skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's just a matter of knowing your battery's power management firmware. You can overload the power control circuits that pagers or smartphones by creating a massive surge (sending signals to the IGBT drivers) that will cause the battery to explode. If the battery is moderately charged, the explosion is devastating. Hacker teams from the notorious Israeli ShinBet know of many bugs of this type.
afaict it uses https://github.com/r0x0r/pywebview under the hood (so yes, cross-platform)
I find these projects very interesting as ideas but never ever suitable for any serious purpose. Not even for my personal website or blog. As soon as you approach the boundary of what the project provides, you are completely on your own. Also, unlike "established" projects, they may stop being maintained at any point. That's the reality.
They 100% had a explosive added inside. Batteries cannot explode like that.
Always solid advice. Still, I updated a sacrificial laptop to the public beta on day 1 and it’s been one of the most boring-in-a-good-way releases in a while. Save for things like Rogue Amoeba having to update their software to a new API, which is an annual tradition, I honestly don’t recall anything that didn’t work from the start.
How to succeed in Mr Beast production [pdf]
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41567573
His lyrics are prophetic but somehow he always plays the exact opposite note than one might expect.
"Intelligence agency intercepts batch of pagers and swaps out the internals" seems the most likely.

If the footage on Twitter is legit, there was something more explosive than a battery inside those pagers.
Oops! We tested the Oauth flow but forgot to update the email one. Thanks for the heads up, fixing this now.
These frameworks are cute, and I understand the desire to avoid the modern SPA JavaScript build systems, but it always seems like so much more work than just writing HTML.

I swear, HTML/CSS + Flask + HTMX gets you so far these days. Then, you can throw in some AlpineJS for any inter-element interaction you need and build a responsive SPA without almost any JavaScript.
This doesn't seem to work for me in any browser. No sound.
newer reports saying 1000s not 100s

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/17/middle-ea...
Just as a reminder, the LTS releases are 8, 11, 17, 21 (released September 2023), and forthcoming 25 (September 2025):

* https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java-se-support-roa...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history
That's enough to vaporise about 100 g of water according my back of the envelope calculations. Overkill? Or is modified for an entirely different purpose?
I love

https://openjdk.org/jeps/482

as being forced to call super() first thing in constructors was an annoyance to me when I was coding Java before JDK 1.0.
There's no way the little battery in a pager has enough energy to do this. This is a 'supply chain attack' by the Israelis. An ingenious one at that.
Secure Boot-neutering PKfail debacle is more prevalent than anyone knew
TwitterCopilot-Generate comments automatically with ChatGPT in various styles
What is TwitterCopilot?
TwitterCopilot leverages the power of ChatGPT to analyze tweet content and generate comments tailored to your chosen style and attitude. Its hidden gem—multilingual comment generation—allows you to effortlessly engage with a global audience. Whether you’re managing a brand, providing customer service, or running an international campaign, TwitterCopilot is designed to meet your needs with precision and ease.

Key Features of TwitterCopilot
1.Multilingual Comment Generation: Automatically generate comments in multiple languages to engage with a global audience.
2.Intelligent Text Extraction: Extracts text from the screen and processes it using ChatGPT for comprehensive understanding.
3. Customizable Comment Styles: Choose from predefined styles or create your own to match your preferred tone and style.
4. Advanced ChatGPT Models: Use the GPT-4o-mini model for general use or the GPT-4o model with visual capabilities for advanced processing.
I completed PhD in the top 5 CS programs in the world.

One of my first meetings to present my topic to my thesis committee had a leader in my field (a world-wide expert in the field and one of the founding fathers that particular area) say: "This idea is bullshit and I can't even bother to tell you why" That was the only thing he said.

Of course, I defended PhD on the same subject 4 years later and other leading scientist and his competitor said the idea was brilliant :D
So either this was planned long enough ago to replace a large number of devices over time, or communication about a larger order has been provided to the enemy and fulfilled without suspicion. Either way, that sounds like a crazy infiltration effort.

Also, we can assume that anything sent to those pagers so far has been forwarded to Israel and now that channel is burned, right?
Exactly! Those damn immigrants who come here and leach on the system while accepting a stipend and going home! While they take our jobs and leech off of unemployment benefits!
They refuse to integrate and steal our woman!

