Hacker News Reader

sikhnerdon Swype makes almost 4000 location requests every day

Every time I see something like this come up, it really makes me wonder how many other apps out there are doing the same thing and getting away with it.

Unless you root your phone and use something like the mentioned android firewall, or go whole-hog and install Cyanogenmod, what chance do you have to guard against this?

I assume ios users are likely in the same boat, but with even less chance of recourse.

sikhnerdon GNU Screen v.4.2.1

This is an excellent point, and another big motivator for me to move to tmux

Basically, if I'm going to be rolling out a new (patched) version of screen manually to all my servers/clients, might as well install tmux instead.

sikhnerdon GNU Screen v.4.2.1

Notables from 4.2.0:

  * layouts
  * window groups
  * better mouse support
  * vertical split
  * new and expanded commands

Though I doubt this will entice me back from tmux, even though my primary motivator at the time (ages ago) was lack of vsplit in screen.

Also notable is if you upgrade you can't re-attach to sessions started by an older version of screen.

sikhnerdon Programming Sucks

The page source has a nice gem:

  <!--
  So this guy we just interviewed at my
  current job wrote this little script
  to see if a product update for some 
  company had come out. Every 10 seconds
  the script urllib'ed the page, checked
  the length of the html - literally
  len(html) - against the length it was
  last time it checked. He wrote a blog
  post about this script. A freaking
  blog post. He also described himself
  as "something of a child prodigy"
  despite, in another post, saying he
  couldn't calculate the area of a slice
  of pizza because "area of a triangle 
  with a curved edge is beyond my 
  Google-less math skills." Seriously 
  dude? I haven't taken geomtry in 20 
  years, and pi*r^2/8 seems pretty 
  freaking obvious.

  The script also called a ruby script
  to send him a tweet which another 
  script was probably monitoring to text
  his phone so he could screenshot the 
  text and post to facebook via 
  instagram.

  I think the "millenials" - who should
  be referred to as generation byte - get
  undeserved flak, as all generations do,
  for being younger and prettier and 
  living in a different world.

  But this kid calling himself a prodigy
  is a clear indication of way too many
  gold stars handed out for adequacy, so
  to ensure that no such abominable
  script ever does anything besides 
  bomb somebody's twitter account, this
  comment shows up exactly 50% of the 
  time, and I encourage others to do 
  the same.
  -->

sikhnerdon Name for OpenSSL fork released

"LibreSSL (the OpenBSD fork of OpenSSL)" In case anyone missed it on first read as I did.

sikhnerdon Microsoft OneDrive for Business modifies files as it syncs

Seriously raises some questions around the whole product, and makes me wonder if we can ever trust any other third-party with any sort of "sensitive" data.

Luckily there exists plenty of FOSS options that provide a close approximation of this functionality for me, though I know they will likely never be an option for the type of companies that rely heavily on things like OneDrive.

sikhnerdon What it is like being the only engineer in a meeting [video]

I think the best way I've found to combat these types of meetings and cut through the talk is simply to ask "Why"

Find out pretty quickly (generally) what they are actually wanting and nobody needs to print things in transparent ink... (usually)

sikhnerdon Ask PG: Is HN Expired Link Eventual Fix Planned?

I loved this extension, and is really the only thing I'm missing now that I've moved back to Firefox :(

sikhnerdon I fought my ISP's bad behavior and won

  brew install curl --with-ares

sikhnerdon Edit a Google doc with vim

(2010) and looks like it hasn't got any updates in a couple years unfortunately.

sikhnerdon [dead]

Looks like it posted (late?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6827554

sikhnerdon Archive.org: Play Castle Wolfenstein in your browser

This is cool, too bad it crashes so much. Once this is better I think there is a lot of cool software they can put up.

sikhnerdon Unix: When pipes get names

Only time I've used it is as a poor man's screen -x

  mkfifo file; script -f file

Other user simply does

  cat file

sikhnerdon Unix Commands I Wish I’d Discovered Years Earlier

You can pre-sort as greyfade mentions, or do it within awk itself:

  awk '!/#/ {a[$2]++}END{for (i in a) print a[i],i | "sort -nk1"}' data.txt
 1 0
 1 202
 1 289
 1 291
 1 298
 1 311
 4 104

sikhnerdon Infinite Bang Bang

This is covered in the faq: http://ridiculousfish.com/shell/user_doc/html/faq.html#faq-h...

