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jlujanon ESP32/ESP8266 Wi-Fi Attacks

Their "Trusted Root Catalog" is a total fiasco as well. They were one of the AWS IoT launch partners and they apparently repeatedly failed to including AWS root authorities in their catalog. They were responsive in acknowledging, but typically took a month plus to actually update the SDK, (released quarterly,) to address it.

https://e2e.ti.com/support/wireless-connectivity/wifi/f/968/...

They did finally provide a method to use a custom root CA for SSL a year later, https://e2e.ti.com/support/wireless-connectivity/wifi/f/968/....

They seemingly failed to comprehend why anyone would not want to use TI's chain of trust, that is not manufacturer customizable, on proprietary IoT devices. This was explicitly an issue for code signing as well, as it required obtaining a third-party code signing certificate from any number of CA's instead of using our explicit root CA.

[edit] spelling, clarity

jlujanon Pyramid Tracks: Obscure, retro, and weird royalty free music

Layout is very similar to https://artlist.io/page/aboutus

jlujanon A guide to difficult conversations

When going through a similar event, I was able to find resources at the hospital that helped a lot. In life and death situations they often have patient advocates on staff. I was able to reach out and had a patient advocate, either a nurse practitioner or doctor, that helped sort out the communications. A lot of the stress came from doctors' reluctance to put things in simple terms. The patient advocate was able to basically come in and say, "Look, they can put a pacemaker in, but your loved one only has 12% heart function and is still dying." It was received differently than a family member saying it. After all, their job is to advocate for the best interest of the patient. Ours actually got pretty angry with the doctors for how things had been allowed to progress. Hospitals usually have grief counselors and social workers as well. Just getting the brother extra support might be enough to open him up.

jlujanon Ask HN: How to Find the Best Info on Cancer Treatments?

There is T.h.e. Brain trust that hosts online support groups for brain tumor patients and caregivers. I am on the adult ependymoma mailing list. It is a good way to find specific hospitals and doctors to get in contact with. The ependymoma list has a couple of doctors that regularly communicate on specific questions.

Their GBM specific list is here

http://braintrust.org/groups/gbm/

Edit:spelling

jlujanon Verizon's accidental mea culpa

As a residential subscriber this is contractually the case. ISPs do not allow the operation of servers in residential contracts and they are almost always provisioned with asymmetric speed. 50 down, 5 up, etc.

jlujanon Android without the mothership

presumably, as a programmer, you check return values. Especially if they could be a null reference

jlujanon Android without the mothership

>I have occasionally downloaded apps through one of the APK downloader services mentioned in the article comments -- I've had mixed luck.

One of the biggest issue of running Apps (open source or not) is the inclusion of the Play Store API in the app itself. These apps when not logged into the play store usually crash with NullPointerExceptions. Please... if you are an Android developer... expect your third-party services/APIs to be missing or to crash and handle that case... If you include the Map API or several other Google Services APIs in your app and the Play Store is missing or the user does not have a registered account... calls to those services will most likely result in NullPointerExceptions. Tell me to deal with it, don't crash.

jlujanon Python Best Practice Patterns

What you are referring to is a design pattern called fluent interfaces[1]. They do make for very usable APIs when used to represent pipelines and filters. They are also used heavily in creating domain specific language features. In your SQL example it works very well such as in SQLAlchemy. But in that example, the chained methods are building a query as opposed to mutating the actual data. Splitting hairs.

[1]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_interface

jlujanon Don’t Slurp: How to Read Files in Python

Another nitpick. The article doesn't specifically say text file. Who is to say it has newlines at any reasonable spacing. Why is this front page.

jlujanon Golang Diaries II

Yes. I am aware how to sort and can only read your comment as as informative sarcasm as to the ease.

jlujanon Golang Diaries II

Screw map, let me pass a comparator function into sort for interfaces.

jlujanon The Revel Web Framework for Go

I am new to go with a Python and C# background. Using Revel on my latest project. Not completely convinced it provides that much over roll-your-own or composition with Gorilla's libraries. I much prefer Gorilla's mux to Revel's routes. Looking at the source code has been highly beneficial to learning Go, so Thanks all the same.

jlujanon The Unexotic Underclass

See my comment above

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5786754

jlujanon The Unexotic Underclass

"On February 5, 2013, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs announced that instead of building a single integrated electronic health record (iEHR), both DOD and VA will concentrate on integrating VA and DOD health data by focusing on interoperability and using existing technological solutions. This announcement was a departure from the previous commitments that both Departments had made to design and build a new single iEHR, rather than upgrading their current electronic health records and trying to develop interoperability solutions."

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42970.pdf

jlujanon Why are Buddhist monks attacking Muslims?

tl;dr

"If you have a strong sense of the overriding moral superiority of your worldview, then the need to protect and advance it can seem the most important duty of all."