How do they do it? They just do it!
Another rather unconventional way to do this, though it can be powerful, is to combine GraalPython, JavaFX and jpro.one:

https://www.jpro.one

The primary advantage is that the built in set of components is pretty powerful (e.g. a real table view), everything runs server side, the Python can be JIT compiled, and from the user's POV it still feels like a web app (e.g. zoom is respected). You can "shell out" to Javascript if needed, you can use Java libraries. The JPro website is itself a JavaFX app running as a web app. Also there's a visual UI builder that's decent (and free).

Primary downside beyond just the obscurity of the stack (same problem as for Rio), is just that JPro is a commercial solution. But then you get commercial support and bug fixes in case you need something special or hit an obscure rendering case.
> Then there’s spooky shit like:
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_electron

From the article:

> However, Carter's calculations also show that a would-be black hole with these parameters would be "super-extremal". Thus, unlike a true black hole, this object would display a naked singularity, meaning a singularity in spacetime not hidden behind an event horizon. It would also give rise to closed timelike curves.

I wonder if there's a fun sci-fi story in the discovery that all electrons are in fact naked singularities.
Israel infiltrated the supply chain and inserted a bomb into the device configured to be detonated 3 seconds after a specific message is received. Then they waited x months and sent the page.
Ten Years of Six Colors
I was today years old when I found out about Quote Investigator :-)
> In looking at roost networks of bank swallows in Ontario you can identify that, “Oh, some bank swallows at night are actually going to different roosts from where their babies are,” and the adults will often trade off. We don’t know why, but they will sort of wander around and travel a hundred or more kilometers to a different place between nights.

That is actually pretty surprising to me. The weirdest insight from animal trackers I’d previously heard was kind of similar—that wolves regularly travel a lot further than scientists would have expected—but trading off roosts is a whole different level.
Sadly, Google (Gemini) is aware of the quote, and does not provide an unbiased determination as to whether four seconds is enough to hot up the disintegrator.
If the description of "exploding" and "tearing [a] bag to shreds" are accurate then it has to be a physical modification of the pagers, lithium ion batteries don't explode with a lot of force when they go up.
Predator spyware kingpins added to US sanctions list
Ah yes, the Mossad / Non Mossad threat model :). Classic.
Interesting seeing some similar ideas percolating through different languages and platforms.

Some of the proposals/in-progress features look very similar to features rolled out in C# over the last 3-4 years.
Hey, Rio dev here. Love to see us on Hackernews <3

Rio comes with its own set of debug tools, so I don't see debugging as a problem. Our components even explain their entire layouting flow, so I'd argue debugging Rio layout is much easer than CSS :P

For example, here's an excerpt of what the built-in dev-tools have to say about a button in one of my apps:

> The component was allocated a width of 104.0 by its parent MyRoot. Due to align_x being set, the Button only takes up the minimum amount of space necessary and is centered in the available space.
>If you want change you need to fight for it, physically with violent force, otherwise you'll be at the mercy of the "free market" which may or may not be in your favor depending how the wind blows. Perks aren't just gonna fall out of the sky for the working class, ever. The covid years were a fluke.

Which I think is very unfortunate, because working from home is a huge benefit to people who want to, while not being an actual cost to employers (in my opinion, not in theirs).

The part I'm struggling to understand, and please be honest here, is you almost sound a little smug that people are being made to return to the office. Maybe you have a good reason for that, or maybe I'm misreading your tone?
I’ve learned that when we I feel like my production code is cool or exceptionally clever, I’m doing too much of something or making too many assumptions
The initial premise is that the universe/nature imposes a requirement upon you to sustain life. Nature can not be a forceful actor by virtue of not being an actor.

Same problem with several of the replies sibling to yours.
Backed by YC = Not open source. Eventually pressure to exit and hyper scale will take over.
The reports right now are that these were ordinary pagers and that some sort of software attack overloaded the batteries and caused them to explode.

But I work lithium batteries. I've overloaded lithium batteries before and let them explode for safety testing. The videos released of these things exploding on people doesn't look anything like what I would expect, especially not from something as small as a pager battery. You would need to seal lithium batteries in a metal tube or something to cause that kind of explosion.

I highly suspect that this was a supply chain attack, and that there's a high explosive charge hidden in these things, with some sort of radio backdoor that allows them to be detonated by whoever controls these things.
It injects exhaust. Burned fuel air with NOx, CO, CO2, and very little oxygen. It does this to lower in cylinder combustion temp and reduce the formation of NOx. Less oxygen in the cylinder means less temp which means less power. That is just a fact, it’s thermodynamic law, you literally can’t dispute it.

