These are people spying on commercial vehicles abusing rights of way to avoid paying their fair share of the cost to carry them in the area (parking, in particular). Why are you taking the side of the trucks?
No. Taking the side of people who want to live in a place that isn't Brazil the Movie.
I love watching HN swim outside of technical depth. "Well, what if we put explosive collars on citizens at birth? That'll surely fix the crime problems.."
Well, guess what : it doesn't matter how you apply this concept, it's psychological poison. Incentivizing trivial taddling ruins the world, ruin businesses, ruins schools, it literally ruins any group of people that have to converse and deal with one another.
It's like people totally forgot that the primary methods behind groups like East Germany were to turn the populations in on each other for the sake of the state.
The truck idling problem is closer than ever to being permanently solved -- why is it that NOW we decide to create citizen spies when the problem is as least-bad as we've ever witnessed it since the advent of trucks?
I'm sure it's surely not a stepping-stone to adjust us into our future entirely-surveillance driven criminal justice system that's further bolstered by citizen-spy/tattle-tales, right?
This is like "protecting commercial interests who exploit gaps in law enforcement to save a few bucks at everyone else's expense, but leftistly".
People call in complaints all the time. They always have. It's part of city life. When they're complaining about truck drivers fucking up the streets, they're not rats; they're the good guys. Getting mad that their lives are being made easier seems super weird. But you do you! We're not going to agree.
This could not be less true and I really wish people would stop spreading this idea, because it's costing other people lots of money. In fact, the Venn diagram mapping "software celebrities" like Patrick and expert negotiators has not much overlap at all. You've never heard of some of the best-compensated developers I know (and they don't work on "celebrity" projects, either); meanwhile, I can think of multiple "celebrities" who have gotten extremely raw deals --- one, for instance, was brought in to lead engineering & R&D at a security company working against organized crime, and didn't even get any equity.
Patrick is right: compensation is much more about negotiating skill than it is about reputation or (especially) notoriety, holding everything else equal.
Does this sort of stuff still work for people who can do Python or Javascript just as well as thousands of others? I expect most companies today to simply stop talking to a typical candidate if they refused to tell their number first.
Wow, this is a whole thing. Like: absolutely, unpaid volunteers shouldn't feel like they're on deadlines to fix security bugs in open source code. They're not. But you're reading this and assuming, "ok, they're getting a lot of dumb reports from random bounty seekers or whatever", and, nope, he's complaining about GPZ.
Which, again, fair enough! But the bugs he's apparently talking about are presumably very serious.
(If maintainers of projects like libxslt stop fixing bugs, Google will ultimately just fix them.)
This library was originally written to parse GNOME configuration XML files. It was never intended for parsing untrusted data. From GNOME's perspective, if you can crash the XML parser with a malformed config file, that's just a regular bug. If an attacker is able to write to arbitrary files in your home directory, he's already won.
I agree with the maintainer's perspective that it's irresponsible for Apple, Microsoft, and Google to rely on this library for parsing untrusted data in products that they make billions of dollars off of, not provide him any monetary or other support, and expect him to prioritize fixing "security bugs" that don't impact security for his use case. If I was the maintainer, I'd make the same decision he made.
It took me a second: "Google Project Zero" which I accept responsibility for because I come to the comments before TFA but I hadn't seen that initialism before
Can I say again how deeply silly this munition is? What's special about a GBU-57 isn't its explosive force. It's that the bomb casing is made out of special high-density ultra-heavy steel; it's deliberately just a super heavy bomb with a delayed fuse. It is literally like them dropping cartoon anvils out of the sky.
From what I've read, the idea is that they keep dropping bombs into the same bomb-hole that previous sorties left, each round of bombs drilling deeper into the structure.
> Can I say again how deeply silly this munition is?
Honestly, I'd rather you not. For those who are more personally familiar with warfare and combat operations, consistently describing any sort of bomb as "silly" is childish and inaccurate to the point of making me wonder if there's an ulterior motive with your description.
The typical person compartmentalizes between a weapon's use in military operations and its engineering. You see similar dynamics with things like military aircraft at air shows. Where kids and adults alike enjoy the demonstrative operation of the machines without ruminating on how many human souls were negatively affected by them.
