Hacker News Reader

mastre_on FCC votes to restore net neutrality rules

This reminds me when I got a “survey” email from ERCOT, the entity that oversees Texas’ “deregulated” energy provider racket. I was ready to lay into them hard, but starting with the second or third questions, it was clear that all they were concerned about was to _sell_ new products — ZERO interest in hearing feedback of how terrible the system for end users, they just want to sell some sort of outage insurance product (“would you pay $5 to be protected from a 30 minute or less outage one time?”).

I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a less than noble ulterior motive behind this push, although I’m hoping for the best. Sounds like the main reason it may actually make sense to bring it back from their PoV is because ISPs have to deal with individual state laws.

mastre_on Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the Next Decade

> many boards are already integrating M.2 slots: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm

Which ones are you seeing with M.2 slots? I've clicked a good 5-8 of the top listings from that list for which it would make sense to have such slot and they're missing it.

mastre_on Arm Announces Armv9 Architecture: SVE2, Security, and the Next Decade

Care to describe details of your setup?

mastre_on As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'

> My kids are being taught a lot of critical race theory concepts in their middle school which, to put it charitably, don't have a whole lot of objective data behind them.

Can you give examples of the concepts you mention your kids are being taught in their middle school?

mastre_on Voltswagen of America

The i in your pei shan't be there, the sound is a flat peh. All of the syllables are flat sounds, hah-lah-peh-nyo.

mastre_on OpenSSL Security Advisory

Update: as of now, homebrew has updated to openssl 1.1.1k.

mastre_on SQLite is not a toy database

Also, another issue when not in WAL mode is that a long read will actually have a write lock and block writes.

mastre_on SQLite is not a toy database

> but one that will never be fixed due to backward compatibility

I wonder if a fork/"new version" could address this. Like, sqlite2 (v1.0, etc.).

mastre_on OpenSSL Security Advisory

Mac's OpenSSL should be LibreSSL 2.8.3 as of Big Sur 11.2.3; for brew openssl you'll have to wait till they update it.

mastre_on Tz: A Time Zone Helper

I'm in the same boat but since I'm thankfully not married to RH-like systems I'm also considering things like Debian.

mastre_on Tz: A Time Zone Helper

FYI this works flawlessly on M1 too.

mastre_on Tz: A Time Zone Helper

What are your plans post-2024?

mastre_on Chrome’s address bar will use https:// by default

Thanks!

Edit: strange that this change is not listed on that page.

mastre_on Chrome’s address bar will use https:// by default

I feel like I'm asking the obvious, but.. is it that hard to mention a date when you're going to break a bunch of stuff, so those affected at least know how long they have to look for contingency plans? For those who don't know how long it takes for a Chrome version to move from dev (v90 is there now) to prod it would be nice to have an idea, is it a week/month/90 days?

mastre_on I just hacked my brain (2015)

Can someone explain to this non-EE how current alone, as specified in milliamps in the absence of a specified voltage, can be used to specify a lethal condition? In other words, from here and other sources I'm inferring that 100mA can stop the heart, but does it not matter if it's from a (at?) 9V battery vs 1.5V AA battery?

mastre_on Running my own DoH relay and getting Pi-hole protection away from home

> a Raspberry Pi is not quite powerful enough to handle a gigabit connection

To clarify, you're referring pretty much exclusively to the PiVPN part here, correct? I have a 3B doing lots of other things and it's serving Pi-Hole duty as well w/o a hitch.

mastre_on The road to electric is filled with tiny cars

> I mention all this free of ethical opinion. Just want to clarify that it is almost certainly not just a simple act of goodwill. Despite this, we can all—at least for now—benefit from such generosity.

I agree. It's still refreshing to witness as it's not something you see every day (ever?). Things are impossible to do a certain way until they're not. If everyone shared patents, we could focus on innovation. Yes easy to say, and easy(er) to do in a new field like Tesla's when they started, but again, it's a refreshing respite from the status quo, that is all.

mastre_on The road to electric is filled with tiny cars

Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy[1]. They even have an "open source philosophy to patents[2]." I believe, based on what I've seen, all this makes Elon happy to see -- it's the world he envisions and, at least in [no small] part, helped spur on.

