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I don't get it, what is this supposed to be? Another drag and drop? I am failing to understand the uniqueness of this.

Also, if you put the cup on the tape and try to move the tape, the cup removes itself.


Open the notebook and flip through it. Drink the coffee (drag the mug downwards). Put the floppy in the device. Put the VHS tape in the device.

I first tried to shake the coffee to see if I could make a mess, didn't work. When the mug is empty, the github logo becomes visible and you can click through to the github repo.

That's an illustration of the difficulties. I got the disk, video dvd and even drank the coffee but I initially thought the notebook was some sort of box for the video so didn't realise you could open it to read!

I think that's on purpose/by design, so that users are nudged into exploring. Things like these were pretty common in adventure games back in the days, which I probably spent too much time on playing...

How do you open the notebook?

I can drag it around, no problem. The cursor also changes to a pointy hand when over notebook's right side, but clicking doesn't do anything. Nor does click-and-hold-then-dragging.


Clicking on the right side (pointy hand) worked for me.

Drag the floppy to the console and you'll get a download link for the tool.

That was very touchy for me; it took 4 or 5 goes to get the floppy in, at least. The tape worked easily. (I didn't see the floppy or notebook being able to do anything)

Got so far, but what does the tool do?

It looks like it's some sort of game-playing AI?:

> Automat's objective is to be able to semi-autonomously play a variety of games. It's the first step towards a more general environment for interacting with computers.

That's not what I got from the notebook, though. From the notebook, I thought it was some sort of new programming paradigm, so I'm confused.


It’s like a mini myst puzzle as an way of consuming content

"Automat's objective is to be able to semi-autonomously play a variety of games. It's the first step towards a more general environment for interacting with computers."

If you have no intent to use it longer, please do let me know. I am always looking for machines, books etc to give to my former high school in southern Africa. I'm in the US and can get it shipped

Interesting. What does number 5 do?

Also, how do gzip bombs works, does it automatically extract to the 20gb or the bot has to initiate the extraction?


> Interesting. What does number 5 do?

LLMs that are implemented in a manner like this to offer web scraping capabilities usually try to replace web scraper interaction with the website in a programmable manner. There's bunch of different wordings of prompts, of course, depending on the service. But the idea is that you as a being-scraped-to-death server learn to know what people are scraping your website for in regards to the keywords. This way you at least learn something about the reason why you are being scraped, and can manage/adapt accordingly on your website's structure and sitemap.

> how do gzip bombs works, does it automatically extract to the 20gb or the bot has to initiate the extraction?

The point behind it is that it's unlikely that script kiddies wrote their own HTTP parser that detects gzip bombs, and are reusing a tech stack or library that's made for the task at hand, e.g. python's libsoup to parse content, or go's net/http, or php's curl bindings etc.

A nested gzip bomb has the effect that it targets both the client and the proxy in between, whereas the proxy (targeted via Transfer-Encoding) has to unpack around ~2ish GB of memory until it can process the request, and parse the content to serve it to its client. The client (targeted via Content-Encoding) has to unpack ~20GB of gzip into memory before it can process the content, realizing that it's basically only null bytes.

The idea is that a script kiddie's scraper script won't account for this, and in the process DDoS the proxy, which in return will block the client for violations of ToS of that web scraping / residential IP range provider.

The awesome part behind gzip is that the size of the final container / gzip bomb is varying, meaning that the null bytes length can just be increased by say, 10GB + 1 byte, for example, and make it undetectable again. In my case I have just 100 different ~100kB files laying around on the filesystem that I serve in a randomized manner and that I serve directly from filesystem cache to not need CPU time for the generation.

You can actually go further and use Transfer-Encoding: chunked in other languages that allow parallelization via processes, goroutines or threads, and have nested nested nested gzip bombs with various byte sizes so they're undetectable until concated together on the other side :)


Yes, it requires the client to try and extract the archive; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb is the generic description.


What archive? The idea was to use Transfer-Encoding: gzip, which means the compression is a transparent part of the HTTP request which the client HTTP library will automatically try to extract.


Unless I misunderstood, there was a gzip transfer encoded gzip.

The transfer-encoding means that the proxy has to decompress a 200kb request into a 2Gb response to the client, and the client will receive a 2Gb file that will expand to 20Gb.

Small VM gets knocked offline and the proxy gets grumpy with the client for large file transfers.


> Unless I misunderstood, there was a gzip transfer encoded gzip.

Yes, correct. A gzip bomb inside a gzip bomb that contains only null bytes, because it's much larger on the client side when unpacked.