I'll take "What is the definition of succinct for 1000 Trebeck"

jlujanon New, Higher-Resolution Image of Boston Marathon Suspect

Like the where's waldo of "high res suspect photos"...

jlujanon Defense Distributed’s New 3D Printed High Capacity Gun Magazine ‘Cuomo’

The barrel is probably the only part that has "rigid tolerances". The AK is famous for a stamped receiver with minimal machining.

http://ultimak.com/AKReceiverID.htm

jlujanon NTSB identifies origin of JAL Boeing 787 battery fire

>Were I the folks in charge at Boeing, I'd be looking at a joint venture with Mr. Musk, starting today.

Boeing and Lockheed are pretty much the only space flight companies working with the government. Musk has an issue with this which is why his battery predictions are so enjoyable.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-10-16/business/35279...

jlujanon The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Yes, I would read Seneca first or I highly recommend "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy". Then reading Epictetus and Aurelius. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson can also be added to the reading list in my view.

jlujanon The End of Ragequitting

>Ragequitting is childish, a sign of immaturity.

I had never heard this term before. I agree with Jeff in general but there are very legitimate reasons beyond immaturity. One is maturity in the sense of picking your battles in life and knowing when your current activities are incongruent with your principles. There are many situations when the best course of action for everyone involved is to walk away. The result is not always having given up forever, but an opportunity to step back, reflect and reevaluate your approach. It is unfortunate that people do "rage quit" and give up entirely. Resilience is not always a function of maturity.

jlujanon Black and Whitey: How the feds disable criminal defense

The supporting argument is that, if proven guilty, there might not be enough assets left over to compensate victims. Also, in some cases to prevent the alleged perpetrator form fleeing. The problem is scenarios as described in the article. The issues that I see in this is a)that funds unrelated to any crime are frozen/held and b)there is no recourse when proven innocent. There almost needs to be some mechanism to hold funds while leveraging them for defense, in the similar way to a bail bond. As far as rich mobsters, having prosecutors resorting to vague statutes of unrelated crimes (wire fraud instead of murder) is indicative of a larger issue with the criminal justice system (as well as many other scenarios in comments here.) Creating obscure, vague, all encompassing statues to snare criminals, and ever more frequently, the ignorent and unwary white-collar, is not representative of an effective and fair social justice system.

jlujanon Ninja IDE: written in Python for Pythonists

On mountain lion, it requires X11. Not sure why as my PyQT apps do not.

jlujanon Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/rfid-chip-student-m...

As a Texan, I think it is ridiculous to spend millions on a technology "solution" just to get more funding. Why would you want kids in class that don't want to be there? Money would be better spent on actually educating the kids that do attend than tracking kids that don't.

jlujanon Facebook the Devourer

> Facebook has TREMENDOUS lock-in. For any new place to have value, it's got to have the majority of the people Facebook has > Facebook's value IS lock-in

How can a website lock you in to only being able to share things with your friends through their website? Do they lock you out of your friendships if you quit the site? This is a very bizarre notion to me. Facebook accounts have no value, the people behind the accounts and the relationships have the value. Facebook disappearing wouldn't prevent you from communicating with them. Is this real life?

> and companies with real technical prowess will fail because they rely on producing something new

Err, what? Do you mean that smart people working on hard problems are destined to fail? That facebook has some how consumed all of the available users and prevented them from existing any where else on the internet?

jlujanon Facebook the Devourer

>it's a wonderful medium for us to have shared experiences for things that otherwise would be extremely difficult to share.

His rant doesn't touch this because that is the perceived value to individuals that facebook provides. Cannot really argue against that and I am glad people are able to use it like this. However, there is something in this "value" that bothers me and why I do not use facebook. From the facebook ad link at the beginning of his post:

"We make the tools and services that allow people to feel human, get together, open up. Even if it's a small gesture, or a grand notion -- we wanted to express that huge range of connectivity and how we interact with each other,"

The ad does not show that. It shows people doing things together. It shows real people interacting in a physical world. It shows physical, tangible, things. Not pictures of things, or short quips and a link to an article or an emoticon. The feeling the ad tries to carry across to the viewer is the exact reason that facebook is a terrible medium to "connect" in the human sense. Lets compare it to Apple's FaceTime ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k). Not only is the product in almost every scene, but the ad shows exactly how it directly integrates and impacts peoples lives. The last scene with the sign language drives home the technology empowering humans to connect in an almost surreal new way. Another example is the Kodak Carousel scene from Mad Men (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus). How facebook goes from their Timeline ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzPEPfJHfKU) to "Chairs are like Facebook" is incredible to me. The commonality in all of these is capturing intiment moments between individuals. That is where the value proposition falls down with facebook. There is no sense of intimacy in the communication channel. A photo of your mom and dad probably has a different value to you than to your other facebook friends. It has very little to do with the photo itself as the photo has no intrinsic value either. It is the memories and emotions tied to it. That is the extent of it. Your mom doesn't need you to like the photo. Your friends don't need to see your comment saying your dad looks like a dork in that sweater. I argue that the passive nature and resulting noise to signal ratio makes facebook insufficient to build real human connections. For these things, not sure how facebook is better than email... it is no where close to live voice or video chat. Having a billion people on it means nothing when you only really want to communicate with 50 of them on a regular basis and only 1-4 of them at a time. Everything else on facebook is just self absorption and ego.