Compartmentalization is a coping mechanism. That children are exposed to similar military engineering in such a way to make it enjoyable does not negate the nature of a bomb, tank, or machine gun.
>Can I say again how deeply silly this munition is?
If it is silly and it works, then it is not silly. If I remember correctly you have good cryptography skills. Rectothermal/rubber hose cryptoanalysis is quite silly too, but breaks AES,RSA,ECC and post quantum crypto schemes in 30 seconds.
If the weather is good and no jamming of gps it’s very practical. The bunker buster is basically a very large jdam and their precision is around 5 meters iirc.
So many armchair quarterbacks in this thread. You haven’t defined how silly this is beyond your feelings. Are you a munition expert? If you were an AF general given this order, what tactic would you choose excluding a nuke?
The same bomb hole tactic is an untested theory (which may be ineffective but not silly) but we’ll know more later this week once MAXAR surveillance and other independent or IAEA analysis rolls in.
I'm not an expert. I just think dropping giant anvils from the sky is Loony Toons tactics. Maybe it works great! I don't know! But it's worth knowing how these things work, and how they work is: they're just super super heavy.
They literally printed a bank note celebrating their nuclear program. The SL is not "staunchly opposed to nuclear weapons".
(I think the B-2 strikes were a terribly stupid idea and that Trump got rolled by Netanyahu here, but I'm not going to be negatively polarized into thinking the Iranian SL is a benign figure.)
Ok, I will take the bait. Two countries that are frequently noted as having the capability to build nuclear weapons is Japan and Korea. (For the purpose of this post, please assume with good faith that they don't have secret programmes to build nuclear weapons.) Both have world-leading civilian nuclear power programmes and at least part of the nuclear fuel cycle onshore. Side note: One thing that I never see discussed: As both countries are signatories to the Non-Proliferation Act, I assume that they have regular audits of their facilities by IEAE. (If they were consistently failing with major mishaps, or secret programmes, I am sure that we would read about it.) Both of them have incredibly sophisticated national scientific research programmes that could easily pursue nuclear weapons.
What is the difference between Japan & Korea vs Iran? It is simple: Trust. On the surface, sure, what you say might be true. However, it is hard to trust Iran as they so consistently threaten Israel. What do you think would happen if Iran had the bomb? They would lord over Israel and threaten them on the regular. This would be massively destabilizing for the region and world.
Final question: Is it harder to build a safe, civilian nuclear power programme compared to a (safe?) nuclear weapons programme? I don't know.
After Israel assassinated Haniyeh in July and launched an air strike on Beirut that killed 30+ people, some of which were civilians. Keep going on with this game though.
Indeed. The lowest of the horses, however, is clearly the USA. Our history and our actions (POSIWID is the most effective heuristic in the modern information environment), including the capricious abandonment of the very successful JCPOA, suggest complete dishonesty in this realm. There is zero reason to believe we have any legitimate reason for attacking Iran and every reason to distrust our stated motivations. Iraq was 22 years ago.
We presented outright fabrications to the UN to justify an imperial war after the president campaigned against "nation building." It is hard to ignore the parallels to Iran and Trump, proclaimed "anti war" candidate that you had to vote for to prevent WW3. Here we are.
I am bathed in the light of heaven for my war is in service of justice and peace for all existence. Those who stand in opposition to these goals are an evolutionary dead-end. An answer to the Fermi Paradox.
My father, a middle-class mormon and far-right political enthusiast, once told me in the context of the conflicts in the Middle East, "people will die for their country, but they'll kill for their god." This harrowing indication of his radicalization nonetheless holds as a true and instructive maxim.
Who is your god? For most of America, it is power and the best proxy for power is the demigod of Money. Avarice and greed are in, Christlike works are out. Too woke.
It is literally possible to use all of this incredible technology and productive capacity to enable food security, high quality housing, access to healthcare, unlimited access to the wealth of all human knowledge and digitizable creations, while protecting our only habitable planet and nurturing its biosphere, and so much more, for all of humanity. Yet money and the desire for power will see billions suffer and die in the next century while mass global extinctions will only decelerate due to depletion of species.