A "normal" gzip bomb that would only leverage "Content-Encoding: gzip" or only "Transfer-Encoding: gzip" isn't really good as for compression ratio, because the sent file is in the megabytes range (I think it was around 4MBish when I tried with gzip -9?). I don't wanna send megabytes in response to clients, because that would be a potential DoS.

edit: also note the sibling comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923635#41936586


I'm using "archive" as a generic term for gzip/zip/etc.

But that's a good point; I'd not considered that if you compress the HTTP response it'll almost certainly get automatically extracted which "detonates" the (g)zip bomb.


Most HTTP libraries would happily extract the result for you. [citation needed]


Java class java.net.http.HttpClient

Python package requests

Whatever is the default these days in C#

Honestly, I have never used a modern HTTP client library that does not automatically decompress.

I guess libCurl might be a case where you need to add an option to force decompress.


The article is about the internal storage mechanics of ClickHouse and how it optimizes handling JSON data behind the scenes. The data types like Dynamic and Variant that are discussed are part of ClickHouse’s internal mechanisms to improve performance, specifically for columnar storage of JSON data. The optimizations just help ClickHouse process and store data more efficiently.

The data remains standard JSON and so standard JSON parsers wouldn’t be affected since the optimizations are part of the storage layer and not the JSON structure itself.


> The data remains standard JSON and so standard JSON parsers wouldn’t be affected (...)

No, not really.

The blog post talks about storing JSON data in a column-oriented database.

The blog post talks about importing data from JSON docs into their database. Prior to this, they stored JSON documents in their database like any standard off-the-shelf database does. Now they parse the JSON document when importing, and they store those values in their column-oriented database as key-value pairs, and preserve type information.

The silly part is that this all sounds like a intern project who was tasked with adding support to import data stored in JSON files into a column-oriented database, and an exporter along with it. But no, it seems an ETL job now counts as inventing JSON.


Full discussion with Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz today here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKspo1FLj-4


What do you mean? As long as people inspect what they are transporting or only take things delivered to them directly from merchants, I don't see how this would be a problem.

In fact, there is a whole class of travellers in some parts of the world now called runners who do this


How would you inspect it? I don’t think you have a good chance of finding hidden drugs, but the airport might. So there’s a risk that you missed it but their dog will find it, and you’ll be on the hook.


The runners i am referring to either receive orders from merchants like Amazon or Apple then bring them for people, or they buy the items themselves once you give them for the items you want. That way, they minimize risk. If I am not mistaken, if you want to send things like documents, you have to courier with an official courier like FedEx, UPS or DHL then you have to allow them to open the envelop to ensure it is only what is listed then they transport from there.

By the way, this service for travel between countries. So people who want things from the US, Dubai or other large shopping destinations and when it is the reverse direction, where people in the large countries want things from back home countries like certain foods, ornaments etc, then they have to give the runner the money and the runner makes the purchase.


I expect it to make a huge difference if you go out of your way to say at the earliest opportunity : "I am (also) a courier, please check this item (that doesn't belong to me)."

Not doing it would be reckless of course.


> So there’s a risk that you missed it but their dog will find it, and you’ll be on the hook.

No problem - you have a paper trail showing where you got it, that you were unaware of what was in it, and that you were not allowed to inspect it.


Literally every check-in form I've been through had some required checkboxes to declare that you've packed your luggage yourself, have complete awareness of what's in there, and claim responsibility for such items. There are also countless, very visible, posters in airports saying so. Your paper trail might be useful to law enforcement in prosecuting the people who handed you the no-no stuff, but it doesn't absolve you of any responsibility.

Anecdotally, I once had an outrageously difficult time explaining to a German customs officer that the bag I placed in the scanner had items belonging to both my sister and myself. It didn't help that we were travelling together, and she was also there to back my statements up. He simply would not accept the fact that there was an electronic device (e-book) that belonged to her, in a bag that belonged to me, which we forgot to take out before the scanner.


That's not how the world works. You are responsible for the luggage you are transporting even if it's not yours. The customs do not care and they are not going to try to figure out the laws of the place you came from or get in contact with their authority.


> The customs do not care and they are not going to try to figure out the laws of the place you came from or get in contact with their authority

Yes. They also won't try to 'interpret' their own country's laws, it's above their paygrade. If you aren't doing exactly what they expect, they will hold you (or your passport) and push the issue upstairs.