sikhnerdon A Practical Computer Science Primer (2008)

I wish there was something like this near me, I'd do it in a heartbeat

sikhnerdon Quine Relay

Here's the generated QR.go https://gist.github.com/SikhNerd/6004502

sikhnerdon Quine Relay

I gave it a (very) quick go, but failed and I don't have neither the time nor skill to debug it, I'll throw up what got generated so far if you're interested. https://twitter.com/sikhnerd/status/356920512770867200

sikhnerdon Trying to complete all projects from Martyr2’s Mega Project List

Looks like we've killed the site, here is a mirror via the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20120809050719/http://www.dreamin... (couldn't see the live site, so this may be updated)

sikhnerdon Southwest Airlines grounds flights due to computer outage

I believe Southwest uses a system called SAAS, which they call "a Sabre Product" though it is actually based on the old Braniff Cowboy system and modified in-house. I remember talk of them switching to Sabre proper, but it's been years since I've been in that industry. Sabre I believe was made by some IBM engineers originally.

Some Relevant Links if you want to dig in, working with these systems was a lot of fun (I worked at several airlines):

Sabre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)

Global Distribution System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system

Sabre Company site: http://www.sabreairlinesolutions.com/home/

sikhnerdon Upgrading a cPanel plugin

This is part of what the developer released to fix the security vulnerability disclosed responsibly on WHT [1] tl;dr of that thread by the OP [2] . Beyond the ridiculous response of the developer in the thread, the fix released doesn't even fix the issue. Some other security researcher released the root vuln [3] and basically every install of this software is about to be rooted. And that's all before the ridiculousness of passing a root password over http, which strips "special characters" that is used to login to your box and upgrade their software. If you read the linked thread, it's like a case study on how to NOT respond to a security disclosure.

[1] - http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1275572 [2] - http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=8727714&postcou... [3] - http://localhost.re/p/zamfoo-120-vulnerability

sikhnerdon Vim Adventures

Previously on hn, with some good discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877880

sikhnerdon If you love automation, why is your development environment manual?

Use can easily do something like this for one-off edits "vim scp://remoteuser@server.tld//path/to/document" or use netrw for a more robust solution to using your local vim to edit remotly. http://www.drchip.org/astronaut/vim/index.html#NETRW

sikhnerdon The most useful thing in bash

CTRL-x-r will reload it as well, without having to restart your shell

sikhnerdon The most useful thing in bash

You would also likely want to increase HISTFILESIZE as well. HISTFILESIZE sets the size of the history file, HISTSIZE is per-session

sikhnerdon Bob's wife Carla lends a speedy mind

I recall in a previous thread jgrahamc promised a single, illustrated document with this series, very much looking forward to that so I can hand it to someone like my wife and have her truly understand how this works. Thanks for putting it together, great series.

I could see a similar set devoted to explaining things like PGP or PKI

sikhnerdon Twitter is forcing us to drop ability to flattr creators by favoriting tweets

How long until twitter rolls out it's own tweet-directed payment service? Maybe they finally found a market-tested monetization strategy.

sikhnerdon If you're in Boston without phone service, use this website to call your family

It's always encouraging to see a startup use it's resources to help others. Unfortunately quite rare as well. Good job Twilio!

sikhnerdon Huge attack on WordPress sites could spawn never-before-seen super botnet

It's actually two separate, but extremely similar attacks. One is exactly as described in the article, fairly distributed dictionary attack with user admin against wp-login.php. The second one is slightly more advanced, much much more distributed and I've seen it go for Joomla and wordpress, trying common usernames at times (though generally sticking to administrator/admin) and going through what appears to be a dictionary of about 3000 passwords. The bigger issue is these are coming in so fast and from so many directions, on resource constrained machines this is essentially ending up like a DDoS, which has a lot of ancillary effects. mod_sec and other similar methods of identifying these incoming before hitting apache and spawning a php thread are proving to be very much not enough.

sikhnerdon The DDoS that almost broke the Internet

I'm happy to see CloudFlare actually include some technical details in this post, though as always, I'd be happy to see more. It's always more interesting when we can follow along technically.