Hacker News Reader

c00lioon Apple Silicon Mac Pro uses PCIe switches to support all slots

Apple Silicon is low-power low-end laptop hardware. Of course their I/O capabilities are limited, because their users do not need lots of I/O. If you are looking for stuff with lots of I/O capabilities you have to buy proper server hardware.

c00lioon Cloudflare Is Having Issues

"AOL is The Internet"

sorry, just had a flashback...

c00lioon Every Signature Is Broken: Insecurity of Microsoft Office’s Ooxml Signatures

Well. Eversign holds the key and promises to only use it when you authenticated by clicking the link in the email that was sent to you personally.

eIDAS was intentionally formulated to allow such signature services, making the whole thing quite pointless from a security perspective.

c00lioon Every Signature Is Broken: Insecurity of Microsoft Office’s Ooxml Signatures

That is about a public tender, where there are "form requirements", meaning that certain documents and signatures have to conform to the required form. Usually that means "in writing, on paper, with signatures made by hand" or the new legally accepted replacement of secure electronic signatures. Sometimes it might even mean signing the paper in front of a notary, e.g. for contracts regarding the sale of real estate. But in general, outside clearly defined exceptions, contracts and declarations do not have a form requirement, so even oral agreement or "conclusive behaviour" (sign language, point-and-grunt, silently carrying an item to the cash register) are absolutely valid.

Of course, when in doubt, proving the exact content of such an unwritten contract may be hard.

c00lioon The Surprising Power of Documentation

You are absolutely right, and one should prefer languages that can give such guarantees wherever possible.

But often one doesn't have a choice. People still write software in inferior languages such as Javascript or Python, where you cannot even be sure about a return or parameter data type.

c00lioon Every Signature Is Broken: Insecurity of Microsoft Office’s Ooxml Signatures

EIDAS isn't worth the paper (pun intended) it is written on, if insecure "click a link in an email"-signature schemes such as https://help.eversign.com/hc/en-us/articles/6664408666013-Is... can claim compliance...

c00lioon The Surprising Power of Documentation

Yes? Think of a few requirements, open an editor and try it out in code. Compile, put in front of users or colleagues, get suggestions, repeat. No docs necessary whatsoever. Half the world works like this.

c00lioon The Surprising Power of Documentation

If they are clients or people responsible for any kind of budget, just phrase it as a business offer: I can watch through the 89 hours of relevant documentation in 89 hours for $165 an hour. Pricing fixed if accepted within 2 weeks of offering date.

c00lioon The Surprising Power of Documentation

Well, yes, you need to have manual or automatic checks for the presence of the template, and the correctness of the contents is often uncheckable by automated tests. But if things break and e.g. the filled-in documentation template incorrectly said "thread-safe: yes", it will be very easy to 'git blame' the culprit. That way you can at least slowly weed out the sloppy documenters, but I admit that this is tedious.

And, yes, I don't like this either and would like a better solution. But so far I didn't get any viable suggestions.

c00lioon The Surprising Power of Documentation

I am a documentation nazi. I hate it when people skip over documentation because something is obvious or trivial to them. Stuff isn't obvious or trivial to people who have to use your code.

get_height gets which height, outer or inner? Are there error values, e.g. 0 as "don't know any height"? Does it have side effects? Is it a stable and reliable part of the API or bound to change soon? Is it thread safe? Will it change any of its parameters? Who deallocates the return value? Do you need to hold a lock somwhere?

Of course it might be a good idea to group together get_height, get_width, get_diagonal and get_depth if the above is all the same for those. But having no documentation just because you think it is trivial that get_height gets some height from somewhere just means that you are sloppy and didn't think of all of the above. So your code shouldn't be touched with a 10-foot-pole imho.

My solution, which I personally hate but know of no alternative to, is a documentation template for each function asking the above questions (depending on runtime and language of course) that I give people to fill in. Until they learn...

c00lioon Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source

Totally insufficient.

People need a green outlook out of their windows, surrounding greenery is linked to various kinds of psychological goodness. Having to commute to an overcrowded, dirty, needle-ridden park or outskirt somewhere isn't an option.

