icey

Download https://tails.boum.org/ and put it on a thumb drive. Keep the drive somewhere safe.

If you use any cryptocurrencies, put them in a cold wallet and encrypt + hide your keyphrase (not on the usb drive, somewhere that's safe and away from where you are).

After that... keep your head down and don't make yourself a target!

One additional note, even though you said you're not worried about your physical safety -- set up meeting points with your loved ones away from your home in case something should happen and you can't get back there. If someone runs into trouble and can't communicate, it can be helpful to know where to meet up (same suggestion I'd give to someone moving somewhere with lots of natural disasters, fwiw)

> If you can identify a e-mail reflection vuln on the domain you can parlay that into a Slack invite

On reread, I realize that I'm not sure I understand what sort of attack you're talking about. While I think we've done a good job of making Abbot a safe entity, could you describe how this works? It's possible there's an attack vector we haven't considered. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you Ted!

For teams that are concerned about whether their Slack is configured correctly, Abbot can be put into a waitlist mode where an administrator on the Abbot team has to explicitly approve any access. No matter how Abbot is configured, all commands are still logged.

SOX compliance is a bit outside of our domain of influence; our goal is to give people the most powerful tools we can, in a way that they can run it in their environment without having to reinvent the wheel.

Wow, awesome! Thanks Emily!

Mattermost has come up a couple of times recently. Along with Matrix, it's probably our top requested platform. Right now we're focused on improving the core platform, but the nice thing is when we add new platforms all the skills written for other platforms should work on day one. I added your request to our internal tracker for Mattermost and will try to reach out once we add it (your email isn't in your profile, so if you want to email me at paul@ab.bot I can add you to the list).

Thanks Ian! That's great feedback, we should absolutely make more YouTube videos (we have a few here, but it's been a little bit since we've released a new one: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs8WZvPC2qpBFpmzI6Fpa-6NB...).

We also wrote a blog post about how we think about our problem space and value proposition recently: https://blog.ab.bot/archive/2021/07/15/tools-for-inside-the-....

Not quite as succinct as a video, but it might help paint a a more vibrant picture of how we see the world.

boto3 is available in Python skills too, so there's probably a shortcut there for you :)

We tried to buy their domain from them, but they haven't gotten back yet. I'm still hopeful :)

Hubot still has a special place in our heart. The only reason I ever learned Coffeescript was to build scripts for it. But I have definitely broken installs more than once. We tried to make Abbot very simple to run for exactly that reason!

Right now all skills run through the same infrastructure. We are figuring out our package management story currently, but today everyone has the same packages loaded, and all requests come from our shared infra. Some companies we talked to have specific library needs (especially internal libraries) or requests for dedicated IPs for their runners. For most teams, this probably isn't needed. We spend a lot of time making sure things are fast and scale, so it's mostly about control for our customers.

Great question -- chat is a great interface for anything that falls out of the "easy to fully automate" category. As an example, we use continuous deployment internally; but there are times where we might want to deploy a branch to a branch lab for experimentation. If that happens, doing it from chat lets everyone else know that it's out there (and how to do that deployment).

Chat is also a great environment for getting notifications about extraordinary events. We get notifications in chat if a link on our homepage is 404ing, whenever deploys happen, or as scheduled updates for things we want to pay attention to but don't want to manage a separate website to handle them.

We usually start with small commands and then grow them to automate more of the "well trodden path" as we understand what we want to automate. Because every command (we call them skills) can expose an API, it's possible for an Abbot skill to respond without any person being involved.

My building has this (I’m in San Francisco). It’s been fine. It’s much better than risking packages being left outside the door, where they’re guaranteed to be stolen. The delivery person takes a photo of where they left the package and Amazon sends a notification that includes it.

If anything, it’s cut down on random people being buzzed in because some driver rings all the doors to get in.

Ah yeah, what I get for not reading the entire release notes first :)

Release notes: https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.17

Looks like a pretty minor release.

Go 1.17 includes three small enhancements to the language: Conversions from slice to array pointer, unsafe.Add, unsafe.Slice

Paste with formatting annoyed me so much I made a website that's just a giant textbox I can use to paste stuff into (https://qi.io)

I use a similar system to the article, just a bunch of checkboxes and stars in my notes. At the end of every day, I review and make sure everything is up to date. A couple of times a week I'll do a deeper review and either do the thing or formalize the work in an issue somewhere. My handwriting is an abomination, but this system has always worked pretty well for me.

Everything about this is great.

Over the past 15 years, I've tried to break my paper notebook addiction numerous times, and have failed every time. It took a year of interacting with people over screen only to realize why paper has worked better for me (and why I'm going back to it after a year of Roam):

Writing things on paper forces you to be a better listener, AND when people realize you're writing things down, they tend to speak more concisely. It's not that hard to type at the speed of most conversations, but it never feels like it's really listening. Watch people who do it! They nod, type furiously, and when they have something they want to add they will change their facial expression to signal that they want to finish typing their sentence before they want to interject.

Saying "hold on, let me write this down" gives everyone a moment to refocus, and it's a lot more natural to say that than "hold on, let me type this". Plus, it makes it much more natural to revisit topics and let the conversation flow.

Roam, Notion, GitHub Issues, etc are all great for asynchronous communication and coordination, but I don't know that any system will ever beat writing things down by hand for talking with people. (Although, the hype around ReMarkable is tough to ignore...)

