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soneil

4,800 karma · joined December 20, 2010

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soneil··on Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
They address this in the linked article, under the heading "Wait... Doesn't Cash Rule Everything Around Me?".

f.e.,

> Zed Channels is one example of such a service. It's free for anyone today, but we intend to begin charging for private use after a beta period of experimentation. Providing server-side compute to power AI features is another monetization scheme we're seeing getting traction.

soneil··on Tell HN: Hacker News now supports IPv6
I think this turns out to be a pretty good example of how stupidly big the ipv6 space is. Because it sounds like a big ask until it meets the numbers.

So you want "even billions(!!1!)" of nanobots per allocation. Well I'm lazy, and dynamically allocating a /64 is built right into the protocol. So lets let my medication dynamically allocate out of a /64. How many billions? Billions of billions. So lazy, so sorted.

But of course, I don't want my medication talking to my wife's medication. So lets de-conflict that. In fact, let's de-conflict everyone's medication.

We all know that 32bits is a bit over 4 billion. So 33 bits is going to be a bit over 8 billion. That's enough for now, but it's iffy, so let's go for 34bits, a bit over 16 billion. But in ipv6 world, it's polite to land on a nibble-boundary, so we'll go for 36 to be polite.

I'm going to steal the old allocation for ULA as an example. It was /7, but I'm going to call it /8 because I like round numbers.

So lets have an 8-bit prefix ala ULA. Then an 8bit planet number. Then an 8bit country/healthservice/issuingbody number. Then a 40bit human number, because I ran out of reasons to waste 8's There's our 64bit network number. With 64 bits left for billions of billions of nanobots to dynamically allocate.

The best bit about ipv6 isn't billions, it's that we get to actually structure our networks instead of cramming them into every nook and cranny we can buy.

soneil··on Tell HN: Hacker News now supports IPv6
So the funny thing is .. they didn't. They really didn't.

The original numbering plan for IP was that each network number became a /8. Which is how we miraculously ended up with 10/8, because network 10 was ARPANET itself, so 'flag day' left 10/8 vacant.

But back to the point at hand. IP itself is RFC 791, September 1981, nice and famous. The addition of classful networking because 255 network numbers wasn't going to last long, was RFC 790.

The first workaround for IP exhaustion was published before IP. It's been a Known Issue since day negative-one.

soneil··on Tell HN: Hacker News now supports IPv6
The space currently assigned to globally routable addresses is 1/8th of the v6 address space. Over 50% of the addressable space is currently reserved.

The numbers are frankly mind-bending. Even if we we make a complete pigs ear of assigning billions of IPs to billions of networks in the current /3, we have space for more than one do-over.

But I do believe there's a higher chance the next /3 will be assigned to Mars.

soneil··on Tell HN: Hacker News now supports IPv6
IPv6 not just allowing, but expecting multiple scoped addresses relieves this quite nicely.

The most common setup for this is that you have a static link-local address, and a static global address. And listening processes should listen to these static addresses.

Then you have a temporary global address, and outbound connections should use the youngest temporary global address (because temporary addresses don't disappear when they age out, they disappear when they age out AND no existing connection is still using them).

The net effect is that the address you leave in example.com's httpd logs is a temporary address that has no listening processes. And the address you use in dns, mdns, when connecting intentionally, etc is a static address.

soneil··on Your last name contains invalid characters (2010)
Since we're sharing war stories .. I have an O'Name. My employer game me an email address, first.o'name@corp. This, while being technically valid, broke many things as you can imagine. I asked repeatedly to have it changed, but to no avail. I got used to reciting my ID number on the phone because that@corp worked too.

One day, I got a call from IT, almost apologetically asking if they could change my email address because it was causing them issues. I pointed out I'd requested such approximately every 3 years since I started.

It turns out they'd never received those requests. I'll give you two guesses ..

soneil··on BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
Well, they needed /something/ to run on the BBC micro.

Part of the BBC's mandate (public funding requires public benefit, the mandate is essentially the contractual definition of the BBC's "deliverables") requires the production of educational content. As part of this, they had a programs for computer literacy in the early 80s - and commissioned a computer to go with them. So we had the BBC Micro running BBC Basic. We still had some left in school well into the 90s.

It's an interesting bit of history, because it gave a huge boost to the company that won the contract. Acorn soon after went on to develop the Acorn RISC Machine, featuring the ARM1 processor.

soneil··on I will always prefer to work from home
That's what we've been seeing. My team were all in one corner of one room. Then "one day", we were all sent home.

