HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Sahhaese

782 karma · joined November 27, 2018

submissionscomments
Sahhaese··on Yoda conditions
This would achieve the same but is far more readable:

   while(status != SUCCESS) {
      status = syscall(...);
      // do something with status
   }
Sahhaese··on The Horror of Microsoft Teams
That brings me back. All .exe were blocked.

However it turned out that you could rename them .bat or .cmd and they would execute just fine.

I think Doom 2 multiplayer was extra fun because of the added need to be aware not just of in-game enemies but also the need to be aware of the teacher and be ready to instantly quit at any moment.

Sahhaese··on Steam Windows Client Local Privilege Escalation 0day
You can't click through a UAC prompt to elevate if you don't have local administrator rights.
Sahhaese··on Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry
It's nothing like that because in that case, the latter directly sampled the former.
Sahhaese··on Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language
"Foreign language" is well understood as a concept and is used in the opening sentence. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language . Arguing otherwise is just arguing for the sake of it.
Sahhaese··on Steam Windows Client Local Privilege Escalation 0day
I've mentioned before how disappointed I've been to watch hackerone move from a platform helping responsible disclosure to a platform helping companies hide vulnerabilities.

It used to be that even accepted bugs and paid bounties would be publically disclosed. It helped me learn a ton just from reading the (partially redacted) bug reports. Over time they became more and more redacted until they were left entirely pointless.

To mark a bug as N/A, declare it 'not fix' but then say also it can't be disclosed is precisely why responsible disclosure is a thing. Companies can't have their cake and eat it.

Sahhaese··on Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language
I'm not sure why your comments are attracting downvotes; from the title I assumed programming language.
Sahhaese··on Cybersecurity Visuals Challenge
I don't have anything to contribute to the challenge but this is very much needed and I hope this challenge produces a richer visual language.

Here's the BBC's "cyber attacks" page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cp3mvpdp1r2t/cyber-attacks

Predictably the very first picture is a guy in a hoodie. In all the stories they clearly struggle for images. They picture instead the targets or in some cases resort to people holding laptops or phones or this garbage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-48351510

Sahhaese··on Implement mechanism to wait on any of several futexes
This is my complaint about the styling issue, that the important technical notes get lost in the 'noise' of styling issues.
Sahhaese··on Implement mechanism to wait on any of several futexes
Depressing to see reviewers waste review bandwidth bringing up issues such as "wasted newline" and "incorrect comment format". Do kernel developers not use auto-formatters?
Sahhaese··on Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills
In the UK there have been effects, but it's too early to tell the full picture. Many drinks cut down their sugar content to avoid the tax and full-sugar drinks are often excluded from 'meal deals' (or the levy is explicity added, e.g. McDonalds' meals) so I would expect that people have be switching to diet versions in those cases. The Uk is pretty small so things can be changed at a whole country level more easily.

In the US? Maybe, jury is still out: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=696709717

Sahhaese··on Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills
I refuse to buy into the idea that ecological destruction is benelovent because we couldn't otherwise support such a drastic level of poverty and inequality.

The same argument could be made for rainforest deforestation, saying it's a good thing because it's feeding the poor!

Nonsense, tax the externality and then give back and support the worst affected through taxation or aid if needed. Inequality is at a record high, perhaps it wouldn't be so high if we made everything more expensive and then taxed the rich to pay for it.

Sahhaese··on Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills
Sure, let's do that. And the money raised could be re-invested in technology / r&d to improve and cheapen recycling.
Sahhaese··on Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills
A potential "solution" is to price in the externality and tax the use of plastic in manufacturing. Then the market can decide whether it's "worth" using plastic for disposable water bottles or food wrapping.
Sahhaese··on Cities: Skylines Is Turing Complete
As someone who played the base game when it came out, it was a complete game at the time and doesn't require DLC to be fun.
Sahhaese··on I Cancelled My Amazon Prime
Oh, Prime in the UK comes with free next day delivery on everything.
Sahhaese··on I Cancelled My Amazon Prime
There's a significant difference between "next day" and "2-3 days", and the valuable different is not getting it sooner, it's knowing exactly which day you'll get it.
Sahhaese··on Building a hackable editor in the browser
It's funny you should mention google maps, as that's recently regressed to semi-unusable in firefox.
Sahhaese··on What if you couldn’t program with loops?
Half the people here are discussing the headline not the article because people don't read articles, they read the headline and jump to the comments.