Why can't we do better than the current environment of lawless global and domestic violence waged by the US government? It is barbarism.
It is possible that mistakes were made in the aftermath of WW2. It is possible that the victors have rewritten history in a favorable light -- in fact, that is the most reasonable expectation. This must not be used to justify genocide for if our society takes that path the victory against the Axis powers is meaningless and evil will have triumphed in the world.
Israel is more than Netanyahu and less than the Jewish people. Humanity must unite and destroy the power structures that incentivize the hyperscale atrocities we are currently manifesting.
Did I say the Supreme Leader is a benign figure? Iran has problems. Big ones.
You are disingenuous and malicious when you portray my position in this way. The Supreme Leader has a longstanding public opposition to nuclear weapons. He is the respected religious leader of the Iranian government. The actions of the Iranian government, including their adherence to the JCPOA that Trump capriciously discarded, are consistent with this fatwa.
You must provide some other justification for your stance than merely accepting the US propaganda.
We can just disagree about this and let the evidence people can find on their own speak for itself. I find the idea that the SL is "opposed to nuclear weapons" to be risible. Iran bought from AQ Khan!
It is extremely important to document the facile and childish level of argumentation within the industry whose hubris seeks to force the world into the period of its greatest calamities. Society failed to highlight the intellectual immaturity of the Nazis and it has yielded the material reality we exist in today.
Again, I appreciate your labor and contributions to the historical record.
Strict adherence to the JCPOA, capriciously discarded by the man who just bombed Iran in my name, suggests that Iran's position was legitimately held.
In fact, it implies that someone else is lying. Probably the country that just did a complete 180 on its intelligence assessment and attacked another country unprovoked, if you want my assessment.
It's not like the USA doesn't have a documented history of lying and engaging in information warfare to justify wars of choice. This isn't even our first time this century.
You might if a nuclear-armed genocidal pariah state backed by the most powerful and richest country in the world was obsessed with you. Especially if the superpower I've alluded to had previously installed its regime in your country.
You really should be ashamed to lie like this. Iran is the country that has said it is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Israel just wants to live in peace with Iran. But the current religious nutjobs in charge of Iran absolutely will not allow that to happen.
The bombing of Iran by Israel and the US is the result of Iran picking a fight with them since 1979.
Israel is actively engaged in a genocide and its ethnic cleansing program is fully supported by the USA, which is currently engaged in its own domestic ethnic cleansing through violent and illegal kidnappings by heavily armed, erratic, masked, unidentified secret police. The American genocide is informed by and its gestapo trained in Israeli doctrine.
Innocent children are being maimed, starved, and murdered and it is being done with materiel produced with my tax dollars and provided with the bipartisan endorsement of my government.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not perfect, they have promulgated many evils within their society. The USA is directly responsible for the rise of fundamentalism and sociopolitical precarity within Iran, but even that pales in the light of the disgusting atrocities being committed today by the traitorous US government. Iran has issues, but their biggest issue is the existential threat of the American-Israeli alliance against their sovereignty.
This is absolutely not true. Hamas is actively attempting to destroy Israel. I really hate this watering down of the word "genocide". Terms like "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" have specific meanings that shouldn't be diluted through overuse.
"The USA is directly responsible for the rise of fundamentalism and sociopolitical precarity within Iran"
Don't remove agency from the Iranians. THEY chose an Islamic Theocracy all on their own after the Shah was overthrown. You "merica evil" types really like to remove agency from people.
"USA, which is currently engaged in its own domestic ethnic cleansing "
I truly, truly hate Trump and think what ICE is doing is stupid and sadistic but calling it "ethnic cleansing" is completely absurd. The federal government does have the constitutional authority to deport non-citizens.
"Iran has issues, but their biggest issue is the existential threat of the American-Israeli alliance against their sovereignty."
Iran's biggest issue is that they constantly try to pick fights with MUCH stronger countries. They have spend every second since 1979 antagonizing the US and Israel in a profoundly foolish way. Compare this to how Vietnam doesn't hold a grudge against the US and benefits greatly from having a normal relationship with it.
