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NeutronBoy

2,099 karma · joined February 15, 2012

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NeutronBoy··on Upgrading Autopilot: Seeing the World in Radar
> If you have a mobile phone, you are already broadcasting your location. Go to google maps, open the sidebar menu, select "your timeline".

Except you can, you know, turn that off.

NeutronBoy··on A Loud Sound Shut Down a Bank's Data Center for 10 Hours
I don't think of the DCs I've seen have breathing apparatus around - they rely on strictly enforced signin sheets (so when the alarm goes off, a person outside the room immediately looks to see how many people are in the DC), and a 30-45 second delay to evacuate the DC before the suppression system activates.
NeutronBoy··on Ask HN: How would you stay updated with all the engineering blogs?
Or Feedly https://feedly.com
NeutronBoy··on TLS stats from 1.6B connections to mozilla.org
> The stat I was most curious about is in 9th position: SSLv3 with DES-CBC3-SHA, which accounts for 0.2% of the traffic, is a signature from Windows XP pre-sp3 clients, when SChannel didn't support TLSv1 or AES. 0.2% may seem insignificant, unless you're one of these users and the only way you will browse the internet is by first downloading Firefox from mozilla.org.

It's an interesting problem - do you disable insecure/depreciated cipher suites, with the rationale it's an insecure method to download Firefox, knowing that it's people using outdated OSs trying to get Firefox and have no alternative?

- If you disable it, these people won't have any channel to get Firefox on their machine, and arguably be less safe when browsing the internet.

- If you leave it enabled, these people are still vulnerable at (arguably) the most vulnerable point (obtaining a new browser), but then being less vulnerable going forward.

NeutronBoy··on Teens Who Say No to Social Media
It's a reference to an early 90s British sitcom (that I never thought I'd see on HN)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_Up_Appearances

NeutronBoy··on Why I Don’t Hire Ex-Google Employees [2015]
> Almost all of the people I have run across suffer severely from the Dunning-Kruger effect

Sidenote: Is there a name for a phenomenon for people who are aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect to believe themselves to be immune to it? Like a meta-Dunning-Kruger effect?

NeutronBoy··on 43M passwords hacked in Last.fm breach
Soundcloud launched in 2008. Spotify launched in 2008. Only a year or so after Facebook opened signups to anyone IIRC. Not exactly sure what the impact on Last.fm would have been but it evidently wasn't good.
NeutronBoy··on Academic Torrents: A distributed system for sharing enormous datasets
Question about your first point - doesn't it depend on the use case?

What would happen if I wanted to get a list of datasets and papers? (maybe in this case it's nonsensical, but it's a problem with some other APIs I've used and I've never figured a good way to work around it)

GET /apiv2/entries?cat=5&cat=6 vs 2 separate requests and client logic to combine results?

NeutronBoy··on FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System
At least I know what my options are to recover from that. When I tried to resolve my ZFS issues, no tools existed to try help recover because it wasn't a failure mode that had been considered as an option apparently.
NeutronBoy··on NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender
It also wipes the device IIRC, so you can't fastboot unlock a device you found on the footpath and gain access to it's data.
NeutronBoy··on FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System
I used ZFS in two production instances a few years ago on Solaris, and had two instances of a bug that totally corrupted the superblock on each drive, meaning that all data was gone with no way to recover.

Now I'm back to HW RAID, LVM, and ext4, which works a treat, and I'll be using that until I have more faith in ZFS.

NeutronBoy··on Essential Electron
And the concept of 'web apps' barely existed.
NeutronBoy··on Systemd-logind must be restarted to prevent delay
It looks like it's an issue with dbus queueing connections, and systemd's interaction triggering an edge case.

Are we really just posting bugs in widely-used software now?

NeutronBoy··on My favorite day of the month is bank statement day at my company
The confirmation letter was a few years ago so it may have been updated.

