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It is straight up the same NERV, so it might.

From the site:

> The name and logo of "NERV" are used with the explicit permission of khara Inc., the copyright holder of the "Evangelion" series, and Groundworks Corporation, which manages the rights to the series.


This is just the best. A very serious company, doing seriously cool and important stuff, also has an anime name/icon.

I wish more corps took themselves so lightly, while remaining serious about what they do.


For people unfamiliar wanting an easier comparison, Evangelion is Japans star wars. It'd be like learning of tornadoes from someone with Empire insignia

> Evangelion is Japans star wars

Which is funny to say because Star Wars is actually the Western version of samurai movies (especially but not exclusively Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress).

That's the movie that Lucas is pretty open about heavily drawing "inspiration" from (all the way down to specific characters and plot beats) but Hidden Fortress is itself part of a larger genre of similar stories.


probably closer to the 90's Batman: The Animated Series

ostensibly a kids show, but wayyyy darker and which has had a huge impact on later fandoms


I don't know how anyone could get the impression evangelion is a kids show, unless you consider all animation as "for kids"

It's a show about 14 year olds with emotional angst and the show reminds you the robots are a depression masking metaphor every other episode.

Yes, it's a show for pre-teens and teenagers.


Eh, Gundam is Japan's Star Wars. Released about the same timeframe (late 70's), tons of sequels and spinoffs, etc.

Evangelion is what happens when someone does a very successful riffs on the genre that Gundam is the most prolific example of.


wouldn't it be more accurate to say its their star trek? admittedly not a gundam fan but I don't see it talked about or merchandised nearly as often as evangelion.

Maybe not in Western countries, but Gundam is HUGE in Japan and neighboring countries like Taiwan. A big part of it is that the merchandise is heavily focused on model kits, like Warhammer on steroids.

Evangelion is so mega overrated of an anime im experiencing second hand embarrassment on behalf of Japan for letting its national personaification be exlempified by shinji.

it is a masterpiece, up there with ghost in the shell, akira, and serial experiments lain in terms of "japanese existentialist scifi"

Lain is 10/10. Akira/Ghost in the Shell are great too. Evangelion is a weak 7/10 in comparison to them in every aspect imaginable. I also realized that Evangelion is Japan's version of assigning weird mysticism to religions they don't understand (much how westerners depict shinto/daoism/buddhism with tons of mysticism).

Evangelion is a disgusting anime to consider part of your national personification. Drop it and pick up Ghibli films more please Japan.


Evangelion is not “Japan’s version” of anything in terms of western religions. It’s one guy who was making a TV show. It’s not Japan’s “national personification.”

If you want to go down the rabbit hole you’ll find a lot of quotes from Anno and others on it.

A lot of it boils down to “we did this because it’s cool and we have no idea what Christianity is” down to Anno going “Yeah I could do this because no one in Japan is really going to care and I don’t really care about the Western world anyway.”

https://gwern.net/otaku

https://wiki.evageeks.org/Statements_by_Evangelion_Staff

It’s fine to not like it but it’s quite a step to go “this is how Japan thinks.” It’s akin to saying America is personified by the Simpsons every time they go to Japan.


But America is personified by the Simpsons!

I guess Saddam Hussein's propaganda team thought so in 1991 too.

It is a show about depression, which is why people love it.

The "weird mysticism" is just the reification (pun intended) of the urge to self-harm. i.e. Literally turning into a puddle of emotion, or allowing oneself to be crucified.

It's visceral in a way I've never seen before or since. Going all in on a surface-level understanding paid off in my mind.


> Lain is 10/10.

Caught the BeOS fan ;)

(I kid, mostly but remember Lain fans rabidly trying and espousing it)


> shinto/daoism/buddhism

The style of your comment is not making a good case for knowledge of this subject.


I guess it reinforces his point about the lack of knowledge of Japanese people.

i'll concede lain is better, but evangelion beats akira and maybe ghost in the shell. what problems do you have with it in specific?

