Hacker News Reader

pawson iPhone update for Meltdown-Spectre: before/after performance benchmarks

My iPhone X has been on 11.2.5 since the day it came out, and I haven't perceived any slowdowns.

Have not done any benchmarking, and I'm not saying performance is the same as before, but anecdotally I haven't seen a difference. Just one guy's opinion.

pawson ECMAScript 2018 Language Specification

A few paragraphs down, you should find:

This specification introduces Async Functions, Shared Memory, and Atomics along with smaller language and library enhancements, bug fixes, and editorial updates. Async functions improve the asynchronous programming experience by providing syntax for promise-returning functions. Shared Memory and Atomics introduce a new memory model that allows multi-agent programs to communicate using atomic operations that ensure a well-defined execution order even on parallel CPUs. This specification also includes new static methods on Object: Object.values, Object.entries, and Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptors.

pawson If It Weren’t for Apple, Hybrid App Development Would Be the Winner Over Native

That sounds like an excellent outcome!

If you would consider writing up your experiences in a blog post I'd be interested in reading.

pawson PfSense 2.5 and AES-NI

TL, DR: If you are building a pfSense box with an x86 chip made in the past ~7 years [1], stop reading and carry on.

Those of you on a power budget, and want e.g. VPN support at closer to wire speeds, you're being advised to select a CPU with AES-NI to get hardware crypto offload. It's great we have software crypto in the first place, but under load it's likely to put a cap on your max throughput.

Kudos to pfSense/Netgate announcing this ahead of time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set#Supporting...

pawson PfSense 2.5 and AES-NI

Why do you say that? According to [1], AES-NI is not that rare.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set

pawson Ten years with DragonFly BSD network stack [pdf]

I saw that, cheers.

I'm more interested in the higher level takeaway. Why should developers use Dragonfly?

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the ability to peruse the kernel implementation narrative in the first place. As I'm not a kernel developer I'm left wondering what it means.

e.g. better multicore performance?

pawson Ten years with DragonFly BSD network stack [pdf]

If anyone could summarize what makes DragonFly's stack different I'd be obliged.

I understand FreeBSD's networking stack has been well-regarded since the 90s[1] and has shipped in many environments and consumer devices. Now that it's 2017, it's interesting to see what else is out there.

[1] https://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpoptimization.html

pawson Spotify acquires audio detection startup Sonalytic

@anonu the jsessionid param was giving me some issues.

Here's an alternate that should work:

https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...

pawson 94-year-old Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor Introduces Solid State Battery

I'm not an expert, but the article mentions current LiIon using "liquid electrolytes" a few times.

pawson 94-year-old Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor Introduces Solid State Battery

TL, DR: This tech utilizes solid-glass electrolytes vs today's liquid electrolytes. This apparently brings us:

"at least three times as much energy density as today’s lithium-ion batteries"

"greater number of charging and discharging cycles, which equates to longer-lasting batteries, as well as a faster rate of recharge (minutes rather than hours)."

The team lead is Dr. Goodenough, making things better!

(sorry, couldn't resist. that's really his name)

If true, that first point especially sounds awesome!

pawson UC Berkeley makes course video content unavailable to public

"Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete"

Sigh. No good deed goes unpunished.

Reminds me of this Louis CK bit: https://vimeo.com/69662330#t=4m39s

"How does the world owe you something you didn't even know existed 30 seconds ago?"

pawson UC Berkeley makes course video content unavailable to public

Ostensibly the National Association for the Deaf are aware of YouTube's automatic captions feature[1] by now. I wonder if it's possible nobody informed them until after they filed the complaint?

I'll grant that on previous occasions YouTube's auto captions have been hilariously wrong, but these days it really seems to be more fully baked.

I was curious to see how well the feature worked on older videos, and tested a random CS lecture from 2008.[2] Captions were perfectly fine.

