ls65536

I suppose I should clarify my point that I was referring to those dangerous items in the mail in the sense of their capacity to directly cause physical harm to those handling or receiving them, rather than in the more general sense of the societal effects of their proliferation, which is something else altogether (to your point).

To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with you in regards to the harm caused in the specific case of CSAM, but I can't help but see this as a slippery slope into having the ability in the future to label and act on other kinds of information detected as objectionable (and by whom one must also ask), which is itself incredibly harmful to privacy and to a functioning free society.

I suppose one important distinction here, if this makes any difference, is that drugs and weapons (to use your examples) are physical items, and these could arguably cause harm to people downstream, including to the postal system itself and to those working in it. In contrast, photos, text, written letters, and the transmissions of such are merely information and arguably not dangerous in this context (unless one is pro-censorship).

I'm assuming it has something to do with type casting, with there often being two problems when casting between int and size_t on many systems: one being that int is a signed integer type whereas size_t is unsigned, and the other being that int might be a 32-bit type while size_t is often (on 64-bit systems anyway) a 64-bit type.

For non-negative values less than 2^31, these will happily cast among themselves "correctly", but outside that range you will run into trouble.

As one example of what can go wrong, consider the following code, where we have a 32-bit int (signed) and a 64-bit size_t (unsigned):

size_t s;

int i;

s = 0x00000000f0000000;

i = s;

s = i;

printf("0x%lx\n", s);

We've first assigned to s a valid value for its range (but greater than or equal to 2^31), then assigned s to i, casting it to i's int type (hint: i is negative here because of the int type's sign bit), then assigned i's value back to s, casting it back to a size_t (hint: this performs sign-extension of the most significant bit). The final value of s, as printed by the last line above, you will find is 0xfffffffff0000000, which is not the original value we assigned!

And even if you do happen to need Windows for the odd application every now and then, it generally runs just fine as a virtual machine guest under QEMU+KVM. Interestingly, for Windows 11 Microsoft even seems to have explicitly removed all these awkward hardware requirements when the system detects that it is running as a virtual machine guest [0], making such a setup (Windows as VM guest only) even more worthy of consideration here.

[0] Section 5 from https://download.microsoft.com/download/7/8/8/788bf5ab-0751-...

As a general rule, it ought to be no more difficult or time-consuming to cancel a service than it was to sign up for it in the first place.

Unfortunately I've often found these capabilities end up being used against users as much as, if not vastly more than, they are used in their favour.

For example, secure boot and anti-tamper measures are often used to lock out users from being able to examine or modify equipment and software for their own benefit. Sure, these measures can be argued as ways to "protect" the user from themselves (preventing inadvertent/unsupported changes of hardware causing malfunction, or preventing the installation of malware, and so on), but to rob the users of their agency to decide what's best for themselves in these circumstances is fundamentally disrespectful.

Nonetheless, I hope your employer is in a position to be part of a movement to buck the trend here, but based on what I've seen in the industry over the years, I've learned to be very skeptical whenever I hear of such "security" capabilities being thrown around as universally beneficial for everyone.

Grouping any speech or behaviour against certain governments and regimes under the umbrella of racism is unfortunately something I've been noticing a lot lately, and I think this is really problematic for at least two major reasons.

First, this clouds the arguments being made against real racism (or at least what I think most people would have agreed on what this term meant in past years), and this weakens the voices of victims of that racism. Second, this gives governments and regimes a powerful mechanism to silence any dissent, by using the cover of racism to shut down cricitism far more effectively by potentially painting anyone who criticizes them as a racist.

The first point risks the word "racist" becoming a blunt label that ultimately reduces its effectiveness. Consider that when just about anyone could be considered a "racist" for discussion or behaviour that arguably has nothing to do with racism, then the term itself really starts to lose its meaning and risks devolving into just another derogatory term again any person with thoughts/behaviours one disagrees with. The second point has the insidious effect of shutting down any honest discussion about the statements and actions of governments and regimes around the world, arguably to the detriment of the vast majority of people in the world.

To me it seems more and more like the label "racist" is being thrown around with far too wide a net. As a result, the real victims of racism get their voices drowned out, while other interests get to co-opt the term as a powerful label to use for pushing their own agendas.

> horses don't create demand, but neither do unemployed humans.

Sure they do, although almost certainly nowhere near enough to sustain our current situation and the system it's built atop of (from which the holders of capital seem to have benefited immensely), although perhaps this is exactly the point you were making.

It might not be recognizable to most people living in modernity today, but in general humans will always trade (by some means, not necessarily with "money") with other humans whenever relative specializations occur between them, which even in small groups is likely to happen naturally.