It seems like computing has oscillated between thick and thin clients since the beginning.

Yes, you're right. I forgot about this step because I also corebooted my Thinkpad and replaced the NIC at the same time as keyboard. For the keyboard, I used these instructions: https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Classic_Keyboard_on_x...

(Corebooting was not needed to flash the bios, it just seemed fun at the time)

There are quite a few people who have done this (myself included). The process is pretty straightforward since they have nearly identical chassis. r/Thinkpad has a lot of details on how to do it. The toughest part is covering the right connections on the ribbon cable for the 220 keyboard since the pinouts are slightly different. It is a fun little project and the keyboards can be found pretty cheaply on eBay.

It's not exactly like for like, but compare these maps of available public restrooms in SF and NYC:

- NYC: http://m3.mappler.net/nyrestroom/

- SF: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/1/viewer?mid=1xRGER_GLPdRdOA...

No disagreement as to the opiate issues in SF exacerbating the problem, but it seems reasonable to think that anyone (drug problem or not) would prefer to use a bathroom than squat on a sidewalk.

People have been talking about an uptick in human feces found on sidewalks and alleyways in San Francisco recently as though the pandemic is causing more people to choose to go on the street or as a signal of increased homelessness. I think what the article is talking about is a much bigger cause.

If you're in SF, try finding a bathroom to use even if you do have money to spend somewhere. Everyone has closed their bathrooms because of COVID protocols -- I have no idea if this something mandated by law, or something that businesses are doing, but it's nearly impossible to find a place to relieve yourself unless you're near a park with a public restroom.

I don't have a lot of confidence that the local government in SF is ready to solve this on their own, but just like homelessness, it's much larger than a one-city problem and hopefully more attention on things like this will help everyone chip away at the issues.

I signed up for HN 14 years ago yesterday (whoa!).

The biggest thing I've gotten out of it over the past 14 years is meeting a lot of interesting people working on cool gear. People who I wouldn't have known about at all otherwise.

The second biggest thing is exposure to all those cool projects. I love new programming languages and this has been the most reliable place to learn about them. Almost never from an announcement, but from the early users of those languages trying to convince everyone to join them.

I don't spend nearly as much time as I used to here, but there was one other intangible benefit early on -- HN helped me be more precise in my written communications. Not really knowing anyone here but wanting to contribute forced me to think through the things that I was saying much more than hanging out on irc or Slashdot.

My friend Phil and I worked together at GitHub where we saw how awesome ChatOps could be. GitHub used Hubot for almost everything that could be automated. While Hubot is great, we also know from using it and building on top of it how much of a pain it can be to develop for, host, and otherwise keep up to date.

So we built Abbot; a more modern ChatOps bot that allows you to write skills in multiple languages, share and install packages, and react to external events.

Phil was on .NET Rocks! talking about Abbot a couple of weeks ago, if you prefer learning about things via podcast -- https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1726

Phil and I have been working on this together and are excited to open up beta today. We'll both keep an eye on the thread if there are any questions!

Phil was also on .NET Rocks! today talking about Abbot: https://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1726

We're just starting beta, but my friend Phil and I both worked together at GitHub and are building what we hope to be a better Hubot at https://ab.bot right now.

It's missing some of the chatops stuff that is mentioned in the blog post but since we support a lot more languages than Hubot we're hoping it's a matter of time before someone in our community builds a better replacement deployment script (or we'll do it while building out sample scripts :))

(Also, hi GitHub friends!)

Building a better chatbot / automation platform called Abbot - https://ab.bot

My friend and I used to do a ton of Hubot scripting but wanted to use a language other than Coffeescript to do it. So, we built a bot that used C#... then we realized there was a lot of other stuff that we had to do to run a bot, so we built a platform to run it (and added support for Python and JavaScript while we were at it).

We handle all the annoying stuff about running a bot (hosting, persistence, secrets management, job scheduling) and add a bunch of other cool stuff on top (Triggers, which make it so that Abbot can respond to events from outside chat or on a schedule, a package manager so people can easily share skills, the ability to create some kinds of skills from inside chat, etc).

The timing of this Ask HN is perfect -- we've been running a beta for Slack users for the past few weeks and just started beta for Discord yesterday. We handle all the middleware so skills written for Abbot work in both Slack and Discord without any changes.

Everything is free during beta, and we'll always have a free plan for basic bot usage (we will probably tier based on the number of custom skills people have running).

If you do end up trying it out, please let us know you found out about Abbot from this thread -- just say `@abbot feedback I found this from HN!` or `@abbot feedback I came from Hacker News` or something similar. We're going to do something fun for our beta testers (probably have some fun stickers made). We love feedback, so even if you don't try it out; I'd love to hear why. My email is in my profile!

If you use Slack, we're about to start beta for something that might help you out. Happy to share it with you. I'm not sure it will nail 100% of what you need today, but since we're building aggressively right now and are close, it could be a good time for both of us. My email is in my profile if you're interested!

In what ways is Microsoft monetizing data collection and sales? It seems like their primary revenue generation streams are Azure, Office, and Xbox; are you talking about Bing? Something else?

Nim is a lot of fun to write, and the language is small enough that you could build something fun / useful in a weekend. The community is also very responsive. Definitely worth checking out!