The caption feature rolled out September 2009. [3]

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI

[3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-i...

pawson LG 5K display must be kept at least 2 meters away from Wi-Fi routers

Nice to hear you have an audio interface working there! Sounds like you do professional audio -- curious what kind of bandwidth needs you're expecting to have?

It's a minor nit, but one reason I prefer Thunderbolt hubs is because they hang directly off the PCI bus.

Historically speaking, with USB the host CPU intermediates all bus traffic. The 'fire' in FireWire (vs e.g. USB2) was how devices could access host memory directly.

It's probably a negligible amount of overhead these days, but my take is, if it's possible to use Thunderbolt and free up CPU cycles for whatever you're doing, why not?

Love to hear opinions from someone who has more recent knowledge on this.

pawson LG 5K display must be kept at least 2 meters away from Wi-Fi routers

Glad that's working nicely for your needs. Are you happy with the display overall?

I agree for the low bandwidth devices you've mentioned it's fine to hang everything off the one line. There is of course a speed hit for higher bandwidth needs[1] e.g. RAID arrays but that was true for the previous gen too.[2]

Nevertheless I still find it a shame we lost the variety of integrated ports from the previous gen. If we have to buy extra dongles anyway I'm equally ready to check out competitor panels.

AFAIK the LG 5k is the only panel offering 87W power output, right?

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/07/review-lg-ultrafin...

[2] http://www.macworld.com/article/1163773/storage/thunderbolt-...

pawson LG 5K display must be kept at least 2 meters away from Wi-Fi routers

This monitor was Apple's chance to ease the USB-C transition and IMO they blew it.

The previous gen Thunderbolt display effectively brought all the useful ports[1] back to the MacBooks with one cable, and made even the Air viable for a professional. It certainly was a big factor for me back in 2011.

Unfortunately with the current 5k display, the three included ports aren't even USB 3.1 gen 2. Like many other pros, I prefer to have dedicated keyboard/mouse, speakers, and Ethernet, and would have been happy to run a second cable if it brought those things back.

Right now it's looking like our best 'pro 5k' option is duct taping a hub[2] to the back of someone else's display. And it's not clear which hubs support the 15" MBP 87W charging requirement.

Feels like such a missed opportunity.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Apple-MC914LL-27-inch-Thunderbolt-Dis...

[2] https://eshop.macsales.com/preorder/owc-thunderbolt-3-dock/

pawson LG 5K display must be kept at least 2 meters away from Wi-Fi routers

According to a comment[1]" "An upstream port connects to the host device (PC) while the downstream ports are where you plug in peripheral devices (thumb drives, printers, etc.)."

Of course the 5k monitor does have three USB3 ports. (Not Thunderbolt ports, ostensibly because there isn't enough bandwidth left.)

[1] https://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/upstream-vs-downstre...

pawson OpenSSH 6.8-6.9 PTY local privilege escalation exploit (CVE-2015-6565)

Sierra 10.12.3 appears to be running OpenSSH_7.3p1, LibreSSL 2.4.1

i.e. if you run latest macOS & wondering if this exploit affects you, you're all clear.

pawson Show HN: Use Ansible to Run a “friends and Family” OpenVPN Server on Digital Ocean

Algo[1] may be a good fit for you.

Just be aware the authors deliberately target only very recent clients. [2]

I recently spun up a new Algo instance on an Ubuntu host and discovered I could no longer SSH from an old Snow Leopard Mac because it locked sshd down to only 'modern ciphers'[3].

(No affiliation, just a fan)

[1] https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

[2] https://github.com/trailofbits/algo/issues/168

[3] https://github.com/trailofbits/algo/blob/master/roles/securi...

pawson Ask HN: Why are flash memory prices going down so much faster than RAM?

For some historical context this is worth remembering:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing

pawson Moody's: U.S. Telecoms are underinvesting in broadband

Historically the big three agencies make money by charging a fee to the companies/entities they're rating. My understanding is that it's always been that way & things have not materially changed since 2007.

A good question to ask here is to what extent institutional debt buyers continue to rely on these ratings.