In this case it drowns out discussion of the article because the article is terrible. It doesn't start with the code as it would look like with loops, but instead says "Let's pretend you don't have loops" and then refactors the logic which has nothing to do with loops, then puts the loop back in.

The same refactoring would be just as clear with loops, and in fact the version without the refactor might be even more clear.

A static function which is only called from a single place isn't always more clear than having the logic inside the loop, especially if all that is left from the original function is the loop.

Sahhaese··on I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
You lack imagination.

I'm a professional software developer and I open excel every day.

Let's say someone emails me a list of figures and I want to quickly add them up?

Sure, I could write an incantation in awk but I can't then see if it's wrong because maybe on one row they 'accidentally' put an extra blank column in before the number by marking it with a letter, or there being an extra tab or whatever might cause that.

It's far quicker and less error prone to pop open excel, paste it in and then sum the column, and most importantly there is clear visual feedback if that doesn't work. In awk or a programming environment you'd just either get an incorrect figure and never know it was incorrect, or you'd get an error (e.g. trying to add a letter and number) and then have to debug what should have been an instant thing.

Excel shines for doing one-shot data processing.

Sahhaese··on Apple disables Walkie Talkie app due to eavesdropping vulnerability
I'm guessing you're not in the EU then? I see this everywhere.
Sahhaese··on Apple disables Walkie Talkie app due to eavesdropping vulnerability
This is all you see when clicking techcrunch articles:

https://imgur.com/a/mId1Jfi

If you "manage" your settings to block everything it'll just be back next time.

As a consequence, I haven't read a techcrunch article since June 2018.

Sahhaese··on Zoom fixes major Mac webcam security flaw with emergency patch
This is why I consider bug bounty programs problematic, because they've been co-opted from a system to manage responsible disclosure to a system to contain and manage non-disclosure.
Sahhaese··on Instagram's War on Bullying
> could have

But they didn't, that's a detail you can't just conveniently drop to argue in the abstract.

Sahhaese··on Nobody talks about the real reason to use Tabs over Spaces
We discussed this 5 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341354

Sahhaese··on [dead]
The article headline doesn't match the article, which is a fairly poor essay that the "Senior developer role is dying".

I suspect people are upvoting this based on the headline alone because it's not a well written essay and doesn't back up its assertions.

Sahhaese··on Logitech keyboards and mice vulnerable to extensive cyber attacks
This is actually interesting from the perspective of fairness in e-sports. It's been rumoured that professional players could "cheat on LAN" by side-loading cheat software through modified hardware supplying custom 'drivers'.

If the hardware itself has vulnerabilities it could be used to mask the cheat loading and make it harder for the host PCs to detect if any of that side-loading is happening.

Sahhaese··on YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube
It's not automatically legal to carry a blade under 3 inches,

(2)Subject to subsection (3) below, this section applies to any article which has a blade or is sharply pointed except a folding pocketknife.

(3)This section applies to a folding pocketknife if the cutting edge of its blade exceeds 3 inches.

The three inches is clarification around folded pocketknives, it's not blanket authorisation to carry knives less than that length.

Sahhaese··on YouTube's ban on “hacking techniques” threatens to shut down infosec YouTube
That's not actually true, the law states, "Without a reasonable excuse", so any reasonable excuse is fine. The idea you'd need to be "certified" to carry a knife is fiction to drive an agenda.
Sahhaese··on The Agile process of software development is often perverted by politics (2016)
It could have been phrased as, "The COO changed her mind often enough" and still made the point without drawing particular attention to her gender.

Phrasing it as, "The COO was a woman who changed her mind often enough" draws a lot more attention to her gender rather than the issue of lack of direction.

I'm not normally one to point out this kind of thing, but it stuck out to me too.

Page 1 of 4Next →