The only Motorsport engines built for full throttle only are drag and pull engines, but where I race throttle response and the whole torque curve from 8,000 to 16,500 RPM is incredibly important. Find me an EGR system on any purpose built engine that didn’t have to comply with emissions. Industrial engines, race engines, tractors, generators… anything. That should illuminate what EGR is actually for.
The upper class is thickening faster than the lower class though so technically social mobility is high.
It’s a good idea! For some reason Postico’s built-in query viewer doesn’t seem to follow them, unfortunately.
AI App Starter: build AI apps in minutes, serve from anywhere
Hi HN,

I've been trying to simplify the process of building an AI app. I noticed that people love creating GPTs and custom chatbots on various platforms, but your customization options there are limited and creations aren't highly accessible, portable or monetizable. By leveraging Key Trustee and NLUX you can have a functional chatbot application that's just a standard React client you can deploy to GitHub pages by changing one line of code.

I'd love to chat about features I can bake in to help you build useful AI applications quickly! I'm planning to integrate in-browser RAG with lunr so you'll be able to just dump documents in a folder in the client and they'll automatically be included and used for RAG queries.
I immediately thought of your work when reading your comment... And it turns out It's actually you. Nice!

I'm currently going through the CLI tutorials. No ebooks for the time being, as I'm just broke right know. Thanks for all the content. Keep it up!

Edit: typo.
Was going to ask how common pagers were, but suppose still used by emergency services etc and especially in warzones of questionable cell network reliability
this is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. Everyone should go read it now!
The AI Research Assistant You've Been Dreaming Of
Can you share a link to the Twitter post? If it's graphic, please mention so.
Assuming a lithium battery and control over the firmware+power draw, couldn't you theoretically make the battery output more charge than safe, leading to at least overheating and maybe more?

I also find it unlikely this was just a remote attack rather than supply chain, but with little to no details we can only assume for now.
I think "fact checking" has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of many people — and journalism in general. You can't convince people that something is objective when it has an obvious bias.

Think of The Washinton Post's absurd "fact check" of Bernie Sanders. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bernie-s...

Granted, we know that some beliefs are incredibly resistant to contradicting evidence, and can even result in people doubling-down (e.g., anti-vax). (Ironically, I don't have a citation for this at hand.)
Hiring Lab Data Portal
First, nice work. I'm certainly glad to see such a tool in this space right now. Besides a UI, what does this provide that something like Browserless doesn't?
China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft
netstat -an ?
YouTube's founder mode, according to MrBeast
> They are more likely to attend meetings ... give status updates, etc.

Weird. If I missed meetings and failed to give status updates (especially ones where my update was explicitly requested) my manager would go find out what the fuck was wrong with me.

> If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.

After more than four years of most software folks doing remote work, if your team hasn't established a solid protocol for doing IMs, voice/video chats, and email communications then your management has been fucking off and management deserves all the remote-communications failures they're getting. So, for the rest of this discussion let's assume that management hasn't been fucking off and you actually have a solid communications protocol.

If a coworker is regularly blowing off messages, then that's something that their manager NEEDS to know about. (And it's likely that if they're blowing off messages, they'd also be fucking off if their ass was in a company-provided seat.) However, if a coworker is failing to reply because they're working on something else that's more important then this is another thing that their manager needs to know about and consider reprioritizing your, their, or both people's tasks.

Frankly, I find the "get someone's attention with an IM (whether direct or in a team chat channel) or email" mechanism to be far, far, far better than having someone shatter my chain of thought by coming over to physically interrupt me. I know when I can't handle interruptions, so I can configure my software to not interrupt me. Others can't possibly know when I can't handle interruptions, so they can't help BUT to interrupt me during those periods.
Launch HN: Marblism (YC W24) – Generate full-stack web apps from a prompt
Hi HN,

We are Cyril & Ulric and are building Marblism (https://marblism.com), an LLM-based dev platform to generate and iterate on full-stack web apps.

Here’s a demo video that goes from a comment on Twitter to a working app in 10 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TapOPO-Gv20.

Marblism started when we realized that much of the code we write for web apps is just slightly modified boilerplate: similar login flows, dashboards, API integrations, CRUD operations, etc. While AI tools are helpful, they fall short in delivering a well-architected codebase. The idea of Marblism is to combine the best of both worlds: a solid boilerplate, customized and enhanced with AI.