The legislation was focused on 'debt' based notifications - e.g. the way the existing laws were written, a paper-based notification was the legally recognised way to notify someone of their debt obligations (i.e. credit card statement)

NeutronBoy··on Rare implementation of RC5/RC6 in ShadowBrokers dump connects them to Equation
If you're paranoid enough to believe that the most likely explanation of this is cold war state actors and conspiracies, then you should have no trouble believing that said state actor can track a throwaway account on HN.
NeutronBoy··on My favorite day of the month is bank statement day at my company
In Australia that's the case - paper statements are mandated, and if you want a paperless statement there's a bunch of stuff banks have to do including formally recording your preference to have paperless statements and sending a letter once a year or so to notify you of your recorded preference.
NeutronBoy··on ​Attack on Australian Census site didn’t register on global DDoS sensors
You're supposed to answer with respect to August 9 - it's a snapshot of every person in Australia as of that night.
NeutronBoy··on Show HN: Give 7B people an instant physical address
While I get your point, the XML document includes so much more information than the JSON example. Encoding, version, data types, 'scale', response length, etc.

Please try not to make any false equivalences :)

NeutronBoy··on Claims that China's Transit Elevated Bus Is a Scam
> Easier to just build a second level road.

Lol wut? Easier to build a second level road than put a few gantries in to prevent vehicles over a particular height enter a road? I think not.

This bus isn't going to be used as a general bus that drives around the city. It's more likely going to be used down a single stretch of road, acting as a shuttle from one end to the other so people don't get stuck in traffic on it.

NeutronBoy··on Cat People vs. Dog People
You'll probably find that they didn't use any data that's not available to 'public' viewing.

(Would be interesting to hear about their sampling methodology)

NeutronBoy··on Lithium-air batteries: Their time has come
With 'safety limiters' that you can reprogram or disable in about 5 seconds with no other tools.
NeutronBoy··on Are Fantasy Football and Baseball More Based on Skill Than the Real Sports?
They're basically saying that in RL sport, the skill level at that top level is so close that 'chance' has a significant impact on the outcomes. However, the skill gap between 2 random players of fantasy sport is so large that chance has very little impact.
NeutronBoy··on Police had woman’s Facebook deactivated during standoff
Agreed - why would social media be treated any differently than disconnecting phone lines or mobile phones during standoffs and negotiations?
NeutronBoy··on Atom 1.9 and 1.10 beta
> You don't park your car at red lights and turn off the engine, then complain about how long it takes to pull away when the lights turn green.

You didn't, until car startup time was optimized enough that modern cars do turn off the engine at red lights to save resources, then turn it back on when you put your foot down.

NeutronBoy··on Ask HN: Add “www.” to my domain, or not?
If your TLD is recognisable (e.g. .com, .net, .org) then no need - people will recognise it as a domain.

However, if you've got a new-fangled TLD (.recipies, .shoes, etc) then use 'www' - without context, people aren't going to recognise [redacted] as a URL, but they will recognise [redacted] as one.

NeutronBoy··on Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?
> You're making something that others can enjoy and that you can look at and appreciate. It can live on when you've passed. When you play a game, you do enjoy the experience, but at the end of it all, you've not created anything of value.

So you spend your time creating something for other people to consume, then note that the act of consuming it is useless?

NeutronBoy··on Ireland jails three top bankers over 2008 banking meltdown
No, that's the role of the ratings agency who rates the assets.
NeutronBoy··on Solving the Dating Problem with the SENPAI Protocol [pdf]
> Unfortunately, this protocol is completely dependent on the trustworthiness of Trent, as they receive all of Alice and Bob’s information and are entirely free to manipulate the results of the protocol. If Trent has been compromised, perhaps by a nation-state adversary, Alice and Bob’s love life will be completely in the hands of a malicious attacker

Beautifully done.

NeutronBoy··on Nexus phones now identify suspected spam callers
> I think it's ridiculous you have to have a Nexus phone to get this capability. Anyone with a Google account and Android should be able to get this functionality.

It's probably part of the Dialler app, which many other manufacturers replace with their own application.

NeutronBoy··on Windows Hello face recognition is vulnerable to the Jedi mind trick
And IIRC it's tied to a single machine, so you need physical access for it to be any use.
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