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circular_logic

154 karma · joined April 4, 2016

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circular_logic··on Using an engineering notebook
sorry thats was my phone autocomplete, was supposed to say codebase
circular_logic··on Using an engineering notebook
These are the things I add in when adding in a new usecase to a codename:

- Expansion of the acceptance criteria into small steps.

- Any clarifications to what we are making

- Anything I don't understand yet so i can chase up someone about it later

- As I read through the code I write up possible refactoring opertunties. (I find this a lot better than adding todos as you can skim though the list closer to the end and address things that matter most first. Often the code that seems silly at first has a decent reason to be that way with the full context knowen)

All of this helps me pull the right threads without having to switch context throughout the day

circular_logic··on Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure
I have tried to point out that poorly implemented or non contructive security controls reduce system availability. As employes are not able to get to the information they need in a timely manner.

But it's been a dead end to many an argument. For some the underlying issue is a refusal to accept that product usability and security are not mutually exclusive and a difficult to use system just leeds to grey IT in the org.

The most odd reply I have received was pedantics on the definition of security availability, i.e.,

"Ensuring data and network resources are accessible to authorized users when needed"

Beacause it contains the word "authorized" any controls for authorisation can therefore never affect availability as they have to be authorized before we can consitter it an impediment to availability...

If anyone has a reply better than that's ridiculous, please help me here

circular_logic··on I found a backdoor into my bed
You're right it would be nice to see some more detail. Perhaps it requires sending a custom update when it reaches out via ssh or it does something wild like opening a reverse shell
circular_logic··on UK air traffic control meltdown
What I still don't understand is how flight plans get approved?

In my mind they would only be approved once all involved countries review and process the plan. That way we don't need this ridiculous idea of failing safe on the whole uk airspace for a single error.

That day a single flight plan could have been rejected, perhaps just resubmitted and the bug quietly fixed in the background

circular_logic··on What happens when you leak AWS credentials and how AWS minimizes the damage
This looks to be possible via this guide https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/iam-restrict-calls-ip-ad...
circular_logic··on Google Ad Disguising Itself as www.gimp.org
Another variation is for scammers to update the number on google maps to their premium number. Calling it still forwards to the real call center. You can often spot people complaining about a free call to X org costing them hundreds of dollars in google reviews of the company.
circular_logic··on Making Open Source economy more viable with dual license collectives
I think these collectives would end up behaving much like the music industry in terms of chasing licence fees, suing orgs for infringement, and having too much power on what cut was handed down to developers.

Personally I would rather software be Free than have a unavoidable middle man taking a % cut.

circular_logic··on Waymo will start testing self-driving cars in New York City
That sounds like it would further increase car dependence in city's, how you see city's improving in this scenario?
circular_logic··on Three ex-US intelligence officers admit hacking for UAE
Agreed.

It's one thing to teach general skills and another to help do the actual hacking

If they are being guided through the actual hacking then that's saying that only the driver in pair programming is producing code

circular_logic··on Wealthy people are renouncing American citizenship
While that is the smart way to go. The USA is one of the few country's that will allow you to become stateless.[1] But I am not sure why you would ever do that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renunciation_of_citizenship#St...

circular_logic··on Wealthy people are renouncing American citizenship
Interesting facts about renouncing American citizenship:

- There is renunciation fee that has to be paid and currently stands at $2,350 (the highest in the world).[1]

- A final tax return will sill need to be filed. [1]

- An Expatriation tax is payable if [..] Your net worth is $2 million or more on the date of your expatriation. you will be treated as having disposed of your assets the day before your expatriation and will be subject to capital gains tax.

- The highest capital gains tax bracket in the USA is 20% [2]

Now there will be ways this is avoided but it would seem that the IRS is trying very hard make this process unappealing

[1] https://www.expatnetwork.com/how-to-renounce-us-citizenship-...

[2] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/capital-gains-tax-r...

circular_logic··on Moreutils – Unix tools that nobody thought to write (2012)
I wondered this too so looked at the man page [1]

> Unlike a shell redirect, sponge soaks up all its input before opening the output file. This allows constricting pipelines that read from and write to the same file.

