Hacker News Reader

paulannesleyon The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org

Not really. Unless they completely hijacked all DNS resolution under .org to IPs they control, fraudulently gain TLS certificates (using DNS-based proof), and proxy the traffic to the true IP. Not a realistic scenario at scale.

paulannesleyon Challenging projects every programmer should try

"The tech industry"; maybe. "Hacker culture"; no.

paulannesleyon Wasps: If you can't love them, at least admire them

> He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.

… I think William Gibson did not instil a love of wasps in me.

paulannesleyon The Art of Warez [video]

Perhaps, like me, your serial port was driven by an older UART chip like an 8250 [0] which could be a bottleneck for modems faster than 9,600 baud.

I remember in teen years phoning the local computer shop every week asking if they had the 16550 UART [1] serial cards in stock yet to upgrade my 486DX4-100 to get full 28.8kbps from my modem. Can't remember if they ever did.

I think the 16550 was faster largely because it had a larger buffer, so it wouldn't wait or drop data as often when the CPU was slow/busy.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/8250_UART

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART

paulannesleyon DSVPN – VPN using TCP at port 80 and 443

Toy projects are my favourite HN content. It's the H in HN.

paulannesleyon Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978

> The existence of the greenhouse effect was argued for by Joseph Fourier in 1824

From the linked wikipedia article on Greenhouse effect

paulannesleyon List of dead Google products, services, and devices

Building products/features and then killing them when they don't work is generally fine. And renaming/merging/consolidating them isn't really killing them. But…

> Sparrow was an email client for OS X and iOS. They acquired and then killed it. It was over 1 year old.

Buying then killing is sad. Acquihire I guess?

> Google Reader was a RSS/Atom feed aggregator. It was over 7 years old.

These are the ones that feel like they hurt the internet. That was seven critical years for RSS/Atom. Investing time/money in building feed aggregators/readers meant competing against the might of Google and a $0 price point.

paulannesleyon Mockingbirds show heightened aggression after lead exposure

The article touches on that:

> Sub-lethal exposure to lead in humans has been linked to increased aggression, with people who grow up in high-lead neighborhoods having a higher probability to be incarcerated for violent crime. They also tend to score lower in standardized tests.

paulannesleyon AWS App Mesh – Service Mesh for Microservices on AWS

I wonder if this integrates with AWS Certificate Manager to provision HTTPS certificates so that traffic can be end-to-end encrypted. That's one of the reasons I've stuck to Application Load Balancers in front of services instead of using ECS/Route53 service discovery.

paulannesleyon Apollo Accelerators – Amiga Classic accelerator boards

Thanks, that led me to http://www.interstation3d.com/portfolio/16-bit_memories.jpg and more of his work at http://www.interstation3d.com/

paulannesleyon Fingerprints are usernames, not passwords (2013)

Fingerprints are not passwords, but I don't think it's useful to think of them as usernames either.

This is a much more pragmatic take on it by Troy Hunt, the person behind “Have I been pwned?”: https://www.troyhunt.com/face-id-touch-id-pins-no-id-and-pra...

> The first point I'll make here as I begin talking about the 3 main security constructs available is that they're all differently secure.

paulannesleyon Why a Dutch court stopped high school students from exchanging schools

> let this taint your opinion of Amsterdam

Why taint? The judge gave good reasons for disallowing trading. In particular; if students know they can trade places later, they'll pile onto the most popular schools (rather than their true preference) knowing that if successful they can easily trade their place for another one (including their preferred school which may not have selected them). Add to this the possibility of paid trades, I think it's great they're keeping it fair and simple.

paulannesleyon Building a NAS

> So he's currently using about 10TB of 60TB of usable space.

Other way around; he's using ~50TB of ~60TB with ~10TB free.

paulannesleyon Enroute Airbus A380 wake flips Challenger business jet upside down

> one thousand feet above

Are the imperial units of measurement an aviation thing, or an American thing, or a bit of both?

paulannesleyon Tech Interview Torture Chamber

> you just start working with a guy, giving him basic isolated tasks, and as he successfully progresses with his work, task are getting more and more complicated (salary, permissions as well). After few months of such freelance-ish work you can know for sure that this dude is compatible with the team, able to solve problems, able to learn. And only then he becomes an employee with offer, benefits and SO.