After all, it's not the exchange of paper bills or service to capital in particular that makes an economy, and there is always going to be demand of something and some supply of some of those things as long as humans are around and interacting, regardless of how miserable the existence is, or how "inefficient" such a system might be.

No need to imagine...This sort of scenario already happened to someone I know with their Apple device:

They had just wiped their iPhone in an attempt to clean it up and restore the software to factory condition, and afterwards it required an OS software update for some reason (okay, sure), so this was done. After this update, some kind of "activation" was required (why?) before the device was usable at all for anything meaningful. This activation step failed, showing no particular reason for failure (only along the lines of "your iPhone couldn't be activated, call support"). Over the phone support wasn't helpful in giving any further details, so ultimately the device was brought to Apple where they used some diagnostic tools and determined that some hardware component (possibly cellular antenna?) was malfunctioning, and most likely this was preventing the activation from continuing (again, why?). The Apple tech said they could do nothing to repair the device (no hardware fix, no software fix), and as a "fix" offered only some sort of insultingly low-value buy-back option instead.

There are so many problems with this scenario:

1. Why was "activation" required to use the device at all at this point? The owner just wanted to use it to take some photos, listen to music, watch videos, and do some simple web browsing...No Apple services required, so why the forced requirement to activate the device?

2. Why was no useful information presented to the user about why the activation step failed, so they could at least attempt to troubleshoot for themselves (or with the help of someone of their choosing)?

3. Why does an otherwise unnecessary hardware sub-component (from the point of view of the device "owner" in the context of their usage) misbehaving prevent the ability to activate or otherwise use the device for some valid purpose?

I should mention that the device was out of warranty by this point, so it was not expected that any hardware repair would be at anyone's expense but the owner's, but this entire situation to me just looked like a pointless software-induced device disabling, for no good reason.

After witnessing such a situation, I can't help but wonder how much of this hostility and disrespect towards their customers is just so Apple can drive more new device sales, or what else is going on, but it certainly gave me a lot to think about where this particular company (and the industry in general) seems to be headed.

I don't remember where I read this (possibly even on HN at some point), but this reminds me of an interesting idea that has stuck with me over time...

Consider two broad but otherwise generally viewed as unrelated (however, not mutually exclusive) skillsets: A and B. Lots of people are great at A and lots of people are great at B, but the intersection of the two is generally small (perhaps "law" and "programming" could be reasonably argued as examples of A and B here). There are large numbers of people employed doing A, and similarly for B, often quite successfully in both cases.

Now, there's some much smaller set of individuals who have a reasonable grasp of both skillsets A and B. Recall that they're not mutually exclusive (are any skillsets, really?), just not often seen together. It seems that this set of people would be uniquely positioned to potentially provide immense value over the perhaps small (but even more marginally serviced) field of needs where A and B intersect. The value here isn't in the individual's capability for A or B in isolation, but in what they can provide where A and B cross.

I realise the above is a big generalization and perhaps hugely oversimplified, but it's interesting to think about the different, seemingly unrelated skillsets where there may be great potential from some cross-pollination of ideas to bear new fruit. I do think that "programming" in general, perhaps in some form not as it's conventionally understood today, is becoming somewhat of a new literacy, at least to the extent that there seem to be countless existing businesses or fields of inquiry that could benefit from programmers who are also experts in their traditional domains. However, one could also come up with lots of different examples for A and B above, which may not even include programming at all.

This is it. Relative economic prosperity, at least as long as it's somewhat widely distributed among a large proportion of the population, usually seems to be quite helpful in smoothing over any roughness of the general political situation for most. In any place, one might disagree ideologically with the way certain things are unfolding politically, but people will usually be much more likely to accept it so long as their material situation is improving, be it real or perceived. Of course, if that economic prosperity or general perception of it goes into decline, the situation can suddenly become quite ugly politically.

I've been working on a sailing navigation simulator, using real-world geographical and real-time weather/ocean data: https://8bitbyte.ca/sailnavsim/

Both the core simulator [0] and geographical/weather/ocean data handling library [1] I wrote are free and open source, in case it might benefit anyone else, or if they're interested and would like to contribute. :)

[0] https://github.com/ls4096/sailnavsim-core

[1] https://github.com/ls4096/libproteus

I created SailNavSim, a real-time sailing navigation simulator using real-world weather/ocean data where you can also set up races and play with/against others online: https://8bitbyte.ca/sailnavsim/

Some months ago, I had also shared it as a Show HN post [0], and I am thankful for the feedback received then, but I will be the first to say it's still not really ready for "prime time" despite continuous improvements since. Mostly I've been focusing a lot on the simulation and back-end side of things, but I do think it could benefit from a more modern UI (maybe someday).