There's nothing more overrated than a comment saying a great thing is overrated

"When it comes to the safety of this planet, it's NERV or nothin'." - ReDeath fan dub

It's an unpopular opinion for sure. Evangelion had great potential, a mysterious world, but it never reached it. I kept waiting for it to get good and then it just abruptly ended. I couldn't stand Shinji either. His situational paralysis was so frustrating. If he'd been a coward it would at least be understandable. But no, he sits there frozen half the show.

the emotions of the story are the point, not the story itself. Also, shinji is a coward. That's literally the whole point of the show, showing a cowards reaction to being forced into a situation that isn't avoidable in the most drastic way possible

Luckily, the show does a good enough job at explaining itself to those who care to learn the message. I watched it in my teens but only now in my 40s on my fourth view through does it actually finally make sense the way it should. Sometimes things take a while to click.

Anno Hideaki and his followers are just not capable of actually doing stories with much depth. It's all just shallow dopamine-maxxed mecha-tronic fetish paired with brutalist architecture and rushed out barely meeting deadlines. But pointing that out is like pointing out that ramen is just a single bowl meal with barely tolerable PFC balancing. Who cares. Uh half noodle garlic vegs sauce please. Yes half.

Sadly we're stuck with companies naming themselves things like "Melchior" and "Palpatine" and somehow it's a good thing?

Anyway I need to get back to working on the Torment Nexus.


I'm starting to like the honesty.

I think that’s pretty much the same. NERV uses child soldiers and is secretly planning a fused hivemind. They are the Torment Nexus.

That's true, but I think the difference lies in the fact that the company using the NERV name for their product is a public disadter alert service, and doesn't seek to do or emulate anything it's named after.

That's not the same for a surveillance company or a defence contractor named after the big bad of a media franchise.


If (probably bad example) FEMA started referring to its aid workers as storm troopers I'd find it a bit unsettling (actually I kind of wish they'd do that because dad jokes are the best). Similarly, while I find the reference amusing the NERV moniker doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I suppose an important difference is that they're a mixed bag rather than a purely evil organization but still.

Dude that’s fucking hilarious. Storm troopers. Amazing.

A private organization delivering critical infrastructure and emergency services. Just no. Not even if it has a cutesy anime external shell. It always ends up being a race to the bottom by the nature of it.

The graphics protocol might be relevant, but I fail to see how the rest of your comment is.

I assume you meant Crunchyroll. They've gotten even worse recently by moving away from .ass subtitles which removes a ton of typesetting options

It doesn't have to be significantly better. If the service is stable, cheap and hassle-free, people will pay for it.

For many users it's just not true. I run a subscription weather forecast service for pilots, with a free trial period. A significant number of users reset their device every week to avoid paying 10 euros a month. These are aircraft owners.

Just because you own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions.

People save money to buy expensive stuff. Or take out loans. One cannot assume that everyone doesn't care about spending < X dollars, where X is = 1% of the most expensive asset they own (see e.g. $3000 gaming PC vs. $30 software, elsewhere in the thread).


Everyone's poorer than you think, and sometimes the richest seeming people are under a mountain of debt.

> own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions.

Still, if you can't afford a €10/mo subscription necessary to operate the airplane safely, when hanger fees are well in excess of that, then perhaps you can't actually afford to own an airplane? Airplanes aren't cheap to own, nevermind the aircraft itself.

Put it another way. I like driving BMWs, but, y'know what, I hate having to pay insurance, and I can't afford to pay that after the monthly BMW lease payment, so I just don't pay it, cause fuck that noise.

I don't think most people's response to someone saying that would be "eh, sounds fine, BMWs are expensive". "So don't drive a BMW." seems like more likely reaction to me.


The reason people will tell you that is because paying for car insurance is rarely something you can just opt not to do, at least not without consequences. The consequence for not paying for a $10/month service is having to perform a minimally inconvenient chore once a week.

Indeed. Where I live, civil liability insurance is mandatory and if you own a car, you have to pay it, even if you don't intend to actively drive. It's not an optional cost.

