_vdpp

It’s not particularly great for that, either. Every transaction is traceable and publicly visible.

Same reason you don’t keep all your savings under the mattress. There have been a number of stories about people losing or corrupting their crypto wallets. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

What laws did they break? Legitimately curious.

I think they were arguing that it showed more promise at the time. I disagree though, I think it was simply too over-priced for the mainstream. M1 is very competitive both performance-wise and price-wise. I don’t think it will unseat the reigning champ x86 but do see them living side-by-side for a long time.

There’s a lot more to a computer than just a CPU or instruction set, and it’s borderline negligent for these companies to avoid developing standards for the surrounding ecosystem. RISC-V was initially guilty of this too, but I think they’re finally coming around and publishing some guidelines for what the rest of a RISC-V computer should look like.

I miss the days of standardized I/O ports, BIOS interrupts and memory-mapped devices at published addresses. Now, with ACPI, you practically need to run an entire VM in kernel to figure out what’s connected, and the complexity of drivers makes it very difficult for the hobbyist to interact directly with hardware.

I thought it was caused by loose floormats.

It makes iteration less error-prone too when the index of the last element is equal to the length of the array. In C it’s pretty easy to iterate past the end of an array if you use <= by mistake in a for loop, or forget a “length - 1” somewhere.

The term “504” was new to me - doctor-prescribed academic assistance, apparently.

https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/504faq.html

Is this being abused?

So, it’s better to produce less agriculture and drive up prices (affecting mostly those least able to afford it) than just desalinate?

My understanding is that proposed desalination plants in CA were shut down because of NIMBYism. Better for people to starve, I guess.

We could have practically limitless energy with solar fields and nuclear plants, build canals, aqueducts and pipelines to transport and restore all the watersheds in the west while reducing sea levels, fix deforestation, and grow abundant food for everyone, but it just requires us to stop saying “NO” to _actual_ progress.

Whenever I see salary discussions on HN I’m reminded of a saying about military medals: “There are some who deserved more that got less, and some who deserved less and got more.”

Recursive descent parsing is such a handy tool to have in one’s toolbox. Jack Crenshaw’s series of articles is where I was first exposed to it.

For people without a CS background (like me) it can be a bit intimidating to get started. Parsers tend to have their own vocabulary with terminals, productions, grammars, DFA, NFA, etc. I never took a compilers class and therefore feel like I was never admitted to the club.

Crenshaw’s articles are much more approachable and give a way for the rest of us to use this great technique.

I’m pretty ignorant of the marketing industry, but it seems like maybe you’re lumping demographic targeting in with personalization - broad categories like age, geographic location and gender are probably good ways to target advertising.

Hyper-individualized ads are just plain creepy. I’m glad to hear they’re generally ineffective at reaching their intended audience, and I’d hope that when they are effective, that the sense of invasion people feel causes them to turn the other way.

That’s an insightful take, and completely un-obvious, at least to me.

The idea of a company having its engineers livestream all their production work kind of terrifies me, but might also be kind of an interesting way to do business.

I wonder though if being able to write code and explain it at the same time is a skill like singing and playing guitar at the same time. I’ve never live-streamed though so couldn’t say. Any tips for trying it out, good reasons to do it or reasons not to?

Neurodivergent perspectives aside, it’s entirely possible that the world (well, universe) is some combination of religion and mathematic proofs.

I could probably use this. My muscle memory still reaches for “ifconfig”.

As a fish user myself, I’ll admit there is something to be said for standardization. It’s easy to poke fun at somebody for being afraid to learn something new - but with the explosion of different tools it’s becoming impossible to stay abreast of all the changes and feel proficient in anything anymore.

Oh nice! No more futzing around with GPG. You just made my day.

Sounds basically like a key store/loader like this one: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/usa/kyk13/index.htm. I have a little experience with its successor. There’s a legit purpose for it but it’s a different animal then an HSM in my opinion.

If I’m the one entering the master secret in, then the device is a glorified password manager. The point of an HSM is that nobody, not even the user, can access the secrets. I’m not saying there isn’t a use case for such a device, or that it isn’t possible, only that the security guarantees you get from it are different. The security model you’re describing is the same as someone entering their secret key in the “notes” app in a phone, leaving it in Airplane mode with FDE and wipe after a certain number of incorrect PIN entries. You can call that a “HSM”, but it’s not what I’d consider one.

How is that seed any different from a password then?

Yeah, for the paranoid you’d have an air-gapped box with your PGP tools on it that you’d plug the hardware key into for setup.

FIDO2 with resident SSH ed25519 keys works great, just make sure the OpenSSH client and server versions on all the machines you’ll be using the key on support it. I wish there was a way to sign Git commits somehow using them instead of PGP.

That’s a pretty big foul. I use a different hardware key plugged into each workstation I use and then some “roaming” keys that I can use for backup, travel, etc.

I think the whole point of HSMs is that you can’t back up (read: exfiltrate) the master secrets. Having said that, on certain Yubikeys you can store PGP keys on them, and put the same secret key on several different Yubis. If you’re relying on a hardware key it’s probably a good idea to have a backup key and make sure both are registered with whatever system you’re accessing. LastPass and GitHub at least support adding several different security keys.

I see a lot of people saying “society needs to be more comfortable with less.” I never see anyone saying “I need to be comfortable with less.”

99% of climate change effort is social signaling, the other 1% is engineers and scientists working on more efficient, cleaner technologies.

What I see here is lots of money for talks, articles, conferences, and “awareness.”

Climate conferences are always held in nice places that you have to fly to. They’d do more for the environment by taking that money and paying people to pick up trash on the side of the highway. Of course, that’s why “climate” is the problem nowadays and not “the environment.” The former is a problem for other people to solve, the latter is a problem you can do something about yourself but requires getting off the couch.

I’d argue the quality of tools is the problem. I am starting to view every new tool as just a new set of log messages I have to sort through to figure out why things aren’t working.

I spend more time trawling GitHub issues to find workarounds than I do actually using the tools.

I get that complicated problems have complicated solutions, but what I don’t like is pushing that complexity onto the developers/users. Better interfaces would make all the difference in the world.

Whoever develops the “Visual Cloud” IDE for writing scalable web apps where everything “just works” will be about $10B richer…

I’ve wondered this too. At one point I started writing a hobby programming language and explicitly added escape codes for these extra control characters to be used in string literals. (Ada has them all included in the “ASCII” package which is nice.) It seems like a no-brainer to bake them into file formats like the OP describes.

pandoc comes to mind, one of those pieces of software that “just works.” I’m not a Haskell guy but pandoc makes me wonder sometimes.

Visual Basic (cue the hecklers). Yes the language is awful. But the tool was great. I wish Microsoft (or somebody) would release a new version for full-stack apps with a drag-and-drop UI with js event handlers, easy backend framework, and a one-button “deploy to cloud” button for testing. Then a “publish” button that sets up your CI pipeline for production deployments. I feel like we’ve raised the white flag in terms of what software development should look like in 2022. Writing yaml feels like banging rocks together compared to possible alternatives.