Careful not to presume or disseminate the idea that all candidates/hires are men.

paulannesleyon Circuit building: stop using antique parts (2014)

That effect drives me nuts too; but it seems to bother a minority of people. I've always assumed/guessed it's in the order of 50–100Hz; the 500–1000Hz mentioned may be fast enough to appear continuous to sensitive humans and maybe fish...

paulannesleyon Elementary OS

> 1Password apparently works fine with WINE, but I haven't used it myself.

I run 1Password in Wine in Docker on my (secondary) linux ThinkPad with Dropbox sync. It works, but it's clunky. Part of that is that I don't like the Windows 1Password application compared to the macOS one, though.

paulannesleyon What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic one?

SD cards implement a simple four-pin mode (SPI) for which there's public documentation, and a proprietary mode parallelizing data over more pins. I know more about the former than the latter, but it's probably a similar situation.

SPI is full duplex; it has a dedicated line per data direction (MISO and MOSI), however the same lines are used for commands and data. So with MOSI (master out, slave in) physically disconnected, it'd be impossible to send the command asking to read data, even though that data would be delivered on the separate MISO (master in, slave out) line.

paulannesleyon Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

I somewhat agree; TL;DR can seem dismissive and certainly discards most of the value of the actual article.

In this case I did it because the title made me wonder if this was the article I read years ago about implementing an ARM emulator for AVR to boot linux. I clicked through, confirmed it was, and that it was a 2012 article. I figured I'd leave the TL;DR as a shortcut for others to confirm they've already read it, not as a replacement of the article for those that haven't.

paulannesleyon Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012)

Very cool (TL;DR: it's an ARM emulator for 8-bit AVR which can slowly boot Linux). Could do with a [2012] tag in the title.

paulannesleyon “The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to information” (1991)

This link from that 1991 thread is still available 25 years later: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

I'd guess it hasn't been continuously available, but certainly must be one of the oldest web links working today.

paulannesleyon Traffic Wouldn’t Jam If Drivers Behaved Like Ants

> Stricter and more expensive ticketing might help.

I doubt it, and… please no. Demerit points maybe. Fines disproportionately punish the less affluent and incentivise the wrong attitude to enforcement.

paulannesleyon What’s up with nano?

The ones that ship with OS X 10.11:

  $ otool -L /usr/bin/nano
  /usr/bin/nano:
          /usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib (compatibility version 5.4.0, current version 5.4.0)
          /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1225.0.0)
  
  $ otool -L /usr/bin/vim
  /usr/bin/vim:
          /usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib (compatibility version 5.4.0, current version 5.4.0)
          /usr/lib/libiconv.2.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 7.0.0)
          /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1226.10.1)

paulannesleyon GitHub Security Update: Reused Password Attack

> But would an account where an attempt was made, and failed, also count?

I wouldn't think so. There must be countless incorrect password attempts all the time.

> What if the userid and password are correct, but 2FA stopped the attack on an account. Is that account affected, in their view?

Interesting question. I'd hope they'd inform me if somebody had my password and was only blocked by 2FA.

paulannesleyon PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

Sequel Pro (free open source, despite name) is a native application which is much nicer to use than phpMyAdmin. So, yes there's benefits other than security.

paulannesleyon Tom Perkins has died

If my death warranted coverage, I'd rather a fairly recent photo of me healthy and charismatic.

paulannesleyon HTTPie: a CLI, cURL-like tool for humans

I like using HTTPie for many things, however the current release does a bad job of rendering XML, e.g. it'll display `<sitemapindex xmlns="http://…">` as `<ns0:sitemapindex xmlns:ns0="http://…">`. But — I just checked and found the not-yet-released v1.0.0 fixes this by removing the XML formatter completely as discussed in https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/issues/443 so my gripe is sorted.

I still tend to go back to cURL when I want to see exactly what's been received, and use httpie for when I know the response headers and body serialization are fine and I want to see the data therein.

paulannesleyon Hjson, the Human JSON

JSON5 looks really good. I'm not sure about this one part though, from a point of view of simplicity and interoperability when deserializing the data:

> Numbers can include Infinity, -Infinity, NaN, and -NaN.