy. Splitting the tasks up makes a lot of sense. Having all the equipment onboard to drill cores, quickly analyze them, decide if they're worth keeping, and then putting samples in containers is enough work for one rover.

* Storing all the samples onboard means a larger and heavier rover

* Mass budget squeeze means no more helicopter

* The return requires a ground launch from mars, so no more SkyCrane delivery system

New comment by yabones in "Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA"

yabones — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:31:46 +0000

It's super common and very useful for security systems to work like this. Instead of putting something in-line that might choke on a burst of traffic you put it off to the side and send it a firehose of packets it may or may not be able to handle. If it falls over, no problem.

Grafana – GeoMap Carto Base layer now requires API key

yabones — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:37:53 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/131638

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478278

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by yabones in "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI"

yabones — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:49:52 +0000

Until 2023 I ran our on-prem Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc etc. I had an ancient 6c/6t box with about 24G of memory, and a couple 10K drives & 500G SSDs. It was fast, responsive, rock solid, and LDAP had everybody's accounts synced perfectly.

Then they strong-armed everybody but the largest enterprises onto their cloud. The alternative was painful (exporting/munging/importing to an alternative) so most of us went along for the ride. It took less than a year for them to start enshittifying their core product. Now it's basically unrecognizable from the product we used on-prem only three years ago.

I'll always be salty that my box of spare parts was superior to their cloud service in nearly every way.

New comment by yabones in "Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot"

yabones — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:51:14 +0000

Every server with port 80/443 open has thousands of hits a day from random boxes looking for wordpress login pages. The only new thing is that they're pretending to be a different type of annoying bot. There's a new layer of sophistication and subterfuge, but it's the same junk traffic we've always dealt with.

New comment by yabones in "Show HN: How far do I have to go to run into 100k people?"

yabones — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:24:57 +0000

Indeed, it doesn't seem to think that the fairly large cities of Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, and Thunder Bay have a population of approximately zero. Anywhere in northern Montana has the "beam" shoot all the way over to Maine before reaching 100K, which isn't quite right since it passes through a couple medium Canadian cities and dozens of prairie towns.

I think this tool would be much more interesting in the western US if they had incorporated Canadian census data as well.

New comment by yabones in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

yabones — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:36:33 +0000

Lots of people didn't invest in mortgage backed securities but still got screwed in 2008. When something is systemic, you don't have to be directly exposed to be effected when it goes sideways.

New comment by yabones in "The World's 2,400 Castles"

yabones — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:50:36 +0000

It's probably somewhat regional, as the ones in Canada seem to have pretty good tourism interest, especially when they're right inside a city like Quebec and Halifax.

But we're also very starved for true "Medieval Castles" like Europe or east Asia, so we take what we can get!

New comment by yabones in "Map of the world's great castles and fortresses"

yabones — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:31:17 +0000

Not sure if they count, but the site appears to be missing loads of British star-forts built around the great lakes, st. lawrence, and eastern Canada!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_Hill_(Fort_George)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Island_(Nova_Scotia)

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

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

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

They built these things _everywhere_, probably a good part of what bankrupted the British Empire!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Charlotte_(Nassau)

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

New comment by yabones in "Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode"

yabones — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:25:01 +0000

Looks like its started to publish new imagery again! I'm sure those fellows are relieved to have it working... I can't imagine the stress of trying to debug something that far away and unreachable!

https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/sector_band.php?sat=G1...

Goes-19 weather satellite enters Safe Hold mode

yabones — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:30:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.spaceweather.gov/news/goes-19-safe-hold

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48934286

Points: 178

# Comments: 92

New comment by yabones in "How we can reduce traffic congestion"

yabones — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:13:55 +0000

It once made me exit the highway, using the nearly empty exit ramp, then do a U-turn on the surface street and get back using the lightly used entrance ramp. Wow, all that effort to move about 250m forward in traffic, saving me perhaps 30 seconds of time on my 3 hour drive. Very "over-optimized" software does bizarre stuff that no sane person would ever do.

New comment by yabones in "An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop"

yabones — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:46:20 +0000

There's likely an "updater service" that runs with elevated privs that's used for all kinds of other nasty stuff. Windows task scheduler is full of stuff like this if you know where to look, and plenty of hidden services on Macos.

The problem is that there haven't been good enough native ways to do updates & maintenance on installed applications, at least in the past, so this type of stuff became acceptable and commonplace.

New comment by yabones in "Tenda firmware (multiple versions) contains hidden authentication backdoor"

yabones — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:57:13 +0000

You can use basically any hardware. I've done it with trash-picked laptops and USB ethernet adapters. Best option these days is a N100/N150 mini-pc with multiple NICs onboard, but with the price of everything going up maybe trashpicking will make a return.

https://nbailey.ca/post/router

New comment by yabones in "Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor"

yabones — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:26:56 +0000

I don't see the issue with dry cask storage medium term, and deep geological storage long term. Spent fuel isn't really that dangerous once it's been cooled down and for a couple decades before putting it in the ground, to the point that there are far more dangerous natural things you can dig up.

What concerns me is that 250 years of fossil fuel energy continues to store its waste products in my lungs and the water I drink. That's the issue we need to solve with urgency.

New comment by yabones in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

yabones — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:00:32 +0000

This issue here isn't surveillance as per a signed warrant. I don't think anybody's really arguing against that.

The problem is mass data collection without suspicion, probable cause, or warrants whatsoever. That's a brand new thing, other than the places in the world unfortunate enough to have roving gangs of police going door to door and searching homes without warrants. This facilitates it on a scale that's never really been seen before in human history.

New comment by yabones in "ICE Appears to Be Buying Immigrants' Tax Identifiers from a Data Broker"

yabones — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:41:20 +0000

While there might be some benefit, most of them are snakeoil. Effectively they're just sending polite emails to "people search" websites to remove you from search results. The real, very harmful, data brokers are background check systems (LexisNexis), credit bureaus (Equifax), and insurance industry registries, which there is effectively no way to opt-out short of faking your death.

New comment by yabones in "Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything"

yabones — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:44:02 +0000

Obviously "physical access is full access", but it's shockingly easy to break into a Windows box if you have access to the unencrypted drive. I learned with I was a teenager how to use the recovery partition to mount the C: drive, then copy "cmd.exe" to "utilman.exe" or "sethc.exe" and get an instant root shell on the login page. Takes about 2-3 minutes, can be done in the time somebody leaves their laptop to go to the bathroom at Starbucks.

To me that's the main thing about disk encryption, it's to stop a nasty rootkit from being installed trivially as much as it is about stopping the guy at the pawn shop from getting your tax info. Whether you're on macos, linux, or windows, it's really quite easy to fully compromise a machine if you have hands on it.

New comment by yabones in "Car headlights don't have to be this blinding"

yabones — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:07:40 +0000

I do this on long drives, but always have to put it back to normal when it's time to park. It would be neat if cars would implement some sort of automatic switch between this configuration and the straight-back mode when reversing.