And for wildlife, continuous bands of greenery and routes of migration with only small interruptions (like street crossings) are necessary. Isolated islands are almost useless.

c00lioon Algeria cuts internet nationwide during the baccalaureat exams

French farmers are the highest-subsidized in all of the EU. One even gets subsidies for having fields lay fallow or reductions in production. And French farmers are well known for their drama. Spilling tons of milk on the motorway, drowning Paris in dung, threats of beheadings. So please forgive me when I just file "letting farmers commit suicide" as yet more drama...

c00lioon Algeria cuts internet nationwide during the baccalaureat exams

Wtf? Don't they have businesses and other people using that internet access they are cutting? How do they get away with that?

c00lioon Call for Germany to scrap English lessons in primary schools

Learning French might be worthwhile since there are quite a few speakers on the planet. Although English, Chinese or Spanish are preferable in that respect.

Polish, Chech and Dutch are a waste of time, they aren't spoken anywhere but their origin regions and those are rather small to begin with...

c00lioon Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source

The examples you've shown are north american. For almost all European cities to arrive at the density of those examples, you have do lower it. By a lot.

c00lioon Call for Germany to scrap English lessons in primary schools

> Insisting on speaking English with you, thus slowing your integration.

Insist back. Repeatedly.

Germans (usually) don't do this out of malice, they do this out of (in this case, misunderstood and shortsighted) kindness and friendlyness. They try to be welcoming and make it easy for a foreigner by speaking English, thus removing the language barrier. To them, speaking English is improving your integration, at least in the short term, because you can communicate easily and efficiently right now. If you just ask once to speak German, you will be ignored since it is assumed that you are just doing this out of politeness. It is, to Germans, perfectly acceptable if you then insist on speaking German nonetheless and point out that you are not requesting German out of politeness but a desire to learn.

But the default mode for a German will always me to speak English to foreigners, never German.

Speaking slowly and simply has a similar connotation of impoliteness. If you speak slow and simplified German to a foreigner you are (in a German's mind) pointing out their flawed grasp of the language, thus offending the foreigner. Better to "compliment" the foreigner by speaking "normally", thus pointing out the foreigner's competence...

c00lioon Call for Germany to scrap English lessons in primary schools

There is no "German" school system. There are (at least) 16 different school systems in Germany. The original article glosses over that. Each state has (almost) full autonomy regarding schools, there are only voluntary (by the council of state education ministers) alignments between states. The federal government can only apply minimal directions by providing some additional funding in limited areas. And even within states there are often different kinds of public schools depending on the current political trends in that state at the time, e.g. to try out or introduce "Gesamtschule" (1-branch secondary school system) vs. 2- or 3-branch (and maybe fuse some or all secondary 3-branch "Hauptschule" and "Realschule" into "Mittelschule"), 8- vs. 9-year Gymnasium etc. It is a total mess, what might be true for one kind of school in one state might be different a few kilometers away in the next state.

So comparisons are hard, even between German states.

I also think this autonomy is one of the reasons why the overall average quality is so bad: Schools are a political issue that is used to distinguish a new state government from a previous one, and to distinguish one state from another. So with each election, you get state politicians running around like headless chickens, trying to "make things better" in schools by randomly doing "something", because what the previous government in the same state did obviously cannot be right. And what that other state governed by a different party does cannot be right either. ad inf...

c00lioon Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source

No, but you can teach people about contraception and make it easily available. Or you can not teach people about it, even teach them to avoid contraception because it is sinful, and you can erect hurdles such as prescription and point-of-sale requirements, cost, parental consent, etc.

And while voluntary contraception has a lesser effect than compulsory contraception (obviously, I'd guess), it has an effect.

c00lioon Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source

Nonsense. The inner city being a concrete hellscape isn't being helped by nicer parts on the outskirts.

