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jsmthrowawayon What Time Is It on the International Space Station? (2013)

UTC as a world clock is a happy medium, and works well. You get it in the notifications tray.

jsmthrowawayon Some terrible personal news

Many, actually. It was quite common to run into 30+ year folks at all levels, including EPM (I know of four off the top of my head).

jsmthrowawayon Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

Preaching to the choir, man. I was just saying the Slack bleeding could potentially be lessened by wielding a slightly different model of chainsaw. I certainly want my gig back.

jsmthrowawayon All of Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working due to an expired certificate

CRLs are pretty difficult to scale resiliently, though, for a number of applications. Same problem that led to OCSP stapling after OCSP became a thing. With CRLs you can at least take advantage of a CDN of some kind, but there are tradeoffs with your ability to operate a CRL securely doing that, too.

CRL in the driver install flow implies being online (at some point) to install drivers too. As we move into the future it’s hard to imagine not having Internet access, but we also don’t design Windows. It’s definitely a case they’ve considered, though I did see mention of a timestamp server in this thread (I don’t know much about Windows signing, just X.509 PKI in general).

jsmthrowawayon Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

Mattermost is also an example of how not to license software, including a promise not to enforce provisions of the license they have chosen. If one needs a promise, one has probably chosen the wrong licensing structure.

Here's a fun one: say I use the MIT binaries, then debug a problem by reading the AGPL source code. What legal position am I in? (If you have an answer for that rhetorical question, by the way, you haven't thought of the problem long enough.)

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/...

They launched exclusively AGPL and then made MIT as a concession after discovering that a number of companies outright ban AGPL and won't pay for it unlike MongoDB, but licensing binaries differently than source code is not something you come across often.

jsmthrowawayon Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

I remember when Slack in a Chrome tab committed 3-4 GB. Sounds like they've made improvements.

Standalone client and its helpers are sitting on ~800MB committed on my install of High Sierra. Might be worth a shot.

jsmthrowawayon Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers

I'm not kidding: I've imagined exactly that as a career change more than once. Live on the road, see new places every day, hack on open source projects, write, spend time with someone with similar interests (the hardest part). What's not to love?

Even removing the autonomous angle, I've thought about driving during the day and having laptop time for the same activities during rest periods. Probably seems weird, but I'd be in if I could make it work. I do my best thinking behind the wheel, and I've solved a number of engineering problems on road trips. It seems ideal.

jsmthrowawayon Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

A model of PS/2 I worked on when I was a teenager had mains voltage across two exposed terminals behind the big power switch. I discovered this when dropping a screwdriver across them.

jsmthrowawayon Is Loneliness a Health Epidemic?

> Sort of wish downvotes weren't a thing honestly.

I was fine with them until the graying out thing, which turned them into basically a demonstration of the power of silencing. All it takes is four people to consider your comment unworthy, and you might as well have not said anything at all; it's oddly futuristic, to use a safe adjective, that the more people who dislike your comment the more difficult it becomes to read. What if we applied that to other situations? Four people dislike what you're saying; please wear this mask that makes it difficult to hear your words. And now that you're wearing that mask, people are more likely to not like anything else you say and avoid your corner of the room. If you're really problematic, we have a safe space in another room, or we've developed technology that completely mutes you but it still sounds to you like you're talking. Enjoy the party!

If downvotes were intended for removing problematic discussion, that's one thing, but HN's position is that downvotes are fine for disagreement, too. So if you say something disagreeable, you are slowly filtered to irrelevance. The macro of that arrangement, which optimizes for discussion that the community will find acceptable and agreeable at the expense of contrarian thought or opinion, is apparently lost on everyone who I've discussed it with, so I've stopped bothering for the most part. Graying out of downvoted comments is honestly a symptom that contributes to perceptions of the valley, based on my conversations with people outside of this community -- I was present for a conversation about Thiel among midwest tech folks, and it was specifically brought up as cancerous to thought.

Good news is there are stylesheets that disable it. It isn't going anywhere, so if you feel like I do, adapt. That and showdead are useful.

jsmthrowawayon Ron Patrick's Street-Legal Jet Powered Volkswagen Beetle (2006)

Not only were the guys at the air base trying to sell Patrick an SA-2, "they were saying, 'you want a MiG 21 (fighter jet)? I'll sell you two tanks and a MiG.' " .

