HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

lwf

1,080 karma · joined July 26, 2011

https://luke.wf

https://twitter.com/lfaraone

COI disclaimer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LFaraone/Affiliations

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/lfaraone; my proof: https://keybase.io/lfaraone/sigs/6o4P6-K6M9rk-AkC7eWiiVA49d8i03k03VozHhK8Ssw ]

submissionscomments
lwf··on Closing a stale SSH connection
https://mosh.org/#faq:~:text=Q%3A%20What%20is%20Mosh%27s%20s...

The cryptography is standard AES-128 in OCB3 mode. It's been around long enough, and has had enough security scrutiny to at least discover a few minor DoS vulnerabilities, that it isn't entirely unreviewed.

For the cipher itself, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCB_mode#Attacks

lwf··on Closing a stale SSH connection
It's client-side, so works even if the remote system is totally hung and did not clearly disconnect.

For example, running `systemctl suspend` will not terminate active SSH connections before putting the destination machine into a sleep state, and thus Ctrl+C (which isn't processed by SSH) will do nothing until the remote host is woken up by some mechanism.

lwf··on Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users
DNS servers listen on port 53 :)
lwf··on Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022
The vast minority of utilities in the United States, by number of customers served, are investor-owned; publicly-owned and co-operative utilities only cover 50m people.[1]

Theoretically, the grid is supervised by the California Public Utilities Commission, which has wide latitude to set standards and regulations for PG&E and others. The Public Utility Code is the highest law in the state of California[2], so IMHO a large part of the blame for PG&E's failures fall on CPUC's failed oversight[3][4]

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40913

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Utilities_Co...

[3]: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/CPUC-head-Michael-Peev...

[4]: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/pge-probation-lift...

lwf··on A 'screenless smartphone'
Written so hastily they misquoted the "discount" offered (57%, when the clickthru clearly says 51%).
lwf··on The smash and grab of Kroger-Albertsons
Note that Shaw's and Star Market are both Albertsons :)
lwf··on Spam domains that plague my email
Surprised to not see gmail.com in the list[1].

[1]: https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/25/Gmail-is-a-huge-source-of... , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26265329

lwf··on What’s Behind the Naming of TBD54566975?

  > Translated to a human-readable timestamp, 54566975 
  becomes:
  > 
  > Friday, September 24, 1971 06:29:35 GMT
No, that's PDT :)

  $ TZ=UTC date --date=@54566975
  Fri 24 Sep 13:29:35 UTC 1971
lwf··on This Is the Boke of Cokery
Which doesn't even make sense, given it was abolished by Nazi Germany "when Hitler's distaste for the supposedly "Jewish-influenced" script saw it officially discontinued"

(via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter)

lwf··on I Don't Want to Be on Call Anymore
If you have teams in Israel, you at least can cheat a bit on Sunday v.s Friday.

And having at least one daytime rotation agree that "well, you're expected to be on-call during business hours on Saturday" isn't nearly as crazy as "you can't relax at any time during the weekend".

lwf··on My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)
(To start: Just to clarify there's a significant difference between benzodiazepines and opiates.)

> I have a friend in the US who told me they have an app on their phone where they can just tap a button and the next day they can refill their benzo prescription, and it's been like that for years without having seen a doctor again.

Is this the "request a refill" feature that every US pharmacy offers? Granted, benzodiazepines are less restricted than stimulant drugs¹, but a doctor in the US need to at least review a prescription twice a year.

Chronic (daily) of benzodiazepines is bad, and doctors will not² start new patients on this.

There's still a lot of legacy patients who are on chronic benzodiazepine treatments -- doctors should work with them to wean them off, but it's very challenging and disruptive.

Requiring a patient receiving a benzodiazepine at a non-daily level (e.g. for seizures, anxiety, occasional insomnia) to go back to see their doctor when nothing's changed several times a year is just pushing medical costs (money/time) on the disabled.

¹: e.g. Adderall, which can't be refilled

²: Providers are trained not to these days, at least

lwf··on Ask a Librarian
Most libraries do not record that information once material is returned. See SFPL:

> 10. The Library does not maintain a history of what a library user has previously checked out once books and materials have been returned on time4.

> 11. When fines accrue on a user's account, the Library does maintain records of items that have been borrowed but returned after the due date, or are still outstanding on the user's record. When overdue materials are returned and all associated fines are paid, the information associated with the library card number is deleted.

> 4 Library users may choose to opt in and enable My Check-out History. By doing so library users choose to give explicit consent to the storage of their Check-out History from the opt-in date. Library personnel will not access or release Check-out History unless required by law to do so. Library users may opt out of this service and delete Check-out History at any time. (Noted - November 30, 2011)

https://sfpl.org/about/privacy-policy#text-40586

lwf··on Amazon to remove more content that violates rules from cloud service – sources
The article you linked describes preventing the creation of a shared link, not actually deleting content from people's Dropbox accounts.

(previously worked there, not speaking on their behalf or from private knowledge)

lwf··on Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
Right, so don't use the network: broadcast a signed message on a band reserved for emergency services.
lwf··on Court rules California's Prop. 22 on Uber, Lyft drivers unconstitutional
Link to opinion: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21046832-castellanos...

The key bits:

> The Court finds that Section 7431 is unconstitutional because it limits the power of a future legislature to define app-based drivers as workers subject to workers’ compensation law.