Yeah, for a fucking airplane. In most of the world, that's way up there with yachts as a rich people toy rather than a everyday necessity. The real question though is, upon having discovered this, why allow them to keep doing that?

"I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks." The same habits that let a nouveau riche amass enough fortune to afford a plane make them penny pinch after they no longer need to.

Then don't use it. Use BBC weather. The sense of entitlement is insufferable.

Probably because resetting first is sufficiently easy for them, especially if they're not flying terribly often.

That's crazy! I would LOVE to hear more of that.

There will always be some amount of people who are too cheap to pay.

However, that doesn't mean that if you plug all the holes that they will pay. No. They'll just not use your service.

In the long run it's better to keep these types of people around because they at least advertise your service. But getting any money out of them is a pipe dream.

People often frame piracy as "oh 5% pirated instead of paying!" Well... the "instead of" part is doing the heavy lifting there. The options arent pirate or pay. They're pirate, pay, or not use.


In the short term, maybe. I don't think that's the case in the long run. They normalise the behaviour for others, even telling them about how to get around paying. I see strong clustering of the behaviour.

Lots of fun trying to go to a target symbol. Especially if you intentionally get yourself stuck in the lines first :D

Is this a joke I don't get? His name was Rudolf Diesel, right?


Yes, it is a fantastic joke and I laughed for ages, well played.


I have the printed versions of issue #6 and #7, I highly recommend them!

https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/pagedout


I think op meant the subjective feeling of having a system that runs in a stable manner. I don't quite follow their reasoning either (maybe the smaller changesets expose compatibility bugs before affecting general ux?), but I agree that arch was a joy for me to use and felt "stable".


If you're trying to deny internet access to a program, beware that landlock only restricts tcp sockets. Programs are free to setup udp or just raw sockets.


Well that seems like a major oversight there...what is the reasoning for that?


It's just incomplete and very early days for landlock.

Landlock requires you to commit upfront to what is "deny-default"ed but they only added a control for TCP socket bind and nothing else. So you can "default-deny" tcp bind but all the other socket paths in the kernel are not guarded by landlock. It tries really hard to have the commit of features be an integral part of the landlock API so that you can have an application able to run on multiple kernel versions that support different parts of the landlock spec. But that means that as they develop the API the older versions of landlock need to be less restrictive than newer versions otherwise programs dont work across kernel versions.

That way, a program that is very restrictive on say kernel 6.30 can also run on kernel 6.1 with less restrictions. The program keeps functioning the same way (never break userspace). The only way to do that is to have the developer tell what parts need to be restricted explicitly and you can't restrict what isn't implemented yet.

They're planning to extend it to all socket types. This is also mentioned in the linked article https://github.com/landlock-lsm/linux/issues/6

I guess if you want to run without networking at all today you can just unshare into a fresh network namespace, or maybe use seccomp strict mode


There's always a lot of caution and review that goes into a new syscall feature, because once you add a feature, there's no takebacks. All the libraries downstream from landlock rely on the kernel API being good.

There is an ongoing patch series for udp and another one for general socket control.

You can read about it on the linux-security-module mailing list.

Basically UDP is harder to hook into because it's a connectionless protocol. So bind and connect don't really work the same way.

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20241214184540.3835222-1-matthie...

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-security-module/20251118134639...


They can be disabled by firewall, iptables can match outgoing sockets by owner uid. I know it's not the same thing as landlock, still can come in handy.

And raw sockets require elevated privileges anyway iirc.


Well you need root access, or at least the CAP_NET_RAW capability to use raw sockets. UDP seems pretty bad though.


Pretty big loophole!


oof! thats terrible... :/ good to know..... what a weird restriction.


I think it's only "weird" if you don't understand why it is the case... adding UDP/raw socket support is much more difficult, and waiting to get that implemented would have much larger downsides for the project as a whole to gain any traction in the meantime.


Is this about getting to the moon quickly or is it about doing it with the help of a different rocket company?


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