"So they wanted $2,000 for the missile," Patrick said, "and I had a bottle of ouzo and after a while I got them down to a grand." He still hasn't got the 35-foot-long missile, but he does know what he'll do with it once it clears U.S. customs. (Good luck.)

"I want to build a missile silo on my front lawn," he said. "It'll have those electric-opening silo doors and I'll have a set of lights for it. Then, at night, I open the silo doors and raise the missile up, with those lights on it."

This guy is a dream come true. He's like a version of Woz with a flair for surplus weaponry. It's fantastic.

Also, imagine having the connections to buy a Mach 3 missile that shot down Gary Powers for less than a Macbook. I wonder if a launcher is included.

jsmthrowawayon Is Loneliness a Health Epidemic?

I get you have good intentions, but be careful not to assume you have a handle on what the physical health troubles are, nor that you understand the exact circumstances preventing action that seem easily surmountable to you. It can be more harmful than good to suggest stuff like this if you've missed the mark in your assumptions, speaking as someone who experiences a lot of well-wishing advice for similar reasons.

Sometimes it's better to listen than explain.

I explain it like this: if you're "normal," for lack of a better word, interacting with someone with major depression can feel like debugging a program that is currently in an undefined state. Nothing makes sense, and your rules for how a program should behave are irrelevant, because depression makes me think in ways that are completely bananas (both to you and me, oddly enough). But, you can't just restart the process, so take your time understanding what's going on before acting; sometimes, action is not the right course at all.

I'm not trying to pick on you. I just see this a lot on HN when someone brings up major disorders -- "just work out! just garden! just be happy!" -- and it's troublesome in general, not just you.

jsmthrowawayon Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

> It is impossible to do Internet-scale multicast streams without IPv6

Wait, what? How did IPv6 become a multicast dependency? PIM/IGMP is difficult, but is quite possible without MLD/IPv6. Don't forget class D space.

jsmthrowawayon Silicon Valley VCs tour the Midwest

I could have sworn "in most places" wasn't present when I replied, but I might be misremembering.

jsmthrowawayon Silicon Valley VCs tour the Midwest

Which is what “landlords” means; not the company’s landlords. It’s far from facile.

jsmthrowawayon Make Medium Readable Again

Safari 5 introduced Reader. It damn near predates Chrome itself.

I think Google would have gotten around to it by now if they were going to, considering the other giant epics they’ve launched in the browser since then.

jsmthrowawayon Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

No, it doesn’t. It describes politics.

Assigning caricatures to the “other side” like a football rivalry also describes politics. People have opinions. Sometimes these opinions align with a broader group. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes opinions evolve, and if you respect “the other side,” yours might, or theirs might.

Extrapolating to pejorative classifications of the left or right as a group is precisely what’s wrong with politics because it caters to competitive human nature, and the attitude that the other side must be defeated, bipartisanship (remember that?) be damned. There is no middle or consensus in a knife fight. This is applicable not only to national-level politics, as you've turned the discussion, but also to corporate politics, the subject of the thread.

“Politics is broken. Because of the {left,right}.” is a self defeating approach, and it amazes me how many otherwise intelligent people fall for it. Sadly, we might be too far gone to fix this, and what I would consider a reasonable opinion, like mine, seems every day to be more and more in the minority.

jsmthrowawayon FAA Tapes from That Oregon UFO Incident

And immediately get painted by three or more primaries. Large airliner doesn’t fit with the primary radar loss, and they seem to use those aircraft for transoceanic routes on account of their radar signature. One doesn’t hide a 727, even with weaker civilian radar. Once the military was involved it should have been a slam dunk intercept, in that case.

Although Southwest flies 737s and the SWA pilot did report it was bigger...

Could be a routine ferry of Nightwatch/NEACP based on the same profile, but seems like NORAD and WADS would have caught that sooner. And kiboshed FOIA and not made public statements and all that. Nightwatch is operated by USAF, though, under high classification, while WADS reports up through the National Guard. Miscommunication seems at least plausible.

jsmthrowawayon Space catapult startup SpinLaunch comes out of stealth

> Atmospheric density decreases exponentially with height.

I'm aware. That's the math I did in my comment, solving for 0.5 atm.

jsmthrowawayon Space catapult startup SpinLaunch comes out of stealth

Going to space is not entirely about being high. It's about going sideways, fast.