Someone left, and was replaced by someone in another European country. He's nominally "in the office", but since it's not the same office as the rest of us (and we're not in ours anyway), he's free to come and go as he pleases. It's not like it makes any difference to us.

Then our manager moved on, and was replaced by someone in yet another European country. He was WFH / fully remote before "this" even started.

By time they tried to sell us on RTO, exactly 50% of the team are still here. And going to the office now, just makes it less convenient to call the other 50% of my team. (Yes, call. Call me old fashioned, but I love a good bitchfest, and a good bitchfest shouldn't be in writing.) My manager genuinely advised we ignore the RTO missive and see what happens. (Spoiler: not much.)

Then my boss's boss moved on, and was replaced by another remote position - and now the murmurs of RTO have died down.

Now we're hiring and the net has widened yet again. They need to be in a country where we have a legal presence, and need to be willing to work European hours.

It's amazing how much has changed in relatively little time. It doesn't feel like that long ago I was trying to make the case for WFH on weekends.

soneil··on Canonical Launches MicroCloud to Deploy Your Own "Fully Functional Cloud"
We never really left.

I work with an enterprisey on-prem product, which we of-course tried to replace with a cloud offer. And in all fairness, it's generally gone well - but because we manage the platform, it sits in the cloud we chose. And that's never going to be the right choice for everyone.

So we have some customers who are concerned about national boundaries. We have some customers who offer their own clouds, and aren't hugely enthusiastic about using the competition's. And then the whole mess with the govt having isolated regions within otherwise-public cloud offers.

Between these, it quickly became apparent that replacing our traditional offer with *aaS would leave a lot of money on the table. It's a minority of customers, but it turns out to be a very valuable minority.

Within that context at least, "private clouds" start to feel like they have legs - bringing most of the benefits of the cloud, to places that 'public' can't reach.

soneil··on Blue Lagoon geothermal spa in Iceland closes after series of earthquakes
There's a gentleman who came across my radar, who follows this kinda stuff much like a 'storm chaser' might in the US. He has a recent (Wednesday) video where he found hotspots on the surface with a thermal camera - close enough to the Blue Lagoon that it's in-frame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV75cDceExw&t=115s

It's worth noting the area is surprisingly flat. Flat like sandpaper - it's not at all smooth, but there's not much of a gradient either. Essentially whatever the volcanic version of a flood plain is. So a surface fissure here could be quite problematic. It's very close to the power station, very close to the resort, and there's not a lot of geography to channel it away.

soneil··on Trouble Brewing for RISC-V as Issue of Technology Transfer Is Questioned
Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38163412 is worth reading alongside this (it's not exactly a dupe, but it's pretty meta).
soneil··on macOS Sonoma Broke Grep
ah, you're right - it looks like it was part of ohmyzsh.

It appears I missed the -o; without it, my alias asserts, but unaliased doesn't. With the -o they both assert. Still not what I was expecting, but the failure to cleanly replicate it is mine.

soneil··on macOS Sonoma Broke Grep
Interesting - it only appears to affect me with --color set (which is a default alias, but if you unalias grep it stops exploding.)
soneil··on Show HN: WireHole combines WireGuard, Pi-hole, and Unbound with an easy UI
It seems the canned deployment is the entire value-add here. It’s existing components that you can already deploy yourself if you prefer.

I much prefer this over the old method of canned deployment where you ran a script and prayed it didn’t hose the host too badly.

soneil··on iPods now considered vintage tech– so of course sold out at Urban Outfitters
I've been wondering how long until someone comes up with a drop-in logic board for the classic iPods, now that the patents are dropping off. Not only is it the only part with no new replacements, but mobile parts have come a long way.

My biggest worry would be matching the smoothness of the interface - rockbox has been going at least since my iPod Mini was new, and it still doesn't feel right.

soneil··on EBCDIC Is Incompatible with GDPR
"realistically" .. I don't think it's much to ask a Belgian bank (or offering accounts in Belgium) to actually support Belgian customers?

Unless they let go of every single customer with diacritics in their name, the complaint would still stand. Especially since the case is brought by a government body, not the end-customer.

The "throw your hands in the air" move for the bank wouldn't be to ditch this single customer, it'd be to ditch the entire eurozone. Remediation is likely cheaper.

soneil··on mAh Is an Industry Mistake
Every powerbank vendor I've seen gives the battery rating at 3.6/3.7V, so USB implying 5V gives us misleading values. So a 20,000mAh powerbank is 20*3.6V=72Wh, not 20*5=100Wh.