"Israel can't do genocide because it is Jewish and it is their right" is a fascist Big Lie, right up there with "The America people cannot do genocide because the USA is an inherently Good actor and entitled to the things it takes."
I already heard that when the USA illegally attacked and invaded Iraq. Both of these situations, from the point of view of international law, are no different from Russia's illegal bombing of Ukraine.
Yes, but as much as I don't trust Trump or his administration, it's not clear whether Iran has or doesn't have a nuclear weapons program, and if they do, how close they are to a serviceable weapon.
Bush Jr and his buddies are IMO unindicted war criminals. It remains to be seen if this current act puts Trump in the same shoes. I hope Iran really did have a nuclear weapons program and that this attack is in some way justified. But I won't believe or disbelieve it until we know more, corroborated by trustworthy sources outside the US.
It's really hard to say, but probably not good (there was an Atlantic article about this last week). Part of the dynamic here is the idea that the SL can't back down without losing so much domestic credibility that he puts the regime at risk; being in a shooting war with the West probably reinforces the regime's position. The flip side of this is that I don't think there were many signs that the opposition was in position to challenge the SL any time soon.
They lack the capability to do much aside from disrupt shipping with SRBMs. They've taken down only one drone, which is one less than the Houthis. Their ballistic capability is heavily degraded. Their military leadership is gone. Their airforce is gone. Their air defense is gone. They're a paper tiger and I don't understand why people still think there's the prospect of some kind of grand retaliation. They're not holding back, they just can't do anything.
Well. Some guys with a tiny fraction of the funding Iran has managed to fly a few airliners into some buildings a few years back.
So, I imagine there are perhaps unconventional options available to a country which is fully willing to fund terrorist groups for decades against a country with a very large amount of largely unprotected infrastructure.
But who knows? It just seems a bit premature to argue Iran's defeat. Feels a bit... mission accomplished.
They were already doing that in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq and Bahrain. They weren't holding back before, and they won't hold back after. But their ability to do that is now severely degraded. The officials overseeing these programs are now gone. The weapons they were sending to these groups are now reduced.
From your link:
"However, despite the public opposition of Pakistani officials, multiple former Prime Ministers gave covert permission to the United States to carry out these attacks."
Makes sense, they were in the tribal areas where I assume the government was losing control of their monsters.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, perhaps my comment sounded snarky? But I don't think it's unwarranted either.
9/11 was not a direct response to any US invasion, but the London and Madrid bombings were a direct response to the second Iraq invasion. I would be surprised if there will be no terrorist attacks on American soil.
I don't know why you are so confident that no terrorist attacks will happen this time. I would argue that now it's even worse, because Israel is pulling strings. Every single Trump "deal" has fallen flat, he just now realized that smear campaigns don't work on an international level. But bombing a country to submit them to sign some deal is not going to work out either - you need to bomb AND talk smooth to get something, but Trump is basically just talking shit as usual. It won't work out unless he blows it up into a full ground invasion, with countless people dying - including Americans.
Iran will do some nominal attacks. There is little power projection that they will do. I bet they will focus their attacks on Israel which has been happening already.
Because Iran's leadership isn’t stupid. They know a full-on attack against the US would bring overwhelming retaliation and possibly collapse the regime. They've been hit before (like when Soleimani was killed) and their response was pretty measured. They’ll do something to save face. Maybe hit a US base through proxies or ramp up attacks on Israel-but a direct war with the US? Not worth it for them. Too much to lose.
I don’t think we’d see something like 9/11 again. Attacks on the US homeland bring a level of blowback that even Iran’s hardliners would want to avoid. But I totally agree there’ll be fallout in the region. Expect more proxy attacks on US bases, shipping lanes, and of course Israel. That kind of long, drawn-out pressure is way more in line with how Iran operates. Not total war
But why does Iran get to take workers hostage for 444 days in 1979, conduct Beirut embassy bombing in 1983, then the Beirut barracks bombing in same year, 1982-1991 Hezbollah (Iran sponsored) kidnappings of Americans in Lebanon, TWA 847 Hijacking, December 1983 Kuwait Embassy Bombing, June 1996 Khobar Towers Bombing, multiple EFP attacks on US forces in Iraq, May 2011 Camp Liberty Rocket Attack, 2011 IRGC plot to assassinate US officials, Dec 2019 Kirkuk base attack, etc
How is this any different than your 9/11 scenario and Iran has been doing it for 40 years?
