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groks

269 karma · joined May 28, 2010

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groks··on Fedora 23 Beta released
Not any more:

http://www.scrye.com/wordpress/nirik/2015/09/18/rawhide-note...

groks··on Show HN: Sshync – Auto-sync files over SSH

    $ rpm -qf /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id 
    openssh-clients-6.9p1-6.fc22.1.x86_64
groks··on Firefox Under Fire: Anatomy of latest 0-day attack
The sandbox -X command doesn't work: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1103622 - and hasn't worked for over a year.

The author is mia from the bug and seems to have given up: https://danwalsh.livejournal.com/72697.html

groks··on Microsoft’s new small print – how your personal data is abused
Looks like some people are binary editing the Lenovo supplied BIOS to hack in the PCI ID of their WWAN cards.

Your X201 has decent support in the free coreboot BIOS, so if you fancy a weekend project you can ditch the WWAN whitelist altogether:

http://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x201

groks··on Microsoft’s new small print – how your personal data is abused
Here's a list of cards supported by ModemManager which works in conjunction with NetworkManager on Linux:

  https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/ModemManager/SupportedDevices/
It doesn't explicitly call out 4G support so you will have to work backwards.

fyi: some laptop firmware, such as thinkpads, have a whitelist of supported WWAN cards. If you can't find a suitable internal card you can use a USB dongle without restriction.

groks··on Yanis Varoufakis opens up about his five month battle to save Greece
> Why do so few people mention that almost 75 percent of Greek pensioners retire before the age of 61?

According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement

    | Age             | 55-59 | 60-64 | 65-69 | 70+ |
    |-----------------+-------+-------+-------+-----|
    | Germans working |   61% |   23% |    3% |  0% |
    | Greeks working  |   65% |   18% |    4% |  0% |
    | USA working     |   66% |   43% |   20% |  5% |

65% of Greeks age 55-59 are working, while only 61% of Germans are. More Germans age 60-64 are working than Greeks, but slightly more Greeks age up to 69 are working.

> I also believe that we should hear much more about what the country will do to improve productivity and work harder.

Yes, when will the Germans learn to work as hard as citizens of the USA?

groks··on Ask HN: Share your favourite bash/zsh aliases
(Use ^d instead of aliasing x to exit)

Use magit in emacs as a git front-end instead of dozens of git aliases. You can continue to use vi or eclipse or whatever for editing. Use dired in emacs to replace a lot of file manipulation aliases.

Replace all your complicated aliases with ^r reverse search. For example, instead of typing

    sudo dnf --refresh check-update
I type

    ^rche
because 'check' is the most distinct string in that command in my mind, and by 'che' bash has already located the last time I typed it in the history. Save lots of history:

    HISTSIZE=100000                   # Lots of history.
    HISTFILESIZE=100000               # Lots of history in the file.
    HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth            # Ignore entries with leading white space and dupes.
    HISTIGNORE="ls:ll:cd:fg:j:jobs"   # Uninteresting commands to not record in history.
    shopt -s histappend               # Append history to file, don't overwrite.
    shopt -s histverify               # Show expanded history before running it.
    shopt -s cmdhist                  # Store multiline cmds as single
Which directory is hiding all the bytes?

    alias dux='du -x --max-depth=1 | sort -n'
Machines on the local network:

    alias nwho='ping -b -c 2 255.255.255.255 2>&1 | grep "bytes from" | cut -d " " -f 4 | sort | uniq | sed -e "s/://g"'
Set the permissions to allow sharing of files in a directory between users in the same group (probably doesn't work on bsd/osx):

    function rwxs {
        find $1 -type d | xargs chmod u+rwx,g+rwxs,o+rx
        find $1 -type f | xargs chmod ug+rw,o+r
    }
groks··on Ask HN: Share your favourite bash/zsh aliases

    sudo dnf install sl
groks··on Why I dislike systemd
The difference appears to be that the sudoers file supports the finite set of access checks the authors of sudo anticipated. If you need something more elaborate than that, write arbitrary javascript to the polkit api.
groks··on Why I dislike systemd
> Like pretty much anything from freedesktop.org, the documentation is a joke.

  man polkit
Looks pretty good to me. It even includes an ascii-art architectural diagram! Here's the webified version: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/master/polki...

> polkit doesn't have a textual interface, it only works through D-Bus. This makes it useless for scripting.

polkit(8) and pkcheck(1) describe how to use the pkcheck program. It returns 0 on success (access granted).

> I can't do things like "ok, tell me who can mount filesystems"...

I think that's the nature of the problem domain. polkit seems to be for enforcing arbitrary rules, when the built-in rules of something like sudo can't cope. Therefore: arbitrary code snippets as rules, therefore, no introspection.

However...

