Hacker News Reader

f2fon Oil plummets 30% as OPEC deal failure sparks price war fears

what are you talking about? we all got rich from all that Klein Money in 2008. still reverberating in the economy as we collectively decided not to buy booze and steak and instead invested them all /s

f2fon Go-flavored Pascal: A small embeddable self-hosting Pascal compiler for Windows

Robert Griesemer, from the Thompson/Pike/Griesemer triumvirate that created Go, did his PhD under Wirth.

f2fon Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems

the article mentions plan9 but says that it left a lot to be desired due to unstructured text input/output interface.

i want to note that Inferno, the other OS that came from Bell-Labs in the 90s did have a typed shell called alphabet:

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/1/sh-alphabet.html

mayhaps you'll find this interesting.

f2fon How Canada's military reacted to seeing Pokemon Go players trespassing

the locations are identical to the ones users submitted for ingress, the previous game niantic did.

for that you didn't need much vetting and because the popularity was low nobody cared so much. most likely some servicemen (servicepersons?) submitted the spots.

f2fon Soviet Santa

"дядо мраз" in bulgaria. we also celebrated xmas with a quiet family vegetarian dinner, not having such a massive clampdown on religion, and "mraz" delivered presents on new year's. after 1989 things came back to normality and he's now called "дядо коледа". new year's is just a drinking holiday :)

f2fon John Wheeler’s H-bomb blues

another day, another person on the interwebs attacking what is clearly a suggestion (with a supporting narrative) thinking it's presented as gospel.

the typesetting in the pdf is clearly superb to my tastes. there are many ways to present he same dish. i prefer the fancier that can be enjoyed longer.

f2fon John Wheeler’s H-bomb blues

One suggestion: go with the PDF and not the web page. Grab a comfy recliner and just tune out for a while. The difference between the layouts of the magazine article and the webpage are atrocious. Shows you what we've lost in this modern age :(

I'll buy his book. It will go along with many others I've accumulated from that era, such as a 'A Short History of Nuclear Folly'. Atom bombs and planes is what that time was all about, for me.

f2fon Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

oh, you mean since Roswell? ok.

f2fon Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan

Currently #1 in "Best Sellers in Computing Industry History" on amazon, which is somewhat of a weird category :)

f2fon Secretive military spaceplane lands in Florida after record-long orbital flight

the article mentions hexafluoride. but LANL did (and probably still does) hydrazine. source:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2690378

(used to intern, and subsequently work there, although not as a chemist, of course. i'm not that smart)

and if you want to pedant that the patent wasn't issued to los alamos nat'l laboratory... well, in '54 things were different :)

f2fon Secretive military spaceplane lands in Florida after record-long orbital flight

There was this amazing article in 2010 about "chemical compounds i will not work with". Tetrafluorohydrazine was one of them:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...

and mentions briefly that hydrazine is produced at los alamos for national security purposes.

f2fon The Octopus: An Alien Among Us

wouldn't that be fun?

f2fon The Octopus: An Alien Among Us

you're going to love Peter Watts' "The Things":

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

it's 1982's "the thing", from the perspective of the, well, thing :)

f2fon Cache Attacks on CTR_DRBG

yes. fips compliance says "use what we tell you to use. want government contracts? be fips compliant."

it's a source of a lot of online discussion as the compliant algorithms aren't the best available. here's to bureaucracy!

f2fon Cache Attacks on CTR_DRBG

anything that is FIPS compliant will use one of the mandated DRBGs, there are two others besides CTR_DRBG.

BoringSSL implements CTR_DRBG with AES for example: https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/fed35d32245ee...

f2fon Creeping normality

> What is up with all of these wikipedia entries making the front page of hacker news? Has it always been so and I’m mis remembering thinking this is something new?

Hehe, there's another name for what you're describing: baader-meinhof effect...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader%E2%80%93Meinhof_effect

Everything has a name nowadays. Taxonomies are almost complete :)

f2fon Yaegi – Yet Another Go Interpreter

a bit less:

    $ cat > t.go
    package main
    func main() {}
    $ go build t.go
    $ ls -l t
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 f2f  staff  1101432 24 Jul 23:19 t

f2fon Fernando Corbató, a Father of Your Computer (and Your Password), Has Died

I'm a fan of old UNIX papers, i remember his name associated with Multics mostly. "Introduction and overview of the Multics system", F. J. Corbató, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and V. A. Vyssotsky Bell Telephone Laboratories. (https://multicians.org/fjcc1.html)

seminal in OS development at the time.

if anyone has links to other interesting papers, do share.

f2fon Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019

i concur with your assessment. i'm sure cloudflare will be cautious and not rush with deployment after the switch. lesson learned?

f2fon Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019

RE2 is bullet proof. It is the defacto re engine used by anyone looking to deploy regexes to the wild (used in the now defunct google code search, for example). It has a track record. Russ Cox, its author, was affiliated with Ken Thompson from very early in his career.

Rust also has a good pedigree for not being faulty. BurntSushi, the author of rust's regex crate also has a good pedigree...

We switched to RE2 for a massive project 2 years ago and haven't looked back. It is a massive improvement in peace of mind.

If anything, I'm surprised that JGC has allowed the use of PCRE in production and on live inputs...

f2fon Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019

Russ Cox also wrote RE2: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/

f2fon Fixing Telnet Fixes

a good set of problems for interviewing programmers who list C as a top-3 language on their resumes.

f2fon 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

adding australian aborigines, who some consider to be the oldest human civilization, dna-wise

https://www.history.com/news/dna-study-finds-aboriginal-aust...

f2fon Researchers confirm that narwhals and belugas can interbreed

now we know why :)

f2fon Researchers confirm that narwhals and belugas can interbreed

reddit 10 years ago would've been all over this.

Q: "what time does the narwhal bacon?"

A: "when the belugas are near!"

f2fon Smoke seen for miles as SpaceX Crew Dragon suffers anomaly at Cape Canaveral

I don't like setbacks, but I fully endorse rigorous testing.

f2fon Git9: Git Reimagined for the Plan 9 OS

you get a bonus point for mentioning dhog, may he rest in peace.

f2fon I Don't Like Debuggers (2000)

K&P usually refers to Kernighan and Plauger's Software Tools, or The Elements of Programming Style.

For the book Kernighan and Pike wrote, The Practice of Programming, the canonical abbreviation is TPOP.

Sorry about the pedantry.