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syn0byte

637 karma · joined August 28, 2018

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syn0byte··on Ask HN: Is the Linux From Scratch project still relevant?
It's not a bad place to start. It still seems to link to a sysvinit style setup by default(good). There are systemd flavored versions available but the relative directions, size and time requirements should tell you plenty without me evangelizing against it.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter06/sy...

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/systemd/chapter06/s...

syn0byte··on Pogo stick rental startup swears it’s not a joke
Is it not? Haven't we just spend 2 days reading/talking about them? Seems to be working out well for them so far.

The opening paragraph has one of their Psychologist angel investors saying exactly this.

syn0byte··on Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning
While everyone else wonders about the nature of time. I wonder about the nature of "sense." What is "sense"? How do some things 'make' sense and others don't? Is "sense" universal? If not, why?
syn0byte··on Jitk: A Trustworthy In-Kernel Interpreter Infrastructure
It is BPF. It's one of the pavers in the road that got us to the current eBPF implementation today.
syn0byte··on Up to 25 cups of coffee a day still safe for heart health, study says
British study. We can infer instant coffee was the main preparation recorded in the study, which has a lower caffeine content than fresh brewed.

~70-120mg look like drip brew numbers. Instant tends to run from 30-50mg.

25 cups of instant == ~750-1250mg

syn0byte··on Rethinking Files
Your not solving anything, at best you are getting maybe one extra level of abstraction by shifting potential complexity in the application. It may or may not care about internal file "schema" and thus has no code for it. Shifts to concrete complexity in the system; Your application doesn't utilize file schema but some applications might so everyone gets a schema field and there is a bunch of extra code and complexity to support it.

From a security/reliability standpoint it sounds like a nightmare combining the worst of things like NTFS alternate data streams and share library loading into one.

syn0byte··on Another Step Toward the End of Moore’s Law
Depends on the brain doesn't it? Kim Peek and Srinivasa Ramanujan would indicate there is no fundamental limitation to the architecture of the human brain that prevents "fast math".

Should we measure CMOS and silicon's overall usefulness as a medium of CPU design based on the performance of a Z80?

syn0byte··on How Plaid Reconciles Pending and Posted Transactions
We don't have the whole story of their infrastructure and that a lot of Plaid's data sources are scraped and/or aggregated and repackaged in nonstandard ways. ACH and transaction tracking have been working fine for the last 20 years prior to a clever ML system.

Nacha ACH spec per BoA for example:

https://files.nc.gov/ncosc/documents/eCommerce/bank_of_ameri...

syn0byte··on Mathematics all-in-one cheat-sheet (2013) [pdf]
https://github.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments

https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

Yes. Not only is it possible but historically already an avenue of attack.

syn0byte··on A way to do atomic writes
What you call "broken" others call "performance choices". Except SSD controllers, they are big fat phonies.

Look at how much slower CPUs are without those speculative execution tricks. I can buy gigabytes of RAM with a 20 I found in an old jacket. You can explore entire worlds consisting of gigabytes of high res textures and mesh data in near real-time, while downloading 4 new albums off the internet.

Broken?

syn0byte··on The sorry state of OpenSSL usability (2017)
They actively removed and refuse FIPS mode as policy.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=139819485423701&w=2

No one that cares enough to use LibreSSL over OpenSSL would want FIPS as reintroducing it would make LibreSSL demonstrably worse. Anyone that requires FIPS doesn't know or care enough about security to have a dog in the fight.

syn0byte··on Google’s Shadow Work Force: Temps Who Outnumber Full-Time Employees
The promise of "promotion to FTE" from a large company is about as worthwhile as a stripper's promise to text you later when you give her a big tip.

Sure it happens, but it's mostly to string along suckers.

syn0byte··on H.264 is magic (2016)
The average refresh rate of a computer display is 60Hz. In this context it's interchangeable with framerate but we think of it in terms of Hz because of the monitors.
syn0byte··on Moody’s downgraded Equifax from “stable” to “negative” due to cybersecurity
Extra irony; OpenPGP is part of Equifax's revamped security practices.
syn0byte··on PayPal's Beautiful Demonstration of Extended Validation FUD
I (used to) implement EV certs among other duties and I don't pay attention to them either.

Step One: Create Doofenshmirtz Evil LLC.

Step Two: Register HugsAndTrustBanking.com to LLC

Step Three: Get the legal services of Dewy Cheetum & Howe to issue a letter stating Evil LLC is your legitimate business.

Step Three: Show CA "proof" of ownership for Doofenshmirtz Evil LLC and HugsAndTrustBanking.com.

Step Four: Get genuine EV cert for your shady scam operation.

Step Five: Profit.

EV certs are dumb, you can trust me on that[0].

[0]https://i.imgur.com/1dbJUQ9.jpg

syn0byte··on Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000)
Beowulf? MPI? Were these not already things 30 years ago?

https://github.com/intel/spark-mpi-adapter

Oh look, a paper; "For example, a recent case study found C with MPI is 4.6–10.2×faster than Spark on large matrix fac-torizations on an HPC cluster with 100 compute nodes"

Does it sound like large data analytics would have horribly stagnated?

syn0byte··on Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)
HTTPS Everywhere is dumb security theater that desensitizes users to potential issues when it should otherwise matter.