Nonetheless, we have a small community of virtual sailors who regularly participate in races, and I could not be more grateful for all their feedback and help with this project so far!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23661326

In my view, this is really the more important and unfortunately often underappreciated concern here. There's a lot of talk about what personal data might be captured by these apps/services (not to minimize that either), but it seems there's overall much less discussion about the potential for the control of information/ideas over large audiences, even in subtle but impactful ways. Not only is it plausible that such interference could happen, be it to exert political or economic influence, but it's likely that it could be done surreptitiously with little to no oversight by regulators, governments and ultimately the people using these services.

I think in some sense it's just basic human nature. Over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, humans seem to have been generally tuned to avoid specific, concrete, short-term threats to their own life/health individually, or perhaps extending very slightly just to their own family/group/tribe, but anything that's a threat more generally, more abstractly or longer-term tends to fall off the radar quickly, even if there's a high probability that those things might turn into an existential threat to the individual at some point in the future.

I'm also curious how (or if) we're going to learn to collectively solve some of these long-term problems before many of them really start to turn into those specific, concrete, short-term threats to us as individuals, at which point many of the "easier" solutions may no longer be effective anymore.

> many Android fans has an unhealthy obsession with Apple bordering on mental disorder

I've also found many Apple fans have an unhealthy obsession with Apple bordering on mental disorder, but my anecdote is about as pointless as yours here.

There are also plenty of people in both "camps" who just want a device to go about their business and, as is their choice, don't care much beyond "what costs less" (however they might define that), or what their friends/family use or recommend, or maybe just what fits a very specific use case of theirs.

I've used both types of devices, and there are some things Apple/iOS does better and some things Google/Android does better, and certainly some things neither does well. The specifics of that will always be a subject of disagreement depending on who you ask.

One way in which I've often thought about it is that whenever you build something on a foundation over which you have no (or little) say or control, then at least work to make it possible to be able to substitute that foundation for an alternative in the future. Or at the very least, be aware of the risks that come with such an arrangement and mitigate them appropriately.

Even beyond software or cloud-based tech, this can be useful to think about and apply even more broadly in life, for example when consideing any variety of real or virtual tools, platforms or services that you may depend on.

> After nearly 13 years of usage I am a happy user of Windows 10 now.

All right, then I really need to ask: it took you 13 years of using Ubuntu unhappily before you decided to switch to Windows?

> Horrible font rendering that makes me not even want to code

I know every system does font rendering a bit differently, and what people like to see really seems to have a big subjective factor it. Personally, I've always had a preference to how fonts are rendered on, for example, Ubuntu compared to Windows 10, especially with 2x scaling on high-DPI displays, but I acknowledge everyone's different.

> But the most important thing is that I am just tired of tinkering. Nowadays I just want to open my computer and get on my programming job and have everything just work.

Not disagreeing with you on this point. However, when it comes to "tinkering", I find all the cloud-connected nonsense and "extras" that Windows comes with turned on and thrown in your face by default after an install a much bigger annoyance, and I often have to go digging through all kinds of settings windows to get a good deal of that turned off, and even then it's not always possible (see telemetry, for example). A new Windows 10 install is a lot more effort in "tinkering" with all the settings into some sane configuration than any Linux distro where you're not compiling your own kernel and/or packages (and maybe even then).

> there's no screen on a microcontroller so printf("hello world") does nothing

Unless printf() is ultimately hooked up to some text-capable interface, like a UART with a terminal on the other end. :) Although I will agree that in general this isn't a typical use case for embedded microcontrollers in the real world.

Not OP, but one thing I found useful when starting out with embedded development was to just get a simple "hello world" sort of program running on bare metal and printing over serial, and to try to understand what was happening in various places that made my program work (code execution on the microcontroller, sending of data over the serial lines, and so on). Even a straightforward Arduino-based environment [0] is usually enough to get started and begin poking around to see what else is possible!

For myself, after getting something simple like the above working, it was a gateway to much more experimentation of further possibilities, and ultimately I ended up making an interactive shell [1][2] with some built-in utilities and text games I also wrote that runs on a variety of AVR microcontrollers (those very same Arduino boards I had when starting out).

[0] https://www.arduino.cc/

[1] https://community.atmel.com/projects/avrsysh-systemshell-som...

[2] https://github.com/ls4096/avrsysh

A "manual" test case I've seen before actually involved trying various things in the software while literally walking into an elevator and having all network connectivity suddenly cut out (no WiFi and no cell radio), in order to simulate what so many people do (or at least did anyway, pre-COVID) regularly throughout the day. I suppose this is also a bit different than just toggling connectivity on the device, since for some time the app and OS both still think the connection is in tact when it's already physically gone, so it may even be useful to help expose other issues this way.

