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ghostoftiber

754 karma · joined January 8, 2020

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ghostoftiber··on You can now play doom directly from Proton Drive
It's their internally coded easter egg. They made a small blog post about rich media in Protondrive: https://proton.me/support/play-doom-online
ghostoftiber··on Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again
I feel like it wasn't defiance as much as "we need to come up with a story why we don't have any developers who know how to update this".
ghostoftiber··on [dead]
Not sure if this is an easter egg or not but this was an incredibly amusing result of a google search in AI mode.

Other prompts:

"I'm taking away your yaoi!"

"I'm taking away your yuri!"

Both have Google search AI respond back in amusing, unexpected ways.

ghostoftiber··on Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics
This reminds me of when compiz came out and everyone was like MY WINDOWS ARE ON A CUBE and I NEED WOBBLY WINDOWS.

So anyway, being that guy, I immediately installed it.

ghostoftiber··on The Rejection of Artificially Generated Slop (Rags)
This document specifies the standard protocol for handling and discarding low-effort, machine-generated contributions submitted to source code repositories, issue trackers, vulnerability reporting portals, and community forums, be they public open-source projects or internal corporate monoliths.
ghostoftiber··on ‘Viking’ was a job, not a matter of heredity: ancient DNA study (2020)
The answer is - it's both. There's also parallels in archers in Europe from the longbow period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training You can tell who was a professional archer by looking at their skeleton, and so naturally families who had bodies with more readily adaptable skeletons typically became archers. This married the morphology of an archer to social status and family line.
ghostoftiber··on ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants
....OK who signed a data sharing agreement without having the thought "who am I sharing the data with" when they were at the doctors?
ghostoftiber··on The most banned books in U.S. schools
"The most banned books in America and here's where you can purchase them using our affiliate links".
ghostoftiber··on PayByCar has suspended their services
PayByCar is now showing a generic:

Our services are temporarily paused. We appreciate your understanding.

Which probably isn't anything nefarious, but I guess the turnpike was free this morning?

ghostoftiber··on Open source projects could sell SBOM fragments
The providence of the SBOM is important. If you can't say "I made this" in reference to the SBOM then it's pretty much worthless.

Or, flip the script, if you're concerned enough about supply chain security to mandate an SBOM, you probably don't trust the supplier anyway.

There's the "but I signed it" crowd, but the wheels fall off when they've signed compromised artifacts too.

I just don't see a scenario where an SBOM that cannot be inspected and verified would be useful. If you have the infrastructure to do it, you're generating SBOMs anyway.

ghostoftiber··on Testing the tests written to test your code
To put it another way - PIT runs your unit tests against automatically modified versions of your application code. When the application code changes, it should produce different results and cause the unit tests to fail. If a unit test does not fail in this situation, it may indicate an issue with the test suite.
ghostoftiber··on Malibal and Coreboot Have a Disagreement
Laptop reseller Malibal who boasts laptops with Linux support has picked a fight with the coreboot project and blacklisted several countries and US states from receiving their laptops.

The "why don't you ship to" links in their KB are also lulzy: https://portal.malibal.com/kb/c2/payment-shipping/

ghostoftiber··on NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty ocean
I missed the A and read E on the end of "europa" and was like "ah yes I see you have met the French".
ghostoftiber··on Leaving LinkedIn
But I bet he still has his resume on LinkedIn. :)
ghostoftiber··on Slackbot supposedly sends automatic replies to whole org via batch update
> We determined that the rollout of a fix for an older bug report pertaining to Slackbot responses not working in org-wide or multi-workspace channels, was the root cause.

I'm not trying to be paranoid here but I work for a very large company. We got slackbot responses that looked a lot like phishing URLs. We got slackbot responses with broken english, and emojis we never use. I find it very hard to believe that this wasn't a security incident.

ghostoftiber··on I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
The mechanism I'm trying to describe is when employers pay a base in X dollars and stock in Y dollars which takes Z years to mature. AWS sounds like they're being somewhat reasonable about it by giving an employee cash before their options mature, but I have interviewed at places (Envestnet in New York City) where I was offered a base comp which was meh and then options which were gonzo. The offer, if I remember correctly, was $105k/y base and then $100k/y in stock which took three years to vest. I passed on the offer because $105k/y in NYC was cutting it too close for me. They did not have a "cash float" mechanism.
ghostoftiber··on I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
You did the correct thing. The PIP is to cover their butt that you really were a bad employee and you were not wrongfully terminated. The laws vary wildly state-to-state but generally if you're PIP'ed out you can't claim unemployment or wrongful termination.
ghostoftiber··on I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
> Good employees? It's literally gaslighting people. One day they're pulled aside and told they're not performing well enough and given a PIP. The PIP usually isn't designed to help them get performance up - it's creating a paper trail to manage them out.