I've never seen a vendor that specifies 3.6V, the best you can hope for is that they give mAh and Wh so you can derive it yourself. If we need the Wh rating to keep the mAh rating honest, the mAh becomes redundant before the Wh does.

soneil··on mAh Is an Industry Mistake
You're not wrong, but the problem we're hitting is that most mobile tech has divorced product/supply voltage from battery voltage, and the result is a lot of "white lies" where the values stated don't add up to a whole.

My laptop has a 6000mAh battery and will charge from 5V. But my 10,000mAh powerbank will not fully charge it. The question is how to explain this to my mother.

To calculate this properly - you have to do some actual digging to find the nominal battery voltage of the laptop, since it's not any of the USB-PD voltages, and is thus entirely divorced from the laptop's input voltage.

And then you have to know that most powerbank vendors tell you the rating of the cells, not the rating of the product. So they will tell you that it's a 10,000mAh battery, and that it outputs 5V - but these two facts are only honest in isolation. It is not a 50Wh battery, it's a 37Wh battery. Or a 7,400mAh product that is powered by 10,000mAh cells.

Almost anywhere we use USB-PD, stating Wh is a lot more honest to the consumer. If we tell my mother that her laptop is 70Wh and the powerbank is 37Wh, she can infer it'll give her about half a full charge. If we tell her the laptop is 6000mAh and the powerbank is 10,000mAh, she can be forgiven for inferring it'll give her almost two charges.

--

For an example of what I'm calling "white lies": https://www.anker.com/products/a1271

(And to be clear, I'm not blaming Anker for this, I believe it's near-universal. I'm only using Anker as an example because they're a more-trusted brand.)

All the way down the bottom of the page, just above the FAQ, they give the capacity as "20100mAh/72.36Wh". 20100mAh is given 19 times - 72.36Wh is given precisely once. From 72.36Wh / 20.1Ah we get a nominal voltage of 3.6V, not 5V. 3.6V is never otherwise stated. I've never seen any vendor tell you that you're seeing the cell rating, not the product rating - but the better vendors will give you enough information to figure it out yourself.

soneil··on Iconic tree at Hadrian's Wall's 'Sycamore Gap' has been 'felled'
I think it's the correct terminology here. The police believe and suspect, the court try and prove. Arrests are always made 'on suspicion of'.
soneil··on Cardboard tents
I've seen this in other places in Europe. So incase this becomes territorial and my viewpoint needs to be discounted - I'm from the UK, but I've only been to festivals in continental Europe, primarily Czechia & Slovakia.

The huge overlap I see with the UK, that the US appears to be missing, is that there's surprisingly few other places to use tents. In most of the UK (ex. Scotland), wild camping is actually illegal. In central europe, camping appears to be surprisingly rare. They have astounding hiking routes, but with amenities provided/expected and just setting up camp is frowned upon.

So we have these super-cheap "pop-up" tents that don't survive much usage at all, and are likely only fit to be abandoned after a few days. Relatively expensive tents for weirdos like me that'll actually appreciate them. And almost zero market for anything in between.

So the markets are roughly €20-40 for a tent that'll survive this festival maybe. €200-400 for a tent that'll make it to next year, if this year doesn't get rained out, and you don't bother spend a few days at home drying it out so it's not a mouldfest when you go to use it next year, and €400+ for something you'll care about.

The huge disconnect between UK/EU usage and US usage is that there's often very little other reason to own a tent here. Even if you don't go camping in the US, you could, and that hypothetical is enough to get you to spend a few bucks more on something that's worth taking home with you.

(This comment offered without suggestions - perhaps a why, probably not a how.)

soneil··on Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
It’s amazing how much we haven’t moved on since iloveyou.txt.vbs
soneil··on Consumers defrauded on Zelle are left high and dry by the banks that created it [pdf]
I assume everyone's familiar with the overpayment scam - it's probably the second most common cheque scam after simply passing bad cheques in the first place. You're accidentally paid too much, and are asked to return the remainder, or pass it on to someone else. Then the original cheque bounces and you're out product plus the remainder you passed along.

This version relies on banks being required to make "funds available" in a timeframe that's often shorter than how long it takes a cheque to actually clear - so you can dig yourself into a hole before the cheque finally bounces.

The zelle version is essentially the same thing. Someone "accidentally" sends you a sum, and being a nice, reasonable person, you return it. The problem is this isn't a rollback; you don't (can't) revert their transaction - you create a second transaction.