> ...or "give me a list of all things that users in the wheel group are allowed to do".

  pkaction | grep mount
  org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-mount
  org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-mount-other-seat
  org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-mount-system
  org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-unmount-others
Gives a list of actions. Use pkcheck to probe for access.
groks··on Why I dislike systemd
http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2015/why_polkit/
groks··on Why I dislike systemd

    systemctl list-dependencies
groks··on Experimental Dependency Vendoring in Go 1.5
You're pushing the Go ecosystem in this direction:

    https://spot.livejournal.com/312320.html
groks··on Tax-Free Debt: The great distortion
> What if I had decided to set up the lemonade stand as a corporation instead? The corporation would pay some sort of profits tax (say 20%, so $20,000). There's now only $80,000 for me. But I have to pay personal tax of 30% of the $80k, so in this scenario I walk away with only $56k.

Wages are a pre-tax expense for the corporation.

groks··on Tax-Free Debt: The great distortion
> I'm not sure what you mean when you say these people have an 'advantage'?

People who buy-to-let are not in the rental-income business, they are in the business of acquiring property, because property prices are sky rocketing.

People with a job trying to get on the property ladder pay mortgage interest with wages. People with second, third etc. properties deduct mortgage interest as an expense.

groks··on The State of Go
> ...a relic of the past when memory and disk space were expensive ... a few megs here and there might actually matter...

The nature of the modern computer is that cpu speed has increased more than memory speed, so if your data doesn't fit into cache your cpu will be do nothing quickly.

Even with shared libraries, this phenomena has such an impact that the Linux kernel now has a memory de-duplication feature (mostly for VMs):

https://lwn.net/Articles/306704/

groks··on Fedora 22 released
What's the attraction of antique, buggy software which no one is maintaining?

If you're responsible for a power station, satellite etc. then OK, better the devil you know than the possibility of a destabilising bug among all the new features and bug fixes. But for your laptop?

Tip: use ansible to configure your personal machine. Once every six months you boot into the live media, install, reboot, run ansible, reboot, done. You'll spend more time boiling a kettle and drinking a beverage than fettling a new release, and no more time trying to hand install the latest version of package X on a 3 year old base OS.

groks··on IndieWeb
> I would love it if everyone could have their own domain name + server - but this isn't practical at this point in time.

You don't need to run your own server. Point the domain name you own at Squarespace (or Wordpress.org, or hosted Wordpress, or any service you like...) for a low-tech, free or low-cost website where you decide what happens.

Move when you change your mind.

groks··on IndieWeb
1 billion people posting to Facebook is centralised. 1 billion people posting to 1 billion dot-whatever's is decentralised.

From one perspective, moving your Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts under your own domain is a kind of centralisation, but it's the least interesting perspective, because so what?

The other perspective is that Facebook's (etc.) centralised service determines what you can do, what you see, who can see what you do, and ultimately because we're all products of our environment, defines you. And isn't that kind of sad?

groks··on Ask HN: Google/FB engineers, Do you like Mercurial?
> More recently bookmarks were added (also as an extension you have to opt-in to)

Bookmarks were added to the core in mercurial version 1.8 in 2011. No configuration is needed to enable them.

groks··on Servo Continues Pushing Forward
Here's an overview from last year showing nvidia's wayland support under way:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=mtgxmde

groks··on Servo Continues Pushing Forward
Wayland might be taking over from X11 on a widely used Linux desktop as early as 6 months from now (Fedora 23):

https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2015/01/19/gnome-wayland-por...

Obviously X11 will not just disappear, but is targeting Servo at X11 at this early stage in it's development like writing a Python library targeting Python 2?

groks··on “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of counting-out rhymes
A list of several dozen posted recently to twitter:

https://storify.com/mooseallain/picking-rhymes

groks··on Ansible 1.9.0 Released
https://github.com/al3x/sovereign
groks··on How We Use Make

  $ man make | grep -A2 silent
       -s, --silent, --quiet
            Silent operation; do not print the commands as they are executed.
groks··on Against DNSSEC
> Browsers and operating systems aren't going to add full DNSSEC resolving caches.

Fedora 22 feature change request: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Default_Local_DNS_Res...

groks··on Docker Part One: Containers
Docker is to the Linux OS as virtualenv is to Python.
groks··on Of Containers, Dockers, Rockets, and Daemons
The next systemd hackfest is on Jan 30th:

  https://plus.google.com/events/c56kbn26s6g01n6m4tj2nmdgnfc
If someone could fix docker so that projects like this are not required:

  https://github.com/ibuildthecloud/systemd-docker
...that would be great!
groks··on 24 Pull Requests
Here are 179 basic Linux utilities...

    rpm -ql binutils coreutils moreutils moreutils-parallel \
        findutils diffutils sharutils psutils \
        pciutils iputils elfutils | grep -E /usr/s?bin
...some of which likely have parsing bugs which can be automatically identified with this fuzzer discussed on HN recently:

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/

Also, an exciting opportunity to discover what the 'pee' and 'sponge' commands do.

groks··on Sometimes Kill -9 Isn't Enough
http://cwrap.org/
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