Here's how it works:

Generate your app - Describe your product, and the AI will build your data model. We create a NextJS app with auth, custom CRUDs, permissions, payment, emails. The AI then generates your front-end pages.

Test and improve your app - Now that your app is set up, use our online workspace to test your app and add more complex features via an AI Chat or directly yourself in the VSCode editor.

Go live - Once you’re happy with your app, deploy it in production in one click.

Here are some examples of apps generated on Marblism in couple of hours of prompting:

Find and validate startup ideas: https://www.muckbrass.com/

A design system directory: https://awesomedesignsystem.app.io

AI-Personalized candle: https://www.scent-a-scene.com/

Marblism currently generates web apps like SaaS, marketplaces, and social networks. It doesn't support Chrome extensions or mobile apps, and it’s not really for small games like Snake/Tetris.

The vision is to add more tech stacks later this year and enable people to create their own templates/tech stack that the AI can customize.

We’re really excited to share this with you and we'd love to hear your thoughts on the potential directions we can take this product.
This is going to be an interesting one... definitely someone (not a lot of guessing who) modified the pagers somewhere in the supply chain...

As with exploding drones, this will become a thing in other countries too, either as a part of organized crime or general terrorism. I mean... who cares about bystanders?
Do you know what the 250 page target is based on? Knowing the underlying assumptions, metrics, KPIs, or whatever, could be helpful.
> I think I know why this will never occur again but that's a much bigger topic.

I'd read that blog post
... except because NotebookLLM is a Google product your dream also includes the hope that it won't be discontinued at the worst possible time.
Instagram Is Restricting Teen Accounts–and Blocking Sneaky Workarounds
Barney Google aside, it's worth wondering whether the same process that led to Google being called Google instead of Googol is what led Chandler to use that word: it's a memorable, alien-sounding word, misspelled.
Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #90
Cyberattack or supply chain attack? Who uses pagers? So a supply chain attack could have been the cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculine_fragility

It's getting to be maybe a _bit_ less of a thing, but it's still a thing, certainly for many people in their 30s.
Snowflake slams 'more MFA' button again – months after breaches
could be both
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/hundreds-of-he... link also
Is it some device like this one?

https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/ied/pager-bomb-rcied

It's disgusting that humans can invent such devices.
Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6920822
At this point forced RTW is just a red flag and a clear giveaway about the company's execs and their culture. I think it's great they are doing this because we know who to avoid on the job market.
Yes, but compare a phone's much larger lithium battery exploding: https://youtu.be/8nz5ijXcckI?si=jpZOWIs3BIQTvVt2&t=31

With a Hezbollah pager exploding: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
We've gone back to the moon many times, just not carrying useless people.

On another note it annoys me a bit that people in power are "fine" with thousands of dead people for wars that aren't needed, but god forbid one or two people dying pursuing true exploration as volunteers.
Rio Dev here. I can see where you're coming from. Seeing an experience web-dev work can be mindblowingly fast. But there's two sides to each story - there's tons of developers that are experts in their own fields but that aren't familiar with web technologies. That's where frameworks like Rio, streamlit, reflex, etc. come in.

We've been getting a lot of reactions from people being surprised how quickly they can create Rio apps after just a few hours, when previously creating UIs was always a major roadblock for them. Seeing these reactions has been extremely rewarding.
Does anyone have a footage?
I doubt it's just a cyberattack, the videos of the explosions indicate small explosives rather than batteries.

Don't think we'll know exactly what happened until Israel tells the world or an independent investigation concludes but so far my impression is there was a supply chain infiltration and thousands of pagers with explosives have been distributed to Hezbollah.
One (graphic) example: https://twitter.com/GlobalWObserver/status/18360589108615294...
‘Cater to their every whim’ - have you not seen FAANG benefits and benefit culture?

If you think employees in tech have just been asking for computers and money - for well over a decade and a half - then you’re living in a completely different industry than I have been.
I realized afterwards that what I want isn't all FEC left to higher levels, but the retransmission logic. It is absolutely necessary to detect packet corruption at the link-layer, for the MAC address, if nothing else. But it is not necessary to infinitely re-transmit all data. There are very few protocols that gracefully handle an RTT of over 60s, so buffering data for more than a few seconds is bonkers.

I do also think that exposing some knobs for the quantity of FEC to apply to a higher level might make sense; some packets are 100% fine to drop, others are very much not. Standards trying to do this exist, but don't seem to be widely supported.