How would you improve density if you aren't shrinking the space people live in?

c00lioon Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source

Of course there is. Only religious nuts do consider condoms or the pill unethical.

c00lioon Call for Germany to scrap English lessons in primary schools

Yes, but on the other hand, the same thing is currently happening, just on the scale of parents moving out of school districts with "problem schools" that are mostly determined by a higher migrant percentage. Thus accelerating the formation of migrant and lower class neighborhoods and upper class suburbs.

Providing different classes at the same school would at least allow some contact of those different groups of children, and in a similar fashion, contacts between the adult population.

c00lioon Call for Germany to scrap English lessons in primary schools

https://www.bildungsserver.de/deutsch-als-fremdsprache-in-de...

https://www.bildungsserver.de/innovationsportal/bildungplusa...

It's complicated, because everyone likes to "look good", so publications always emphasize what they are doing, not what they aren't. E.g. in NRW, there are no classes for all pupils, just in grade 5 and 6 at some schools that have been selected for higher migrant population. So there are 180 remedial classes in NRW, which is laughable for a state of over 10 million.

c00lioon Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source

Which might be ok for the surrounding land, but isn't fine for the inhabitants of the city.

c00lioon Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source

Improved density is worse for people and the environment. One should leave sufficient greens within a city for people and wildlife, and a row of trees or bushes can also easily shield traffic noise. Traffic noise which transit also produces in copious amounts.

Maybe increased density is relevant for some US cities, but European ones should definitely lower their density considerably. Most European cities are dead zones for anything but rats and pigeons, and people fare similarly badly.

c00lioon Call for Germany to scrap English lessons in primary schools

No. What you are linking to is exactly what I was talking about, and you should carefully read what you are linking to: This only applies to some states. In the typically more conservative, right-wing southern ones, pupils with deficiencies in German are required to attend German lessons. In the typically more left-wing northern states, such requirements tend to be frowned upon, and even a voluntary offering of remedial German lessons is often not provided.

Also, the agency you are linking to is responsible for recent immigrants. That is relevant because some states offer German lessons only to refugees, asylum seekers, etc. But not to children born in Germany, sometimes even with citizenship, who nonetheless do not speak sufficient German because their parents don't. This group is a significant part of the problem.

c00lioon Call for Germany to scrap English lessons in primary schools

The "brighter" distinction isn't relevant in this case, yes. It just comes up in the overall discussion about whether to have a 3-, 2- or 1-branch school system, that is whether to have different branches of schools after primary school that cater to more-brainy-less-handy or more-handy-less-brainy types.

And I don't think money is an issue. The problem with lots of immigrant children is mostly one found in cities, where there is typically more than one "second grade" per school. So you could easily, with the exact same amount of teachers, give English lessons to classes 2a, 2b, 2c, 2d and German lessons to 2e and 2f.

c00lioon Barracuda urges replacing, not patching, its email security gateways

If you are halfway competent, you do not use inband IPMI at all. IPMI belongs on a separate ethernet jack or at least a separate VLAN, connected only to a separate secured admin network. Which sysadmins can connect to, but which doesn't have connectivity to other parts of your network or the internet.

But I agree that you should filter all the relevant ports in all networks, just in case somebody screws up.

c00lioon Call for Germany to scrap English lessons in primary schools

It is a combination of an immigrant issue with the refusal to make a distinction between different pupil populations. One could e.g. teach additional remedial German lessons, or split the class and teach German to those who don't know enough German, English to the rest. But this is intentionally not done, several states emphasize identical curricula for all their pupils. The intention is to give everyone "the same chance". But this severely holds back brighter pupils as well as those who are e.g. more knowledgable in German or other subjects. Thereby lowering the overall educational outcomes, because everything is lowest-common-denominator by law.

c00lioon The Asymmetry of Open Source

Not quite. He needs _paying_ users. Those don't necessarily grow in the same fashion and under the same circumstances as non-paying users.

c00lioon Onboarding Antipatterns

That isn't just specific to onboarding, this is just normal corporate BS. Corporate values and culture are just lip service and marketing slogans. You only learn about the real values and culture later on, by what the company really does and how things are really handled. That also includes later surprises like "our culture has changed, we didn't say so, but we now only hire salespeople anymore" or whatever.