How to run phones while being struck by suicide drones

https://nasa.cx/hn/posts/how-to-run-hundreds-of-phones-while-being-struck-by-suicide-drones/

135•nasaok•2mo ago

Comments

mmastrac•2mo ago

"We now continue to work as before, getting social media engagement for us and our clients, applying to YC 2026 and other VCs."

Ehh, so this is a click farm?

smikhanov•2mo ago

Yes

liquidise•2mo ago

"I saw the best minds of my generation..."

chrisandchris•2mo ago

> We help startups get attention with automated social media marketing on physical phones.

mbreese•2mo ago

> Your own army of physical phones in just a few clicks

From a project page linked from the original post.

breppp•2mo ago

Combining what Ukraine is known for, kicking Russian ass and creating shady software

Nextgrid•2mo ago

Click farms effectively function as janitors, mopping up spam someone else paid to throw so that no real user stumbles upon it, so they are beneficial.

Den_VR•2mo ago

It’s computer fraud by the operator and wire fraud by the client…

Nextgrid•2mo ago

It's ultimately spammers and scammers fighting against each other, so you could say the trash is taking itself out. Every dollar they spend fighting is one less dollar spent spamming actual users, so it's a win.

snakeboy•2mo ago

At this point, is the most "effective ethical" career path for a software developer to work on LLMs to flood social media and ad-clicks to speedrun the collapse of digital marketing? And thus freeing competent but money-driven software engineers to work on something else?

Klaster_1•2mo ago

That's one of opening points of Dodge in Hell by Neil Stephenson.

lukan•2mo ago

By collapse of digital marketing you mean collapse of social networks?

I cannot say I would miss them, but I doubt it will solve the problem.

Because yes, software engineers would love to work on many interesting things. But they also love being able to buy food and pay rent.

If the ad companies don't pay money anymore, who will replace them?

(I still dream of a world with donation for free services as default, but I am usually not taken serious with this.)

And .. about ad companies and LLMs - I think the madness just started. Once the marketing companies get their product placements directly into the models and the agents sophisticated enough, that you cannot trust anything posted online anymore, it will just destroy anonymous communication, as you cannot trust any anonymous account anymore at all. And will have a hard time finding out who is, who they say they are.

dansmith1919•2mo ago

Yeah now we know why it’s on the front page not even 10 minutes after posting…

antoniojtorres•2mo ago

What a rollercoaster to arrive at that in the end

xnx•2mo ago

With only 60 phones, this is like a click homestead.

vjk800•2mo ago

Check out the guy's social media (links in the original article). The shit is downright hilarious. He's very self-conscious about how horrible his business is.

lotsofpulp•2mo ago

I just started watching Pluribus, so this one got a laugh out of me:

https://x.com/nasaoks/status/1995382466237108317?s=20

blitzar•2mo ago

"10 out of 10, I love this founder"

throwawayffffas•2mo ago

> Ehh, so this is a click farm?

No no no, it's far worse than that, it's a bot farm.

JawsofDeath•2mo ago

Слава Україні!

nasaok•2mo ago

Героям Слава!

IshKebab•2mo ago

> There even was an official program to replace your old lightbulb for a new LED one for free

Wow do they still have incandescent lightbulbs? Mental.

lb1lf•2mo ago

That depends on what the source of your heating is.

Say, in Norway we largely use (hydro-) electric power for heating, anyway.

So, the 2% efficient (for lighting) incandescent bulb doubles as a 98% efficient space heater, utilizing the 2% loss to light said space. 100% efficient!

pbmonster•2mo ago

No, since the domestic heating is done mostly by heat pump, which is above 250% efficient by comparison.

fennec-posix•2mo ago

I love the ingenuity of this, truly in the hacker spirit! I also lol'd at how fast this got onto the FP given what these guys do, jolly good show gents! Well Played.

nasaok•2mo ago

thanks for the kind words mate

sheepscreek•2mo ago

> Large grocery stores and apartment buildings use big generators, they are the size of a car and way quieter than small generators.

Many industrial generators are enclosed in a box that absorbs most of the noise, unlike the smaller ones.

Maxion•2mo ago

The big ones are also diesel, run at different RPM. ~3500 RPM For the smalle gas ones and around 1800 RPM for the big diesel ones. The noise characteristcs are also different. The big diesels produce more low frequency noise, whereas the small gas generators are literally lawn mower / leaf blower engines and sound the same.

The enclosures of the big generators remove mainly lower frequency sound, making them perceptually even quieter.

sriacha•2mo ago

Has there been any significant use of decentralized mesh communication networks in Ukraine in the last years?

gotts•2mo ago

To limited extend by Ukrainian army, more like a fallback method if something happens to Startlink. Mesh networks are getting used more and more by Russian army for coordinating drone attacks and surveillance - they use Chinese modems e.g. 70M-6Ghz/Uper C-X-Ku).

