Hacker News Reader

arantiuson Show HN: Command Line Challenge

challenge "just the files" description says "Print all files in the current directory". You mean "print the names of all files ..."

Lots of the challenges have awkward/ambiguous wording like this.

(If you'd like more detailed feedback, email me -- this username @gmail)

arantiuson Amazon has made its first drone delivery to an actual customer

In my experience in NYC, most buildings have some mechanical and some recreational space somewhere on their roofs and/or balconies. Sometimes this is private recreational space, sometimes shared, sometimes a little of both.

arantiuson PoisonTap – Exploits locked computers over USB

Not if you can get access twice. A variety of "evil maid" style attacks exist. For example, imagine I replace your FDE's bootloader with a version that appears identical, except it also logs your passphrase. Then I come back, read the passphrase, decrypt, and win.

For scarier thoughts, imagine I know how to control the Intel Management Engine, and attack that instead. That's not covered by FDE.

arantiuson LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

I did roughly the same thing twelve years ago, with even less security built in (hey, I was young(er)):

https://bookmarklets.arantius.com/password+maker+bookmarklet

I did not market it so heavily. It has the same problems, most importantly rotation. As soon as you want to rotate one site's password the only option is to change the "master" password, but now you need to remember which site uses which master password, and your utility is gone. The random site requirements, as mentioned, is also a big deal.

arantiuson More awful IoT stuff

You're only required to distribute sources if you modify them _and_ distribute the resulting binaries right? Is there any evidence that the busybox and/or dnsmasq binaries are anything besides the normal stock installation? The customization is in other binaries that need not necessarily be GPL it seems.

arantiuson DNA-Free Dining Made Easy

How are there so many "Must be about GMO labeling? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" top comments without any references to e.g.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

"Last year, I wrote about an Oklahoma State University survey indicating that over 80 percent of Americans support “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA.” ... Obviously, such DNA labels would be absurd. Nearly all food contains DNA..."

arantiuson Common shell script mistakes (2008)

Is it "more readable" or "more familiar to you"? They're both familiar to me and I find them equally readable.

Concision gets you fewer places to possibly have a bug, and fewer things to possibly miss/misunderstand.

arantiuson 10/10 job application app

Super-e-c-l-enter. (Could probably get away with just "e" but habit and all that.)

arantiuson SSH for Fun and Profit

This is of course specifically how to reveal these features in the OpenSSH client. If you're using another client (e.g. PuTTY) there's a different way to get to these features (click the menu).

arantiuson Searching for USB Power Supplies That Won't Explode

FYI: "mAh" or milli-amp-hours is a unit of capacity, in this case it makes no sense. Perhaps you mean just "mA", a unit of current, which does make sense in context?

arantiuson Amazon Echo Is Magical. It’s Also Turning My Kid into an Asshole

See a recent episode of The Allusionist ( http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/please ) discussing the difference between American and British English, when it comes to the word "please". Brits use it way more than we do. We both think the other is weird (rude, condescending, hoity-toity, etc.) as a result of the difference.

arantiuson Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14316 Released

I'm not OP but sometimes I'll do a high def video render that's only practical to run overnight. If I lose several hours of processing because Windows decided to reboot itself somewhere in the middle of the night I won't be a happy camper.

arantiuson Naughty words: What makes swear words so offensive?

Bob: Wash the dishes! Fred: Fuck you! Bob: Wash the dishes and fuck you!

arantiuson I should be able to opt out an app's feature based on the permission required

There's only one external storage. And in an attempt (irony alert!) to make permissions "easy" for users to understand, some Android people decided to call the permission that grants access to external storage "Photos". Because that's where the photos are stored, and it's sometimes/often the most important/sensitive thing there.

arantiuson Why I stopped using StartSSL (Hint: it involves a Chinese company)

Thanks! A hands-off (on?) manual client is what I always wanted. I've just finally used Let's Encrypt for the first time, with manuale.

arantiuson Why is the latest AMD hardware unsupported in libreboot?

From the Intel section ( https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme )

> If the manifest isn't signed by a specific Intel key, the boot ROM won't load and execute the firmware and the ME processor core will be halted.

So if I just overwrite a few bytes of flash on my motherboard (i.e. corrupt the signature), the whole thing is disabled? It says the _ME_ core is halted. But the main CPU continues to run? Are there side effects? Why is this not a solution?

Also: is there more (probably community reverse-engineered) documentation on the ME's specifics?

arantiuson dd built-in progress introduced in coreutils 8.24

What is the behavior of gettext() if the message is not found?

(This question is the answer to your question.)

arantiuson Tabs or Spaces? The Top Starred Repositories in GitHub Analysed

Google's current Python style guide absolutely calls for two spaces. All of the languages I'm familiar with (at Google) do this. Except golang ...

arantiuson Nintendo Controller Teardown

Couldn't help but notice this. The next page down, in the image, they get it right. And are similarly loose with their terminology throughout the article.

arantiuson Teensy weensy crypto

Wouldn't Solitaire [1] be a better argument (of this vein) against banning encryption? It's reasonably strong and doesn't even require a computer. Much more practically memorized.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html

arantiuson Judge rules on taxi industry lawsuit: Compete with Uber or die

It's not about amount of time, it's order of operations.

Taxi: already on the street, driving around, I try to get flag one down by essentially luck. Pre-arranged: I contact you, tell you where I am, you specifically set out to pick me up.

Pre-arranged is exactly how traditional car services have always worked. The fact that improved technology means pre-arranged also can be fast is a good thing.

arantiuson Monopoly Man – the same image uploaded to Imgur 3.2M times?

I agree, I've seen lots of fun things like this on the internet. But good ideas are hard to come by. I did something like this a few years back, for favicons:

http://tech.arantius.com/favicon-survey

arantiuson The Beauty of Roots (2011)

At least the bulk of the article was discussing data explicitly described as being generated by Mathematica, which is capable of arbitrary precision. It seems just as likely that this mode was used.

arantiuson Mitro Releases a New Free and Open Source Password Manager

My guess is they're using the standard approach for deriving an encryption key from a password: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2

arantiuson A Tipless Restaurant is a Well-Run Restaurant?

> it's kind of like when people are surprised that a standard way of saying "hi" in North America is "how are you?" even though the person doesn't actually wanna hear it and will be weirded out if you reply honestly.

A thousand times this! I've had a lot of personal trouble with the long and drawn out experience of learning that the right answer to "How are you?" is to _lie_ and just say "Good, and you?", regardless of how I really feel.

arantiuson Level 3 are now hijacking failed DNS requests for ad revenue on 4.2.2.x

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy?hl=en

"We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information."

arantiuson Expanding Context in Diffs

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

arantiuson Moving forward on improving HTTP's security

Recently learned of http://convergence.io/ (talk: http://youtu.be/UawS3_iuHoA ) which sounds quite promising. It's not perfect (private, non routable sites?) but removes the certificate authority oligopoly from the picture without reducing security (AFAICT).

arantiuson Moving forward on improving HTTP's security

These ideas are inextricably linked! If you cannot verify the identity of the other end, you cannot verify that a man in the middle is decrypting, monitoring or altering, and then passing the data on to the real endpoint.

arantiuson Why the last 20% of work takes the same amount of time as the first 80%

I believe you need to include arriving at your location and finding your directions were wrong/GPS was out of date/were given the wrong address, and need to re-do most of that last 20% drive again.