Exactly this. The PIP process also protects the company from wrongful termination suits and oftentimes serves as evidence against paying out unemployment claims. Rightly or wrongly applied, telling employees that they're underperforming solely serves as creating a papertrail to push someone out.

ghostoftiber··on I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans
> So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term

That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cliff and my next question is always "what's the average tenure here?" If they look uncomfortable, I know they know it's a golden poison pill.

Consider the fact that Amazon, for instance, won't let you pay for EC2 instances in stock options at your company. They darn well know what they're doing.

ghostoftiber··on APIs for content sites must be free
[ LAUGHS IN LEXISNEXIS ]

Everyone seems to be fixated on the idea that the API should be free and no-one seems to be mentioning that there's some very successful business models built around charging people access to content which the parent company didn't generate. LexisNexis, for legal searches, Elsevier for scientific papers, Facebook, for random graph searches (and occasional political data scraping), Twitter, etc.

It feels scummy to me too to take something free and charge people for it, but it's also not this unique thing people seem to be screaming about. Just go somewhere else if the API is that important to you. (Like hackernews). :)

ghostoftiber··on This Word Does Not Exist
fr fr no cap bro
ghostoftiber··on This Word Does Not Exist
I don't really understand this myself. Language is either comprised of loan-words, which are words which follow another language's rules, or it has its own rules for composing words. I tried a bunch of reloads and got plausible words, mostly following latin and greek word roots with some extra decorators. Lots of un- and -ers. Simply because the word isn't popular enough to be in a dictionary doesn't mean the word doesn't exist - if the word follows generally accepted rules of composition then the word surely does exist and it's easily grasped by someone who understands that language. This is why, for instance, John Dee, Shakespeare, etc "made up" words which were well understood.

I had fun, but I doubt the claim that "this word does not exist". :)

ghostoftiber··on Twitter allows “GovernmentRequested” classifications of “misinformation”
For the folks not logged into Github (who won't be able to search):

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/138bb519975407...

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/138bb519975407...

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/138bb519975407...

ghostoftiber··on Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news
I dunno maybe the author of this article needs to stop googling for taylor swift.

non-snark reply: we're once again going to have the "what is fake news" argument again I suppose.

ghostoftiber··on Ipmitool Repository Archived, Developer Suspended by GitHub
> a potential

> residing in Moscow

Guilty until proven innocent isn't a good look, especially when it comes down to where people live or their ethnic background.

ghostoftiber··on The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter
I feel like the ideal way to test an AI powered jet fighter would be with a balloon... Just putting that out there...
ghostoftiber··on Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
As of this afternoon, seven.

When I post in a who's hiring thread... actually I don't like to post in a who's hiring thread because I end up with way too many conversations.

ghostoftiber··on Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
I feel like this should be a "Who's hiring" thread.

But anyway - we're always hiring if you're into small consulting companies. We mostly do AWS, Azure, and not a lot of GCP (sad because I like GCP), and it's almost 100% K8s. You will have to be able to get a CKA, CKAD, or CKS at some point. Need to be in the US.

Send resumes to Josh@BoxBoat.Com

ghostoftiber··on Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things
Instead of implementing a -h or --help, consider using some code like "if nothing else matches, display the help". The asterisk is for this purpose.

  while getopts :hvr:e: opt
  do
      case $opt in
          v)
              verbose=true
              ;;
          e)
              option_e="$OPTARG"
              ;;
          r)
              option_r="$option_r $OPTARG"
              ;;
          h)
              usage
              exit 1
              ;;
          \*)
              echo "Invalid option: -$OPTARG" >&2
              usage # call some echos to display docs or something...
              exit 2
              ;;
      esac
  done
ghostoftiber··on Salary Transparency
https://www.levels.fyi/ <- contributing your data would be appreciated.
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