Maxion•2mo ago

AFAIK a lot of military gear works over mesh networks.

GaryBluto•2mo ago

How inspiring. In a war torn country, a man perseveres and continues making the internet worse.

The founder's LinkedIn describes his job as "Automating phones for you - Dead internet as a service", and also has a post where he proudly states that this post was "banned on Hacker News", so I don't doubt that he's abusing the phones here too.

It isn't a click farm, it's a bot farm.

falkenstein•2mo ago

hate the game not the player

vjk800•2mo ago

If you check out the man's social media, the hilarious part is that he is not even trying to sugar coat it in anyway. It's like: "yup, I'm ruining your internet, what are you gonna do about it?"

merpkz•2mo ago

Can you give some examples on what are these people specifically doing with all these phones for those unfamiliar with click farms?

fragmede•2mo ago

Creating accounts on every service they can think of, and then selling likes or favorites or whatever that platform uses.

Farbklex•2mo ago

I respect the hustle but I hate the idea.

happosai•2mo ago

> Next thing you need is some way to convert 12V DC battery voltage to 230V AC mains voltage to power common devices like servers.

But the server and phones use 12V/5V DC. Why the extra step of DC 12V (inverter) -> AC 220V (server PSU) -> DC 12/5V ?

foxyv•2mo ago

Because, it is much easier to buy a cheap 230V AC inverter and plug it into your server power supply than it is to make a bespoke power supply that takes 12V and distributes it to various components. Inverters are stupid cheap right now, and 90%+ efficient.

electroly•2mo ago

For folks outside of warzones with plenty of time and access to international shipping (i.e. not OP), there are off-the-shelf adapters that accept DC input and produce the ATX voltage rails with the proper motherboard plug. Search for "DC-ATX" or "PicoPSU", they're pretty neat devices using DC-to-DC converters.

beAbU•2mo ago

It's significantly more difficult to get a working DC-DC setup up and running that's actually reliable and safe. The power supplies on these devices expect 220V AC so it's easier to just feed that in, and rely on the onboard power supplies to handle the complexities of creating a DC source that is within tolerance for the actual device.

mzajc•2mo ago

> We now continue to work as before, getting social media engagement for us and our clients, applying to YC 2026 and other VCs.

Why would YC fund a clickfarm? Besides that, there's something frustrating about these people setting up emergency infrastructure specifically to profit off making the internet worse.

fransje26•2mo ago

I'm very impressed that even in time of war, when one's bare necessities are not met and explosive devices are flying over one's head, everything is done to make the internet -and by extension, ironically, the world- a worse place to be.

But let's keep pumping these fake engagement numbers up boys! This is fine.

foxyv•2mo ago

Foreign dollars buy foreign goods. When your country is on fire, you have to look outside for stuff like food and weapons. The ethical lines move pretty far when facing starvation.

razakel•2mo ago

Bombs are falling on your head and you still have the time to spam. Well done.

foxyv•2mo ago

Anything that brings foreign cash into the country during a war is important. Foreign dollars can be used to purchase foreign supplies and weapons.

nasaok•2mo ago

yessir

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How to run phones while being struck by suicide drones

Comments

Show HN: MCP to get latest dependency package and tool versions

The better you get at something, the harder it becomes to do

Show HN: WP Float – Archive WordPress blogs to free static hosting

Show HN: I Hacked My Family's Meal Planning with an App

Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal

The Future of Systems

NASA now allowing astronauts to bring their smartphones on space missions

Claude Code Is the Inflection Point

Show HN: MicroClaw – Agentic AI Assistant for Telegram, Built in Rust

Show HN: Omni-BLAS – 4x faster matrix multiplication via Monte Carlo sampling

The AI-Ready Software Developer: Conclusion – Same Game, Different Dice

AI Agent Automates Google Stock Analysis from Financial Reports

Voxtral Realtime 4B Pure C Implementation

I Was Trapped in Chinese Mafia Crypto Slavery [video]

U.S. CBP Reported Employee Arrests (FY2020 – FYTD)

Show HN: I built a free UCP checker – see if AI agents can find your store

Show HN: SVGV – A Real-Time Vector Video Format for Budget Hardware

Study of 150 developers shows AI generated code no harder to maintain long term

Spotify now requires premium accounts for developer mode API access

When Albert Einstein Moved to Princeton

Agents.md as a Dark Signal

System time, clocks, and their syncing in macOS

McCLIM and 7GUIs – Part 1: The Counter

So whats the next word, then? Almost-no-math intro to transformer models

Ed Zitron: The Hater's Guide to Microsoft

UK infants ill after drinking contaminated baby formula of Nestle and Danone

Show HN: Android-based audio player for seniors – Homer Audio Player

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LLMs are powerful, but enterprises are deterministic by nature

Make your iPad 3 a touchscreen for your computer