But I digress. His rant is really about how facebook is trying to make everything a part of its ecosystem. I can barely get older generations on email or MMS messaging let alone facebook. Trying to include facebook in every website serves no one but facebook and to what end? It definitely isn't user experience. Facebook is going the way of AOL as a ubiquitous term describing what the internet is and that is a scary thought.

jlujanon We want to take craigslist out while their weak ;) Swappel - Seed funded $50k

Not really. Go to a couple of the meetups like Startup Happy Hour occasionally. I am a developer ("Chief Architect") for a local experiential marketing company and do mostly system design and iOS, Python development.

jlujanon We want to take craigslist out while their weak ;) Swappel - Seed funded $50k

I am in Dallas, so this is interesting. Is the signup just for the Beta? If not, first thing, cut the cutesy landing page and let me find things. Craigslist might be dated and spam bloated, but I can find/price things quickly.

jlujanon YouTube loses court battle over music clips

This is the same as saying gun manufactures have liability in any murder committed with their product which many argue, they have not done enough to prevent the wrong people from getting firearms. But it is the wrong analogy. In sites like youtube, it is more like a property owner that rents a building and is aware of his tenants performing illegal activity on a regular basis. Which depending on the crimes and the amount of knowledge could make the property owner liable or even an accessory. But all of this leads to the same arguments and worthless discussion about semantics. The correct discussion is what value we place on media as a society. The easiest way to solve this is to stop supporting artists on major labels. Advances in technology have lowered the barrier to entry in recorded music to a widely attainable level. Artists trade the rights to their music to labels for the label's marketing and distribution. Now days, interesting things go viral with little to no marketing effort and there is no argument that the labels are decades behind in their distribution channels. Even if you wan to avoid iTunes or other services, It is relatively easy for a moderately tech savvy individual to push a digital album to S3 or the likes, link to it from a static site and serve millions of downloads. Could even get fancy and deploy a web store template from godaddy for taking payments. Yeah, it might take some learning but so does negotiating a 100 page recording contract... ask Aerosmith.

We can't keep bashing labels for defending/protecting their aging distribution channels. You can't blame a dog for acting like a dog. We can create truly disruptive new distribution channels with better terms for artists and go head to head with the labels.

jlujanon Geohot Arrested for Marijuana Possession En Route to SXSW

First, you miss attributed this. It was Philip Sheridan; a Union General assigned to occupy Texas and oversee reconstruction after the Civil War. He was less than popular and removed from his post by president Andrew Johnson for his harsh application of the Military Reconstruction Acts.

Which leads me to a much better quote.

"Fuck You! I'm from Texas."

The guy wasn't even arrested in Texas. He was arrested by the Feds... who Texans usually have no love for. Succeed is on bumper stickers here. But yeah, I admit... Texas enforcement and sentencing can be BS. So don't break our laws and we wont break you.

jlujanon Is Pinterest the next Napster?

Again, Google won this on appeal. It was very narrow victory and isn't a good case for precedent. See http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2007/05/summary_of_perf...

EDIT: Note the last part "affirmed the district court's finding that Perfect 10 was unlikely to prevail on its vicarious infringement claim, because Perfect 10 was unlikely to be able to show that Google had a right and ability to stop or limit the infringing conduct of third-party websites." Pinterest clearly has control over their content and arguably promotes infringement by providing a nifty browser toolbar to do it.

There is also the ASMP, et al vs. Google case that is still pending. See http://asmp.org/articles/asmp-qa-google-class-action.html

The issue with pinterest is the presentation of the original image. Using an image with out explicit consent is illegal even with attribution. Perfect 10 vs. Google revolved around the use of low quality thumbnail representations in search results. Pinterest is not a search engine and does not use low quality thumbnails.

In comparison to Tumblr, it can be argued that Tumblr has a clear purpose as a blog platform above the ability to simply re-blog content from other sites. I am sure Tumblr is inundated with DMCA takedowns as well.

Theoretical lawsuits against Pinterest are more likely to have success because the sole purpose of the platform is to repost third-party content (to what ever means their business model is based on). It will also be interesting to see how well they implement DMCA take-down procedures. Even if the purpose of the site is validated as fair-use, the DMCA procedures will need to be sufficiently vetted to insure they do not lose protection. The recent articles seriously calls into question Pinterest's knowledge and ability regarding handling of DMCA requirements.