You can convince yourself that you're waging a war of Good vs Evil.
The truth is that 9/11 was revenge for devades of invasions and general terror, killing thousands of innocents and destroying civilian lives. You're just a pawn for billionaires.
That's what people said when Israel fought back against Hezbollah. Lots of "this will make more terrorists". Turns out this was wrong. The war against Hezbollah ended terrorism. The literal opposite of the predictions people like you were making.
Killing Civilians and journalists, then laughing at them. This is not fight, that you and your compatriots did was nothing but crimes against humanity, with impunity.
> Their intelligence heads are also all gone. What kind of response do you envisage?
It does not mean that their ability to gather intelligence or use it is 100% gone. It most likely means they are a bit in disarray because of their top-down command structure. And maybe it takes a day or two until they put someone in charge.
A tactital victory does not translate to a strategic victory. I'd like to remind you the "Mission Accomplished" fiasco by George W, that was followed by more than 10 years of war and hundreds of thousands dead.
What planet have you been living on the past 25 years? Iran has a population of almost 100 million as well as a sizeable diaspora across the world. If even a small percentage of the population engages in terrorism, that translates into thousands of potential actors. And unlike a state-to-state war, this is the kind of distributed, unpredictable threat that’s much harder to deter or contain.
afaik Iran is a very very different case demographically from Iraq and Afghanistan- in terms of being bigger, more modern and secular. It seems like those are dynamics that make it harder to go to war/stay in war.
Quite the contrary, the religious populace is more likely to fall in line and decide the government knows best; it’s the secular populace that is demanding retaliation and critical of the government for not pursuing nuclearization already.
One data point I heard recently was 80% of Iranians oppose the current regime. That said I've also heard there is wide support for Iran to have a nuclear program. Presumably as a matter of national pride. I would still imagine the secular population to be less inclined to go to war with Israel in general.
The only Iranians I've personally talked to are ones that live in the west. They generally want to have peace with Israel and want to see the regime removed. Again very anecdotally they are still not happy about Israel bombing Iran but if the regime is actually somehow magically removed I don't think attacking Israel would be a high priority for a hypothetical secular or democratic regime.
The fact that someone dislikes their government's current ruling regime doesn't mean they want the US to invade and install a puppet government instead. It's a false dichotomy.
> if the regime is actually somehow magically removed I don't think attacking Israel would be a high priority
Attacking Israel hasn't been a high priority for Iran. When Israel bombed an Iranian consulate, Iran referred it to the security council and waited, but the security council took no action. When Israel carries out an assassination within Iran, Iran did the same thing. Only after the UN refused to do anything to hold Israel to account did Iran retaliate. Then recently Israel launched a massive series of strikes against Iran, assassinating top members of its military and blowing up apartment buildings. It seems clear that the Iranian government didn't want to go to war with Israel, but at a certain point they ran out of options.
Iran has been attacking Israelthrough its proxies. Israel struck the Iranian consulate in a country they're at war with meeting proxies they're at war with. This is indeed an escalation. As a response Iran launched a huge number of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, which is a major eacalation and direct attack.
> Attacking Israel hasn't been a high priority for Iran.
Really?
It is interesting that you made no mention of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, not Houthi in Yemen. All are well-known proxies for Iran to militarily harass Israel. They all receive direct funds and weapons from Iran.
lol. Watch Khameni’s morning broadcast where they have hundreds of delusional adherents shouting “Death to America, Death to Israel” 50 times in a row. I’m sure you’ll come out feeling the same way.
If you're in Iran it makes sense that you would want that if you feel that Israel is a threat. (But it doesn't make it a good idea).
