Hacker News Reader

afitnerdon Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

Thanks for this writeup! It seems like #1 was the real weakness. Have you identified how the attacker was able to get write access to tj-actions/changed-files? Did this discovery result in any changes to how people can contribute to the project?

afitnerdon Mexico issues legal threat to Google

Mexico’s claim is that the US doesn’t have claim to the entire body of water. It should technically show Gulf of America at the top where the US border extends to and also show Gulf of Mexico below that.

That said the whole thing is childish and stupid and a distraction from the massive grift being perpetrated on the American people right now.

afitnerdon A 20-year-old small company

On top of that, y’all are great in the community. You’ve hosted my tech meetup before and I know you host others as well.

afitnerdon Show HN: Habby – A straightforward bullet journal with habit tracking

Really like the aesthetic. I’d love to be able to set custom text for a yes/no habit. Myself and a bunch of friends do daily “RPM” - read, pray, meditate. I’d capture that at one yes/no habit

afitnerdon 1989 Networking: NetWare 386

I set up a local job recruiters network with netware 386 running over arcnet (2 mbps) in 1989.

afitnerdon Use a work journal

I use the resettable rocket wave notebook for my work journal.

Aside from reinforcing ideas and helping figure things out on paper, it’s perfect to jump back into a task that’s been interrupted.

The other trick with it is to keep a running todo list from the back page in.

The moment a disruptive thought pops into my head that I need to revisit, I flip to the back, capture it, and flip back to where I was.

afitnerdon Ask HN: What single line of code would you put on a programming shirt?

Bash fork bomb. In fact, I have the tshirt.

:(){ :|:& };:

Good explanation here: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/understanding-bash-fork-bomb/

afitnerdon Real-Time Settlers of Catan

Tokaido duo Splendor duel A little wordy Patchwork Jaipur Sky Team

afitnerdon TOTP Authenticator for PalmOS

This is cool. I wrote a TOTP authenticator for the ArduBoy: https://developer.okta.com/blog/2018/08/30/build-one-time-pa...

afitnerdon What Is OIDC?

Friends don’t let friends build auth. Use open source, standards compliant solutions if you don’t trust a company. Just don’t reinvent the wheel.

afitnerdon Don't waste money on a math coprocessor they said

One of my first paid jobs was in the summer of my college freshman year, 1988, I did some consulting work for an insurance salesman. He had an ibm 8086 based machine and it was taking 15 hours to run an insurance estimate.

I got him an 8087 math coprocessor and it reduced the time to about 10 minutes. I think it cost around $500 at the time.

I made my first $50 in tech, an his business was demonstrably improved. What a thrill!

afitnerdon Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

This is a really great summary (with reference links) of the problem.

As an anecdotal experience that supports this: I’ve ordered products from Instagram ads exactly twice, with the same experience in each case: a higher quality, lower price alternative was available elsewhere. And, in both cases, the products shipped from overseas and took weeks to arrive.

afitnerdon A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

In 1988, I had a friend in my computer science program who got some local notoriety when he made a spell checker for DOS. It was a terminate and stay resident program and it used a tiny bit of the available 640K of RAM.

We were all pretty amazed by it. He got some seed money to start a business and then was crushed like a year later when it was just built into wordstar.

afitnerdon Elon Musk sueing ‘disgruntled employee’ who claimed his tweets are boosted

Wil Wheaton said it best: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0sVnpeaG5bL...

afitnerdon Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

On tmobile, in the US, it’s definitely worse. I usually leave the cell settings to LTE on my iPhone. Occasionally, I’ll switch to 5G Auto. When I get the “uc” symbol next to the 5G, it’s often faster, but not always. I’d say I have a 30% hit rate on 5G where the speed is noticeably better. But as others have said, often I can’t get a web page to loaf even with the phone reporting full signal strength.

afitnerdon CEO Jack Altman’s email to Lattice employees

“Employees will have up to 3 years to exercise their options post-exit.”

That’s pretty remarkable, actually

afitnerdon A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry

forgive me if this is a dumb question, but at some point of proliferation, won't wind turbines have an impact on wind flow?

afitnerdon Red Hat Expecting X.org to “Go into Hard Maintenance Mode Fairly Quickly”

Nvidia's lack of support for Wayland really hurts linux desktop adoption.

It's especially bad new if there's no more x.org support

afitnerdon Show HN: I built a 2FA token from a Gameboy clone

Love that idea. Although, the original Gameboy is a little bulky to carry around ;)

afitnerdon [dead]

Let's radio tag remote employees and track their whereabouts.

We can install heart rate monitors to infer their level of activity.

Let's have them type: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 into the keyboard every hour to make sure they're awake.

afitnerdon A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving

Seems busted now - clicking the "I think I know" button does nothing. I thought the answer was:

Let the first number be x. If x is 0, then the second number is 1. Otherwise, the second number is two times the absolute value of x. The third number is 2 times the value of the second number.

afitnerdon Poll: How do you manage your passwords?

I use (and created) the Passable Google Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/passable/bpkpmidmf...

I also take advantage of any service that uses 2-factor auth and use HDE OTP on iOS

afitnerdon Surfly - Surf together on the web

It breaks my site. Dropdowns don't work. And, when logging in, it grabbed the input and threw the username and password into the url.

afitnerdon Find out if your iphone UDID was compromised

Thanks for info. I've updated the information on the page.

afitnerdon Find out if your iphone UDID was compromised

precisely. The cat is already out of the bag. But, my site will not be a vector of "infection" in spreading the existing information or any new information.

afitnerdon Find out if your iphone UDID was compromised

The difference is that if my site is compromised or if someone is listening in on the network traffic, no one will be able to take the database of hashed UDIDs and get the original UDIDs.

afitnerdon Find out if your iphone UDID was compromised

I think you may be missing the point. I already have all of the 1,000,001 original UDIDs posted by AntiSec. I don't need to go through all that hassle you describe. I wrote the script that generated the hashes from the original UDIDs.

The point is that in order to stop people from passing their UDIDs around the net they way some other checking services have made them do, this service does not have any of the original UDID's on local storage. Even if my site is compromised, it will not further the spread of UDID information.

Of course, you do have to trust that what I am saying is the truth. Anyone can choose NOT to submit their (hashed) UDID to my site.

afitnerdon Find out if your iphone UDID was compromised

The udids have already all been hashed. It is the hashed values only that are stored on the site. The only piece of information sent to the site is a hashed udid (the udid is hashed on the browser before any information is sent over the wire).