More background: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2014/10/09/impact-of-the-dod...

pawson A practical guide to securing macOS

A friend recently introduced me to Keepass[1], it seems to be an open source 1Password. I'd be interested in opinions on that, especially @tptacek's.

[1] http://keepass.info/

pawson Show HN: Primitive for macOS

Congrats on launching!

If you're able to do a follow up post in e.g. a month I'd enjoy reading! Especially if you decide to sell directly I'd be curious how that fares vs the App Store.

Thanks for sharing here, nice to see this.

pawson Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

Yes, 8.1 and later[1]

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Dev...

pawson Apple is doubling down on open source

Next week marks two months since Sierra's public release but there's been no commensurate release of any open source[1].

[1] https://opensource.apple.com/ 10.11.6 is latest macOS release at the time of writing.

pawson Apple's Great GPL Purge (2014)

You can still disable SIP

Even if only an academic exercise, it would be cool to actually strip out SIP and mandatory kernel extension signing.

At the time of writing, Apple still hasn't open sourced Sierra's XNU[1].

[1] 10.11.6 source: https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-3248.60.10/

pawson Major next steps for fusion energy based on the spherical tokamak design

Interesting to see the trend continue towards spherical tokamaks.

pawson Greenland shark found to be at least 272 years old

The Greenland shark is pretty unusual.

* Eating it has a deleterious effect on sobriety [1].

* It's also the most toxic shark meat out there. [ibid]

* Female Greenland sharks take 150 years to reach sexual maturity (no word on the gestation period).

The study also shows that Greenland shark females don’t reach sexual maturity until around 150 years old — suggesting that a century of heavy fishing could wipe out the entire species, says Bushnell.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark#Greenland_shar...

pawson Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2016)

I meant to include React Native here.

RN has been a focus for 2016.

pawson Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2016)

SEEKING WORK | Remote | Based in New York City (timezone flexible)

Sr. Technical Consultant

My name is Patrick. I'm an award-winning developer with broad technical and business knowledge, focused on building apps that convert and perform at scale.

Authorized to work in US and EU, bilingual in German/English (native).

  • Full-stack web on mobile and desktop

  • Wide DevOps experience (AWS, Heroku, Vagrant, CI/Jenkins, self-hosting)

  • OS internals (forensics, Unix/Windows, network security/firewalls/Cisco)

  • formerly Microsoft and Princeton

Results:

  • ~40,000 users totaling ~$18 mil in donations (fundraising platform)

  • ~$1 mil/yr revenue (e-commerce site from scratch, non-physical goods)

  • $25k/yr hosting cost reduction by re-architecting AWS infrastructure

  • 200% improvement in forensics turnaround time by revamping imaging lab

  • 350% page speed improvement by rewriting JS & deps from scratch

Public-facing projects: http://revv.co, http://petwellnessreport.com, http://bfa.com

email: me at onpaws.com

Mention HN, please.

http://github.com/onpaws

http://www.iforgotyoursite.com

keywords for cmd-f folks: rails, ruby, es6, javascript, js, es2015, react, angular, sass, less, css3, html5, mobile, ios, elasticsearch, devops, linux, security, cisco, stripe, braintree, paypal, brooklyn, nyc, new york

pawson Let's Encrypt now fully supports IPv6

HTTPS is a good idea for many (most) scenarios, especially when your traffic goes over uncontrolled/public networks, but depending on where you stand, it may not be necessary for _all_ use cases.

For example if the boss gives you an hour to e.g. stand up a internal company-facing blog on a controlled network environment where you don't necessarily have hostile actors in your threat model, configuring HTTPS might not be your first priority.

Another counterexample you hopefully won't have to experience: if you have to support end users where their device's date and time may be incorrect, e.g. their laptop battery died and NTP hasn't kicked in yet, on page loads users would see a scary 'certificate not trusted' warning[1]. Fixing the laptop's date is a non-obvious solution for end users.

1: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/98884?hl=en