So when the source of the original transaction turns out to be fraudulent - and as the parent post says, fraudulent can be reverted, the house always wins - that first transaction is reverted. The second, where you "returned" their overpayment, is an entirely distinct transaction and needs to be fought separately. And it's a much harder fight to win, because it doesn't involve the house winning.

(And yes, this could be almost entirely mitigated by having a user-facing return/revert/refund function that undoes the original transaction instead of creating a second.)

soneil··on The curl-wget Venn diagram
I think our setup was very particular to the UK. We didn't (and still don't?) have free local calls like the US, so we paid per minute for ISPs.

Almost all ISPs went through a scheme setup by British Telecom - you could either have free internet but you paid for your calls, or you could pay for your internet, and have access via a freefone number - so effectively flat-rate.

But the flat-rate option disconnected after two hours, on the dot. Which was hugely frustrating because we had a voicemail variant that was hosted by the telco, and let you know you had messages waiting by pulsing the dialtone. And my modem did not recognise the pulsed dialtone as a valid dialtone, and refused to connect until we called the number and marked them read.

Which lead to one of my most UK-centric retro stories. I tried to connect to the internet, and it refused to dial. I blew away my wvdial config, and it refused to dial. I blew away my ppp config, and it refused to dial. I grepped / for the error message and it didn't exist. I ended up blowing away my OS (and accidentally installing onto the wrong drive, and blowing away everything non-OS too), and it still wouldn't dial.

So I dragged the modem & extension cord to my mother's PC, and shot off a mail to my preferred mailing list (one hosted by John @ linuxemporium, my preferred source of mail-order distros), and swiftly received the response that in order to be certified by BT to operate on their network, one of the rules equipment had to obey was to refuse to redial the same number x many times. And that all I needed to do was power-cycle the modem. Which I'd done by dragging it upstairs to my mother's PC. And my own machine had been wiped twice over needlessly.

Aside, there was a lady named Helen on that mailing list who knew everything about everything, and is everything I aspire to be today. She had opinions on which harddrives best survived salt/sea air, and why they weren't deathstars. Just an incredible amount of lived experience. I miss mailing lists.

soneil··on The curl-wget Venn diagram
Our dialup used to disconnect every 2 hours by design. wget and wvdial were the only alternative to mail-ordering CDs
soneil··on Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge
I’ve also noticed a huge shift in which topics it tries to suggest, but I suspect it’s natural selection rather than intent. It feels like the ‘strike’ allowed subs which didn’t participate to rank higher, and it seems those gains are self-reinforcing (more members/participation lead to greater prominence, which leads to higher placement, which becomes circular).

I don’t like the results, but I’m not convinced it was intentional- more just self-selection between which communities did and didn’t participate.

soneil··on Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)
That I've always found interesting - a proper "skate to where the puck is going to be" moment.

There was a good few years there where everyone was looking for the "iPod-killer". There's even a chance the Zune would have got there, except by time they got close .. that's not where the puck was.

But I always found it interesting that after all that search for the "iPod-killer", none was ever crowned - instead the entire market just slipped silently into the night.

soneil··on Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)
Of course I'm writing this with the benefit of hindsight, but it's still an interesting position to read. They could make almost exactly the same claim for iTunes - that it's really not viable because you have no leverage over the incumbent publishers - that they're making for network operators.

And I really don't think this is a bad comparison, given that in 2006, iTunes is still very much fresh in the mind.

soneil··on DOS Game Club
It looks like it's trying to. On Safari ctrl+alt+f works for me.
soneil··on Police Seized Innocent Peoples Property, Kept It for Years. What Will SCOTUS Do?
You should read up on civil asset forfeiture - it's hilariously obtuse.

They arrest your money. You are not accused of a crime, your money is. Your money is not a person, and thus has no constitutional rights. Your money is not innocent until proven, that's a silly system reserved for persons - instead, your money must prove its innocence. And thus you get cases with absurd titles such as "United States v. $84,740.00 U.S. Currency" ( https://casetext.com/case/us-v-8474000-us-currency )

I'd love to say you can't make this up, but they did.

soneil··on Why does the USA use 110V and UK use 230-240V? (2014)
That'd give an upper bound of 243.8, which is far too close to 240 to be practical. As I tried to add, there is some necessary and natural deviation from nominal to account for path loss etc. 230±6% only allows 240 to deviate by 1.5%, which isn't much scope at all.

I believe ±10% was the traditional definition, so they just trimmed a little off the top end so it strayed less from Europe's definition - but not enough to actually affect nominal distribution.

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