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/1/sponge

circular_logic··on GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
Git being a cli and "main" being shorter to type might help motivate those that are not convinced by the histoial arguments.
circular_logic··on Why is the dropout rate so high for Computer Science?
A Professor in 101 put it as: "Programming is just a tool, CS is a study that just so happens to use that tool now and then."

Without reading through every year's syllabus you will come across supprises (and very few students seem to do this)

Its expectation versus reality, CS seems to be taught very differently depending on where you go ie different levels of maths focus is a big one, another is if they teach "reality" like common industry tools, software development methodologies, software ethics etc

Often there can a problem with elitism "this course is for knowledge, not your career" that changes many students minds on if this huge amount of debt is worth it vs just finding a job right away.

circular_logic··on Deploys at Slack
If you make your application stateless and have it in a container then there are many managed services out there that can do this for you. For example, in AWS there is fargate and EKS.
circular_logic··on Deploys at Slack
Their deployment UI looks nice but this feels like they made their own wheel here in order to keep their In-place upgrade method over something such immutable infrastructure using pre-existing deployment systems.

I wonder if this was ruled out for some reason or perhaps for a large company with people dedicated to deploying this doesn't matter. One example, as they are on AWS autoscaling groups with prebuilt AMI's could have been used to roll new machines instead of copying files to the server.

circular_logic··on SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns
it does on the hangouts for business (ie google meet) but then only for up to 4 other users
circular_logic··on My Startup Failed, So We Open-Sourced the Tech
As other commenters have pointed out linking may still make your software GPL. However, there is still some debate on this [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lin...

circular_logic··on Instagram took down private unofficial APIs via DMCA
If this developer had reversed engineered some documentation about the private API could that also receive a DMCA?
circular_logic··on How Shopify Manages API Versioning and Breaking Changes
Glad to see that Shopify has better API versioning on their mind. When I used there API a few years ago, it was one of the worst APIs to depend on. To the point, we had to architect our system to alert us for unannounced breaking API changes so we could fix and replay the JSON back.

- Moving JSON fields in and out of nestings didn't seem to be counted as a breaking change.

- Changes were rarely announced, and there was never a changelog as to what had changed (they look to have started one starting 2018 [1])

- When we contacted support about a brake, they would often be surprised.

- Often the only sign there would be a change would be that new fields would start to show up before a larger change.

All this would happen every few months. Reading this article I can start to see the reasons why this was happening.

[1] https://developers.shopify.com/changelog?filter=all

circular_logic··on What Happened in the UK Blackouts?
That makes me wonder, if you were standing next to these turbines would you be able to here them slow down?
circular_logic··on Stop Calling It “Military-Grade Encryption”
I tried googling "permanently staffed guaranteed action point (GAP)." With no results.

Is this the militarys mitigation of the two generals problem?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem

circular_logic··on Malicious apps infect 25M Android devices with 'Agent Smith' malware
DNS66, Works without root by creating a local VNM that it then runs its own DNS (with blocklists) on. End results are all the banner adds on most apps will not show up etc.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/

circular_logic··on Google’s robots.txt parser is now open source
The first commit has the extra comment `PiperOrigin-RevId: 254932939`

This may[0] be because it is exported from there monorepo

-[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14811937

circular_logic··on Point it, call it, get it right (2018)
This reminds me of somthing I tend to do when paring on an ops-like task. I will point and speek the resource name that I am about to delete or CMD I am about to run and get my pair to conferm before proceeding. Honestly makes tasks (espishaly production tasks) a lot less nerve racking. Would recommend it.
circular_logic··on DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
Facebook looks to be willingly not following most of GDPR https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
circular_logic··on Popular Google Play store apps are abusing permissions and committing ad fraud
> BuzzFeed News manually identified apps that requested a high number of permissions, including those assigned as “dangerous,”

A useful automated tool for this is 'Exodus' it will scan APKs for trackers and permissions and provide a web report.

Here is a report for one of the apps mentioned. https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/15627/

circular_logic··on Facebook showed me my data is everywhere and I have absolute no control over it
I tried googling for this but turned up short. Do you have a source for this?
circular_logic··on Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords
We're they confused, angry or both?
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