This was the key section of prop 22 which defined app-based service providers as non-employees.

> The Court finds that Section 7465, subdivision (¢)(4) is unconstitutional because it defines unrelated legislation asan “amendment” and is not germane to Proposition 22's stated “theme, purpose, or subject.”

This was the section that imposed a 7/8ths requirement on modification to the statute.

lwf··on Homelessness is about housing
This is addressed directly in the article via economic theory, comparative analysis, and "detailed empirical work" (from studying cases where new housing was built and the observed effect on prices):

From the article:

> When I first started making the case for land use reform, we had two legs to our argument. One was basic economic theory — more supply equals less scarcity equals lower prices. The other was cross-sectional analysis — metro areas with laxer land use regulation see more construction and lower prices. But we can now add a third leg to that analysis in terms of detailed empirical work. [...]

>> We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease rents in nearby units by about 6 percent relative to units slightly farther away or near sites developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. We show that new buildings absorb many high-income households and increase the local housing stock substantially.

lwf··on Offensive Tweet Quiz
Twitter does in fact have a separate adult content filter, which I have turned off in my Twitter account, in part because it's often wrong :) It filters out a lot of SFW content, and a lot of queer accounts are tagged as such incorrectly.

Proves the submission's point, I guess.

lwf··on Offensive Tweet Quiz
> The pictures in the tweets show up as links by default. Follow these links at your own peril.

Ah, I totally missed that! I'm admittedly a bit tired, and that line was above the first set of boxes, where nothing loaded -- I scrolled down to the "Competing" side. This appears to have been a bug, because when I refreshed the first set of boxes had content in them.

Maybe it'd be nice to make it more prominent, set off in bold text somewhere, and mentioned before both quizzes?

(to be clear: I wasn't personally bothered by it, nor was I in an environment where it was problematic)

lwf··on Offensive Tweet Quiz
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

> I regret to inform you that you are wrong. I know that you've likely heard this from someone else -- perhaps even someone respected -- but it's just not true. The law says no such thing. Again, I encourage you to read it. The law does distinguish between "interactive computer services" and "information content providers," but that is not, as some imply, a fancy legalistic ways of saying "platform" or "publisher." There is no "certification" or "decision" that a website needs to make to get 230 protections. It protects all websites and all users of websites when there is content posted on the sites by someone else.

also:

> First off, there is no "neutrality" requirement at all in Section 230. Seriously. Read it. If anything, it says the opposite. It says that sites can moderate as they see fit and face no liability. This myth is out there and persists because some politicians keep repeating it, but it's wrong and the opposite of truth. Indeed, any requirement of neutrality would likely raise significant 1st Amendment questions, as it would be involving the law in editorial decision making.

lwf··on Offensive Tweet Quiz
Should probably have a NSFW warning -- the "offensive" tweets I was randomly shown were porn.

Granted, I have the Twitter "adult content" filter off, so perhaps that's just on me. Was just a bit surprising :)

lwf··on How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
s/trained/strained/
lwf··on .org doesn't mean credible
Wow, I didn't realise it was this old:

> The URL had been registered back in 1999, before 2001 regulations restricted the “.edu” designation to accredited higher educational institutions. “[D]espite its misleading top level domain,” noted Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2015), head of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association, “Academia.edu is not an educationally-affiliated organization, but a dot-com.” Like other prior domain filings, Academia.edu was grandfathered in, granting the startup a time-sealed patina of nonprofit credibility

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305117696523

lwf··on Investigating how the New York Times A/B tests their headlines
The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network[1] isn't publicly funded, no.

PBS, NPR, and, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting[2], lots of individual, independent local radio and television stations.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-SPAN [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...

lwf··on Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
Harvard disagrees with you:

> HARVARD COLLEGE has almost as many students from the nation’s top 0.1 percent highest-income families as from the bottom 20 percent. More than half of Harvard students come from the top 10 percent of the income distribution, and the vast majority—more than two-thirds—come from families in the top 20 percent.

https://harvardmagazine.com/2017/01/low-income-students-harv...

(They do have great financial aid for low-income families)

lwf··on The Right to Repair could help address a critical shortage in school computers
When you talk about a concept, then talk about a personal anecdote, people are going to assume they're related.
lwf··on Feds move to block California’s net neutrality law
IRV == "instant runoff voting"?
lwf··on Zulip 3.0: Threaded Open Source Team Chat
[First engineer at Zulip; work at Dropbox]

Portions of Zulip's backend were used to power some Dropbox features in 2014-16, but the product itself wasn't further integrated.

In any case, I'm proud of how we handled the handoff to OSS and a sustainable independent stewardship org. I have https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/146708555778/zu... framed on my wall.

lwf··on U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation
In the context of this case, which was over a criminal matter, they cannot pass a retroactive law. ("ex post facto")

For civil matters, yes, with a bunch of asterisks: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec...

lwf··on Disney almost bought Twitter in 2016
Right, and that content was on YouTube Kids. The current "made for kids" policy goes a length toward improving on the situation GP was decrying.
lwf··on Don't Mess with Texas
Standing military in the US is also 0.4% (1.38M/328.2M), v.s CA's 0.17% (67,000/37,894,799) of population.
Page 1 of 9Next →