When only important shit you really wanted to encrypt was encrypted and you get a cert warning you took notice. Now one in 10 sites with an "easy/free ssl cert" that expired has normalized cert warnings on pages with cat pictures and bank sites alike.

syn0byte··on Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)
It's not a dying art, it's "abstracted away". The servos are still internally utilizing these designs. You just don't have to worry about the gritty physical details, just some basic control code.
syn0byte··on Intel Performance Hit 5x Harder Than AMD After Spectre, Meltdown Patches
Seems like a FUD-y non sequitur. Everyone isn't going to run out and completely replace their infrastructure with AMD overnight.

I doubt intel could keep up much better.

syn0byte··on Capitalism is failing America, says a conservative Republican
What a funny coincidence! Lawyer and MBAs are the 2 highest paid careers by an order of magnitude according to another link on HN[0]

[0]https://www.zippia.com/research/dead-end-careers/

syn0byte··on Millennials and Gen Z Increasingly Pessimistic About Their Lives, Survey Finds
A single mother working as a waitress at Denny's in the 1980's had more spending power than a college educated cubicle drone in 2019; Let's talk about how is social media's fault!

Twice in the last 20 years - more than any other time in US history combined - The Presidential election went to the candidate that LOST the popular vote; These generations just lack a proper understanding of civics!

The beatings will continue until moral improves.

syn0byte··on Linux distros without systemd
Hi, ops guy; Fuck systemd.

Boot time: A possible 5-10 extra seconds from sysvinit is the problem here not the 5 minutes of BIOS/EFI POST time for those server boxen?

Logs: Where's the storage of the log data in journalctl and what tools can I use to read that data in a small PXE rescue environment? But hot damn I didn't have to ls /var/log so that's nice.

Sarcasm aside how does it make your life any easier? I got a stack of FIXMEs to work on to get our infrastructure working, lot alone stable, on systemd.

syn0byte··on Study Finds Ultra-Processed Foods Drive Weight Gain
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11417387

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20930468

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4365303/

syn0byte··on Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

This isn't just some theory work in academic papers. It isn't even "new", lots of research dating back to the 1960s.

syn0byte··on Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story
You're probably right about the straw man, but I wasn't trying to make an argument against better models. Just rationalizing why what we got ain't so bad after all.

Yes, they do all that now but it's kludgy, easy to detect, and a much more obvious overreach of their presumed authority. See Comcast/Sandvine fiasco.

As to the implicit assumption of the Telco's powers under such a system. History is my biggest "proof". It's a reasonable assumption given economic and games theory. At best it wouldn't have been the Telco's directly that ended up with the control. Someone would have and the result would still be the same.

How about this: How many terrible government regulations about filtering and censorship that are technologically infeasible with the current internet been not only technically possible, but fully fledged features of an objectively better design?

Again I'm not arguing against research and better designs, just rationalizing what we got.

syn0byte··on Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story
There is this preoccupation in these documents with "applications" and "services" being an important part of the design of a network. I find it wrong to the point of troubling. Although granted I say this now only with the power of hind-sight.

With the power of hind-sight; Imagine an internet where Comcast, AT&T, et al, have such granular control over access to your infrastructure. Ala Cart billing based on each addressable service you happen to run for example. DNS hijacking on steroids as another. The development of new protocols for all but biggest "participating" organizations would be stillborn. Capitalism would have strangled the Internet baby in the crib long ago if we had "done it right."

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and these are some of the best intentions.

syn0byte··on Google AdWords Exploit Seen in the Wild
Sounds reasonable only if the text is a URI handler format; http:// file:// ftp:// steam:// etc.

But then what about almost-uri text. www.yourbank.com without the https://. Or lookalikes "https:\\" or... what about proxies? does https://l33th4x.com?proxy=www.bank.com count if the text is www.bank.com?

Filtering crap like this sounds reasonable but very quickly becomes an exercise in what I call "Giving a mouse a cookie." Now you have a huge complex chunk of code to parse and filter URLs/URIs and every look-alike you can think of; Did you remember that automatic deserialization that kicked in when your values were sent to a callback?

2 days of work later, your new build has fancy-pants a tag filtering that contains and unknown number of bugs and phishers just register and use new domains that look kinda legit and follow your new text/link rules. www.security-wellsfargo-audit.com/login looks legit to the mark, your mail client allowed it so it must be OK.

syn0byte··on Is Conference Room Air Making Us Dumber?
I would be interested to see if increased levels of CO2 alter our perceptions of smells/odors. It may become more unpleasant to encourage us to vacate the poorly ventilated area.
syn0byte··on Windows gets a new terminal
unaffiliated plug for mintty

https://mintty.github.io/

Also; Cygwin, XWin and a real copy of XTerm/Gnome-Terminal/etc can give you the entire capabilities of a native terminal. Including weird hacks like w3m's image previews.

https://blog.z3bra.org/2014/01/images-in-terminal.html

The "downside" is native windows console apps will have a bad time with these terminal emulators.

syn0byte··on Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes
Except they won't. Not for an esoteric or exotic bug that doesn't affect 99.9% of their customers. Unless your businesses contract costs more than that team of technical and engineering resources(Eg your Netflix et al), it's not worth their time to bother looking into it.

All that assumes they even admit the issue is their hardware not your code, which is a mighty big assumption itself.

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