Source: I had this happen to me when I tried to enter Canada to work on a contract for which I should have had a work permit. My company had given me the paperwork appropriate for a salesperson or conference attendee. The officer at the gate confiscated my passport, told me to come back the next day with the correct paperwork, and threatened me with arrest if I failed to return. Stress and long nights ensued.


Yeah, and if the perpetrators have disappeared, the authorities aren't going to say "Oh well, they disappeared, let's hunt them.", but they'll drag the mule into court instead...


Depends on the country, I wouldn’t try it myself. And I’m pretty sure „well I wasn’t even allowed to inspect my luggage, i have it on paper“ isn’t a good defense, because then you shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. If you bring something onto a plane, it’s your responsibility. If you don’t know what it is, don’t take it.


Don’t bother. This “I’m the main character, change my mind on this thing” culture has become rampant and exhausting. Smile, nod, move on.


Could you tell us please who has “I’m the main character” mindset in this discussion?


The person starting their response as “No problem …” is our main character with all the answers.


I don't think they censor anything, strictly archiving. Do you know of any instance in which they censored a site?


I take it you’ve never encountered the dreaded message, “The item is not available due to issues with the item's content”?

There was a news item here on HN about something available on the Internet Archive: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16725526> This is now gone from IA. Old page with links to IA which are no longer working: <https://web.archive.org/web/20180331224513/http://profileeng...>


http://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/twitter.com/taylo...

For one. I'm just curious what their policy is.


The law trumps their policy, to be blunt. They can't afford legal disputes so complying is the best thing they can do. They're still involved in legal shit for "giving away" ebooks too easily during the pandemic.


I only know what I just read on wikipedia about her, but it seems like she has been heavily doxxed — I'm guessing she requested this information about herself be excluded? If so, I'm not sure I'd classify that as censorship.


It's her own tweets, not dox.


Not dox but I was thinking there could be old materials in there that people were using to dox her. Idk, why else would they remove it?



Kiwi farms


There are people that maintain "non-public archives" of stuff like that for litigation, long-term archival storage (think sealed boxes intended for future generations of historians. (Libraries, laywers, journalists can run their own WebRecorder, Perma.cc, ArchiveBox, etc. instances)

I think that's a reasonable middle ground, we don't necessarily need every single piece of heinous content mirrored for free access 24/7 the moment it appears anywhere on the internet, as long as there is some historic record somewhere that's probably ok.


Nah, we don't need to archive their targeted harassment.


good


An argument can be made that they should retain a copy for future lawsuits / investigations, but... kiwi farms won't have anything public, and I hope that law enforcement has their private archive where they gather everything.


lol. 24/7 heat and electricity are not life and death situations. There are billions of people who live without either everyday


For someone with an oxygen machine, yes it is. Many of those billions just don't have the option for this, they would end up committed to a hospital or dying because the treatment would never be seen as viable.

And now that I say it: hospitals need electricians too. Electricity goes out in a hospital for too long, lots of people die.

And actually a third point: electricity -going out- is not the only thing that could kill a client, it's not too hard to start a fire.


In North American winter temperatures?


you’re not wrong. But on the other hand, there are events like this. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/03/1069974416/texas-winter-storm...

So at least sometimes, it is life or death.


How do you generate these links? Whenever I try, it says the URL is currently live or something like that.


There are two url inputs, use the other one.


i use this as a bookmark

javascript:location.href='https://archive.is/?run=1&url=%27+encodeURIComponent(documen...


I made a chrome extension that rewrites NY times and a few others with the archive url.


It has to be owned by someone, that does not make it agenda driven. Who would you rather have it owned by so that it is not agenda driven?


It’s not a hypothetical we aren’t assuming spherical cows today. Those specific people have a long and public track record that answers this question.

It’s not a secret, like I said. There are plenty of editors out there who have never decided to concoct ludicrous stories of Al Queda bases in the Amazon to name one example.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/10/28/in-the-party-o...


you still have not answered my question... who should own that you will believe it is impartial?

Should I assume bias and impartiality for your Day One conference simply by who you are and who is behind you? The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, your opinion on that?


My own involvement in media is not impartial and is not intended to be.

My opinion on your question is that Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post to advance his interests, and that the Washington Post indeed has an agenda which is broadly aligned with what’s commonly referred to as “the establishment.”

And absolutely nothing I’m saying is particularly insightful or controversial, it’s obvious at a glance.

As for your original question about who should own media to make it objective, I don’t have the answer to that one.

But I do know that there’s no person with a billion dollars who doesn’t have the agenda of preserving a social order consistent with them being able to continue to enjoy that billion dollars.


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