One of the things that's easy to take for granted these days when working on desktop or server software is a mostly stable network connection, but on mobile this goes completely out the window, or down the elevator shaft as the case may be. :)

> The HN crowd may seem fringe, but they are living in the future.

The other thing that really can't be discounted here is that a lot of the HN crowd are likely the default go-to people in their circle of family and friends for this sort of stuff, and in many cases they may also have major purchasing influence and technical decision making power in their respective businesses. Turning off one of them may be inconsequential on its own in the short term, but it could seriously add up to a lot more destroyed mindshare and significantly more "lost" sales over time.

I had the pleasure of installing Ubuntu on a modern Dell XPS recently. I was happy to discover that everything seems to work flawlessly upon install without any additional fiddling: WiFi, trackpad, touchscreen, display scaling, and really everything else I've tried so far worked great. It's an absolute joy!

There was a time I remember when various things with Linux installations were often quirky or troublesome to get working well with certain laptop hardware, but I'm convinced now that this situation has improved tremendously since then...at least from my recent experience and hearing other good things about the Dell XPS and various ThinkPad models, and of course System76 (although I haven't had a chance to try one of those myself yet).

> Shackleton had to cross 35 kms of uncharted rugged terrain and glaciers on South Georgia Island without any mountaineering equipment

And all this right after crossing, along with five of his companions, 1300 km of some of the most treacherous stretches of ocean in the world, in a modified lifeboat! The entire story of that whole expedition really is amazing.

And if you know anyone who has paid for content that suddenly they had lost access to because of shut down DRM servers or intermittent internet connectivity, then you might be inclined to think a bit differently.

Ultimately I think there needs to be a balance here, and most importantly users ought to be made more aware of what they're usually getting when purchasing DRM-protected content: a limited license to consume their paid-for content for a (possibly unspecified) period of time on a specific set of devices under certain circumstances that often lie well beyond their control.

I'd like to think that some kind of free market-based approach of consumers choosing to support the content creators who take a more balanced approach to DRM (or just avoid it entirely) would "solve" these problems, but I'm not too hopeful of this ever working out given the enormous knowledge asymmetry between content creators/distributors and consumers about how stuff like this works.

I agree. They're really great if you need well-priced, no-hassle infrastructure. As others have already mentioned, they may not have some of the higher-level features that AWS comes with, but if you don't need these, then there's no reason to be paying more for it.

I'm really fascinated by their approach to building datacenters, which seems to include taking over disused industrial sites and converting them for datacenter use. For example, their datacenter just outside of Montreal is on the site of an old aluminum smelter [0]. In this case, I'm sure the proximity to plentiful and cheap hydroelectric power nearby (as would have been beneficial for aluminum smelting in the past) was a major factor in the choice of location as well.

[0] https://baxtel.com/data-center/ovh-beauharnois-quebec-bhs

I really don't think their point was that it's not necessary for books and other physical media to be transferable to kids. I saw it more as an anecdote that I think probably a lot of people would, unfortunately, nod in agreement with.

To your point, however, I do agree. I think one of the major benefits of physical media (or even digital media as long as it's entirely self-hosted) is that you can enjoy it entirely without surveillance, and that it's much more resistant to censorship. Being able to read about and understand how people lived, thought, and created in the past is incredibly important, and it's something we should preserve for the benefit of future generations, even if they might sometimes contain things that one might not necessarily agree with today.

> Do you think your kids will want to read their ancestors’ books?

Maybe they will and maybe they won't, but how are we to know that with certainty today? The whole point is that if the opportunity is taken away now, then that guarantees that they won't be able to in the future. Beyond that, they would also lose the possibility of otherwise sharing them with someone else who might be interested in reading them, and I think that would be a loss as well.

I also run a project with Apache+PHP on Debian, with SQLite and a standalone C program that it interacts with running on the same machine. The whole setup runs on a single, low-spec VPS, and it too easily withstood the HN front page a few months ago [0], with plenty of capacity to spare.

I've found it amazing how much you can do these days with even a cheap VPS, and how many requests you can serve as long as you're disciplined about not going overboard with excessive dynamic content and knowing where your scalability pain points are (sometimes this isn't obvious until you really get a lot of traffic!).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23661326

There's a good book, "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft", which documents the original development of Windows NT in the late 80's and early 90's. A large amount of the focus in the book is on Cutler himself, including some of his history coming from DEC, and his personal style of running the project at the time. I found it quite an interesting read!