I meant that demographically, if your populace isn't as poor, battle hardened and religious (like Afghanistan) maybe going into a long ground war is less politically feasible?
In Afghanistan they had basically just been fighting a war, where the last war in Iran was 30 years ago?
> I meant that demographically, if your populace isn't as poor, battle hardened and religious (like Afghanistan) maybe going into a long ground war is less politically feasible?
> 95,000 Iranian child soldiers were casualties during the Iran–Iraq War, mostly between the ages of 16 and 17, with a few younger
> The conflict has been compared to World War I: 171 in terms of the tactics used, including large-scale trench warfare with barbed wire stretched across trenches, manned machine gun posts, bayonet charges, human wave attacks across a no man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as sulfur mustard by the Iraqi government against Iranian troops, civilians, and Kurds. The world powers United States and the Soviet Union, together with many Western and Arab countries, provided military, intelligence, economic, and political support for Iraq. On average, Iraq imported about $7 billion in weapons during every year of the war, accounting for fully 12% of global arms sales in the period.
No, but they're the ones making the decisions about fighting such a war. The child soldiers in the 1980s are the politicians, the diplomats, and the generals in the 2020s.
Ah I see what you mean. Yes they don’t have the birth rate (or the suicidal fanaticism) to sustain a decades long attritional war against an occupation like Afghanistan or Yemen can.
But given the size of the existing Iranian population and geography, and the lack of any significantly sized pre-existing anti-government military faction, I’m not sure the US military is large enough to even occupy Iran in the first place, absent a draft.
I think they probably like having an GDP 25x larger than North Korea's. Gets a lot harder to export your products around the world when you're squared off against the US.
They still trade oil with China, that is as much as the rest of the world they need. Of course, getting trade overland is a bit more difficult than by boat which is mostly cut off during a war.
It has a peace treaty with Jordan and Egypt. Also, they signed the Abraham Accords with UAE and Bahrain. As far I know, there is no risk of conflict with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, nor Oman. Who else am I missing?
Half joking: (ignoring Trump's recent "threats") Is the US a threat to Canada or Mexico?
I don't know that much. But I have heard about how in terms of daily outlook a lot of Iranians aren't very religious. Esp. compared to other countries in the region.
On the other hand, the internal Cyber Police HQ got bombed today. If the institutions of internal suppression are sufficiently disrupted, maybe some form of resistance could be form. Who knows.
People keep wishcasting this idea, but just because many/most Iranian people don't like the regime does not mean they want to be bombed by Israel/the USA.
The one thing we’ve learned over and over again since WWII: strategic bombing does not actually achieve any objective except temporarily disrupting logistics. If anything it strengthens the resolve of the people being bombed, giving the target regime more ammunition to carry on.
Did the US ever invade Japanese home islands (Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, Hokkaido) during the war? I am pretty sure they got some of Okinawa then dropped two nukes, then Japan surrendered. Do I have the order of events incorrect?
Yes, you're most probably not taking into consideration the Soviets' incursion into Northern Manchuria, which started on August 9th. The last thing the Japanese leadership wanted was to see a big part of their country turn communist.
This is dumb. Strategic bombing did work in WWII, but it was never as effective as its advocates claimed at the time mostly because the bombs rarely hit anything important. They had to drop far more munitions than originally envisioned to actually do critical damage to infrastructure.
You can't really compare WWII dumb bombs dropped from 25,000 feet to modern precision weapons that can hit precisely the weakest point on a target, times thousands of targets, within the span of a few hours or days.
I mean, we literally just watched a massively successful strategic bombing campaign over the last week! Desert Storm was massively successful, Iraqi Freedom (the actual invasion, pre-nationbuilding part) was massively successful, Israel's bombing of Hezbollah was massively successful. I don't know how anyone can argue that strategic bombing with precision munitions isn't successful.
Strategic bombing doesn't work. With the exception of maybe nukes, wars aren't won from the sky and strategic objectives are hard to achieve. The bombing prior to Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom was operational bombing, its purpose was to flatten resistance so the Army could roll in.
It appears that no matter what, no matter the technology involved (maybe with the exception of nukes), you always need grunts on the ground to hold it.
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