And if, at 6,000 feet, air pressure were half that of sea level, nobody would live in Denver and most Tibetans would be dead. Half is more like 6,000 meters.

jsmthrowawayon Signal Foundation

Hence the hardened part. That exploit doesn’t work against any later model, and they spent a lot of money to get into that particular phone. Even with that observation, how can one claim “very insecure?” Do you think it’s that difficult to compromise a PC with physical access? What does secure even mean to people any more?

I trust my phone a hell of a lot more than any general purpose computing platform, and I’d say the same if I owned any number of a significant collection of Android devices. This isn’t phone vs. phone advocacy, just annoyance at opinions that people disingenuously consider factual, useful observations on security.

jsmthrowawayon Signal Foundation

I find it odd that someone would say an iPhone is “very insecure” after the USG, of all players, very publicly couldn’t get into a model from right before the security design hardened, not to mention the also very public panic in the IC about losing access to intelligence due to mobile phone developments. That’s a strange position to tout with the underlying implication that PC platforms are better.

Are you broadening “insecure” to mean “centralized, opinionated security architecture designed for tech-illiterate masses that I don’t like?” Because that isn’t what it means.

jsmthrowawayon There's a Persistent Hum in Windsor, Ontario, and No One Knows Why

I'm always disappointed to see that people think the description on that system's tin is its actual purpose. It does that, yes. What else?

jsmthrowawayon The FBI, CIA and NSA say American citizens shouldn't use Huawei phones

Based on said leaks and a fact sheet from DNI Clapper himself, PRISM is simply an efficient warrant processing system based upon legal authority, nothing more. While troubling and worthy of debate, particularly regarding its 702 legal authority and targeting of Americans, it does not involve malware, surreptitious access to any of the involved tech companies, or an infestation of NSA tooling. The author of the PRISM slides was not careful to make this clear, which meant without context, everyone seemed to assume PRISM was a Room 641A situation. It's become clear that to be a 'partner' in PRISM simply means that the entity is capable of responding to warrants using the system, and citing PRISM as an example of compromise in the same vein as this Huawei announcement is disingenuous at best. Some companies built systems on their side to help (like Facebook), while Google delivered their PRISM data via SSH, for example; Twitter, interestingly, did not play ball.

Having responded to warrants before, I can tell you that it's a drawn out, paperwork-intensive process. Something like PRISM is actually net good for both parties, since governmental relationships are extremely human intensive on both sides at the scale of the large tech players. I can actually understand and sympathize with the USG designing a system to make it more efficient, though the leaks tell us it was flagrantly misused (primarily via NSLs, back door searches, and so on).

jsmthrowawayon The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java

There's several tiers of indexing in Google Search (it's a pyramid, with Instant near the top when that existed), and lots of social stuff is refreshed very frequently at the top of it. That is how recent Tweets show up in searches, as well.

I'd be curious how often Googlebot hits HN.

jsmthrowawayon Don't use VPN services

Only justification I could think of is a strict reading of CFAA, where in your exit paperwork the employer commands you not to access any company systems, and the Web site is technically a company system. Though “protected” would be quite arguable there.

I occasionally have crons from my personal infrastructure running into an employer for operational purposes (offsite monitoring or whatever), so I’ve blackholed outgoing traffic to former employers to be on the safe side in case I miss one. So I can see where that sentiment is coming from, though I think it’s a legal stretch.

jsmthrowawayon Picture of a Single Atom Wins Science Photo Contest

Implying a pale, yellowish white dot depicting the Sun is next. (Or a pale red dot of a Tesla, more likely, given that negatives are probably already being post processed. You have to imagine that astronomy as a discipline took the last few nights off from science.)

jsmthrowawayon Excessive DNS queries for NTP pool addresses

Both threads are exactly about the subject of the discussion. How does it have “little to do with the subject at hand?”

jsmthrowawayon Chrome 68 will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”

> Nobody is attacked using MITM, which is the only thing HTTPS prevents

The only thing?

I can think of four others off hand. That said, the “only” thing is pretty important in itself.

jsmthrowawayon Python’s Weak Performance Matters

Cython interops just fine with Rust, too.

jsmthrowawayon FAA Issues Emergency Order of Revocation Against TapJets

General aviation aircraft are quite safe. I don’t have data on hand to back this up on mobile, but I’d wager more than half (honestly, more) of those GA incidents are pilot error, whether operationally or maintenance-related. Checklist culture and attention to detail is important, and has reasons for existing.

It’s a perfectly fine hobby if you respect it, and there’s no sense discouraging otherwise qualified folks from flying. GA is already in severe decline.