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Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2048

Defaults matter immensely for two reasons:

very few people ever bother to change them unless a specific, user visible problem is occuring

due to the first point, non-defaults receive little or no testing, and are highly likely to be broken, and stay broken because the catch 22 of nobody cares so its broken, and because its broken nobody cares.

Off by default is very much the status of mitigation technologies in FreeBSD atm, its a shame that the author did not touch on this as its one area OpenBSD is miles ahead of FreeBSD in particular (mitigations on by default, breakage exposed and fixed due to it, they remain mostly unusable on FreeBSD due to them).

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To the "X86BSD" user who commented here: you are shadow banned so your comments are showing up as dead by default so most users can't see or reply to them. Just thought you should know.

For the record, if you see a shadow banned comment that shouldn't be shadowbanned, you can click on the timestamp and then click "vouch". I don't know if there are karma restrictions to this, though.

Sorry for OT, are there docs for what karma requirements are for what actions?

Unless something changed since 2015, you need karma ≥ 30 to vouch or flag things, and > 500 to downvote:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512

(Not quite "docs", but hopefully better than nothing!)

> Defaults matter immensely

I would bet that this is not the case for NetBSD users. I'm pretty sure most of them change the defaults and have a pretty good of what's running where. I'm not insinuating that all of them are security researchers, but to the very least are above-average UNIX users.

It’s worth also mentioning that as far as I am aware the OpenBSD folks also almost universally eat their own dog food. Most of not all the developers run -current. The bleeding edge. So they can find and fix any issues. I’m not sure how many of the other developers for FreeBSD or NetBSD do that.

I'm a netbsd developer and run netbsd. I think most active netbsd developers do.

a lot of former netbsd developers are still hanging around and contributing to pkgsrc while using it on OS X or linux, I don't think that's a thing to be ashamed of.

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