---

[1] https://www.tesla.com/about

[2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

mastre_on Cross-Database Queries in SQLite

Will give that a shot, thanks!

mastre_on Cross-Database Queries in SQLite

I have one of the simplest toy services you can envision and am already running into a problem. Basically, I'm logging a temperature from a sensor to a SQLite db every minute or so (whenever it sends the reading). Sometimes I run a query manually thru the SQLite CLI to look into the data -- the query tabulates about 1.5 years' worth of data, by month and with averages, and can take about 20-30s as it's all running on an RPi3. As far as I can tell SQLite locks the entire table instead of just the records involved in the read, if one of my readings, new data to be inserted, happens to come in during me running the query I get "database locked" and the write fails.

Yes this is a heavy query that would not make it to a production system, still I am surprised that load placed on a sqlite db by "hundreds of thousands of concurrent users" would not surface problems due to this simple detail.

mastre_on WSB Went Private on Reddit

> Just one more example why decentralization is actually the future of all content/social platforms.

Truly. In this case it remains to be seen if they can get back online, apparently it's happened before.

mastre_on WSB Went Private on Reddit

  We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a
  result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content
  policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can
  support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back.

mastre_on Can dairy farming ever be sustainable?

Do we know if diet plays a factor in methane production?

mastre_on Stripe’s payments APIs: the first ten years

> I guess this article sums up why we've had a rather bad experience with stripe so far: the API constantly changes, and the documentation or even Googling for a solution seems to be more confusing than ever since most articles you'll find are about some older API.

Just a note, one of the things they got right with their API is versioning. Until you decide to upgrade to a newer version of their API, nothing changes for you, and you can test out compatibility in dev/staging by simply specifying a flag on each API call (which is easy to do if they all go thru a central class that handles the Stripe API calls for your app). Their changelog also takes a "from -> to" flag which will show you the exact changes that are between the version you're on and the latest (or any other). All in all, for this specific part of it, I wish more places handled evolving APIs the way Stripe does.

mastre_on CentOS Linux is dead–and Red Hat says Stream is “not a replacement”

I guess what I am trying to say is that perhaps it's an inherently flawed model as evidenced but what just happened and, going forward, we should rid ourselves of such ties.

At the end of the day, we're talking about a super stable server distro with LTS. While many things are easier said than done, I believe this is important enough to the community that it could happen. My main concern with such a distro is security, a team developers providing security patches would be the most critical part of such an entity.

Hopefully before CentOS 7 goes dark in 2024 there will be viable alternatives. Right now, having to compile against custom libs not shipped with the distro (for example, modern OpenSSL) is a small price to pay for having another 3 years left to decide on best course of action to get off CentOS. Still, it's a terrible position to be in for those who upgraded to CentOS 8 already (as we were just about to do).

mastre_on Anti-fingerprinting extensions tend to make fingerprinting easier

What about randomizing some values on every load to make existing, and additional values (as described in the article), result in new (and therefore useless) fingerprints on every load?

mastre_on CentOS Linux is dead–and Red Hat says Stream is “not a replacement”

Is there anything to stop RH from not continuing to make these publicly available, since their intent is to stop the exact itch CentOS scratched?

mastre_on CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

Don't forget that AL also runs on Amazon's A1 ARM instances.

mastre_on A Guy Walks into an Apple Store

As a reference datapoint, my Model 3 Dual Motor will go about 16 miles on 4kWh of electricity under real-world conditions. Certainly some serious energy to push a 4,000 lb. + passengers vehicle that far, but compared to a year of use of a smartphone, it's a drop in the bucket. At my 7¢/kWh, that costs a whopping $0.28/year.

mastre_on No Implants Needed for Precise Control Deep into the Brain

> You would be creating a mirror of yourself on the computer, it wouldn't be you.

It's possible that the new you would believe you are still you, even though you would be a separate new you. I think what we're really touching upon here is that it starts to go against our belief that we are exceptionally special. And of course we are -- we don't really know any better. But maybe it simply doesn't matter and it would be good enough. Think of it like going to sleep -- how do you really know, beyond theoretical doubt, that you're still "you" when you wake up?

I'm simply here to provide a perspective perhaps not often considered. More for sparking additional thinking on the subject than anything else. I too believe we're super duper special unique snowflakes ;)