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tech2

506 karma · joined May 14, 2016

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tech2··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
Anemoia is the term, I believe, and an almost perfect fit (nostalgia for a time you have never experienced)
tech2··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
Historically that was always part of the bragging rights. The harder to reach, or more risky location, the higher the cred for having achieved it.
tech2··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
All that's old is new again. In the late 90s there were a number of companies (eMachines, for example) which heavily discounted their machines by having integral advertising, and in some cases through internet service provision. This sounds like the same idea all over again, just with a different backing fund source.
tech2··on Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?
Two major issues in my experience seem to occur.

The first is that you had a system with a given set of ownership and now lines need to be drawn between groups to grant each sub-team their own piece of the larger pie. This is where Conway's law comes to bite you because your code is likely structured around your existing team and practices. Deciding how to draw that boundary is a challenge (API-based? Separate services?). Do not skip this part, otherwise you'll have an awful mix of old and new and everyone suffers.

The second is how work is structured. With a small team, anyone can edit anything (ownership again). With multiple teams you need to accept that changes will require multiple stages of development and the rate of change can take a hit due to scheduling and prioritisation for each team. In the small team a single sprint (assuming this is your working practice) may have been sufficient, but with multiple teams those changes will need scheduling.

tech2··on Python Type Checker Comparison: Empty Container Inference
It's not entirely fair.

Prior to 2.3 Python didn't have booleans, just "truthiness". In 2.3 they added the Boolean class as a subclass of int (because of patterns of development it was a pragmatic choice). True and False were introduced, but they were able to be reassigned which could cause all manner of fun. 3.x made them keywords which put a stop to that but the int aspect remained.

tech2··on Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)
I have to ask, because wow that's a lot of buckets, but what kind of activity requires breaching even a 1,000 bucket limit per account?
tech2··on Turn Dependabot off
For python maybe pip-audit, and perhaps bandit for a little extra?

It doesn't have the code tracing ability that my sibling is referring to, but it's better than nothing.

tech2··on Microsoft Copilot AI Comes to LG TVs, and Can't Be Deleted
I tried to do that, really did, but my TV was circa 2006 and I needed a replacement. None of the options in my region are good, there's no Scepter equivalent unless you pay 3x as much for something akin to a commercial display. So, air-gapping it is!
tech2··on Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay
The one that should probably really freak you out was/is the Soviet "Dead Hand" system. Who needs people deciding whether to launch?
tech2··on Basalt Woven Textile
I had wrap from my exhaust system start to unravel at one point during a long journey far from home. I had to unwrap it by hand on the roadside sans-gloves to prevent it from ending up under a wheel and tearing components apart. The end result was that I had to find a local retailer selling duct-tape; Not for the car, but so I could apply segments of it to my skin to pull those tiny irritating fragments free from my inner forearm. Yeah, that itch is evil!
tech2··on Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
Right, but that's a follow on to regulations about increased rear and side still heights for occupant protection, and that's a follow on from increased vehicle sizes, and that's a follow on from commercial vehicles being sold to the general public instead of regular passenger vehicles due to tax breaks, etc.
tech2··on Short Little Difficult Books
One of my favourites that starts out difficult but you become fluent in by the end is Banks' "Feersum Endjinn". I love seeing people's facial expressions on first attempting to understand Bascule, or read it "normally".
tech2··on The Therac-25 Incident (2021)
The earlier model that the 25 replaced was all mechanically interlocked. The belief was that software provided that same level of assurance. They performed manual testing but what they weren't able to do was reach a level of speed and fluency with the system to result in the failure modes which caused the issues. Lower hardware costs equals higher profit...
tech2··on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act
They may not be against content restriction, instead they may be against removal of user privacy or anonymity. If the proof of age thing was some kind of zero knowledge proof such that the age verifying group has no knowledge of what you're accessing, and the site you're accessing has no knowledge of you as an individual (beyond tells like IP address etc.) then perhaps they'd be more open to it?
tech2··on A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
The issue with the lack of intermediates in the cert isn't browsers (they'll just deal with it). Sure, if they aren't already in the cache then there's a small hit first time. The problem is that if your SSL endpoint is accessed by any programming language (for example, you offer image URL to a B2B system to download so they can perform image resizing for you, or somesuch) then there's a chance the underlying platform doesn't automatically do AIA chasing. Python is one-such system I'm aware of, but there are others that will be forced to work around this for no net benefit.
tech2··on A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)
Please though, for the love of dog, have your site serve a complete chain and don't have the browser or software stack do AIA chasing.
tech2··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
Maybe we're missing one another here but it appears you're arguing for me. Khomeini is in place _because_ of western influence/involvement, if it weren't for operation Ajax/Boot (depending on whether we're talking CIA or MI-6 naming) and the various aspects of the associated propaganda then Mosaddegh may have remained in power (I say maybe because it was quite unstable times in the early 50s Iran) and Khomeini may never have gained power.
tech2··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
Are we forgetting the pushback against nationalisation of their oil industry, operations involving both CIA and MI6, the propaganda campaign to get rid of their elected president, and other such fun? It's not like the west didn't have some rather significant involvement and incentive here. They have what they have because the west (as is common) messed with another nation.
tech2··on Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia
Weka can be a lot of fun too, I saw a pack of them opening someone's backpack zipper to find out what's inside.
tech2··on Shenmue (1999) reverse engineering reveals possible sun position oversight
Athens being its own special hell, looking across the city from Lykovounia and seeing everything in the city at the same ~5 storey level of dark concrete.
tech2··on Type 1 diabetes reversed by new cell transplantation technique
Except, a diabetic's immune system already wants to kill those too...
tech2··on Zero regrets: Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years
I don't recall the last time I lost all my tabs. The only big annoyance I've had in recent years is when something caused my tab tree to flatten so all my arranged nesting was gone. I'm more curious how you end up with a system that destroys your session semi frequently?
tech2··on Zero regrets: Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years
Tree style tabs extension, nesting in a manner that makes sense to them, probably other extensions too. I only have about 600 tabs at the moment and am impressed by someone managing more than an order of magnitude more than I.
tech2··on Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
Historically a number of people started as single small developers with tools like FoxPro, Delphi, and (even earlier) Clipper/dBase. These allowed easy creation of some kind of UI. All of these have a database under the hood. The combination of the two allowed a lot of small groups to make quite complicated systems for a single platform.

Now there's an expectation for things to be web-based and the entry point feels less obvious than it used to be.

tech2··on AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them
You could probably achieve the same outcome by combining two approaches though. Use traditional timing and phase management that existing noise cancelling headphones do. Then, using the data from that same set of microphones use AI to extract the conversation of interest (maybe using timing differences from left/right to determine who's "in front" of you) and inject that as the thing to overlay on top of the inversion. This way there's no risk of AI error on the noise cancellation and you can rely on existing solutions.
tech2··on Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
Sorry, I appreciate the joke (really :) ) but I also worry that people keep trying to add the concept of "users" or an existing role or permissions model into capability-based systems when they're unnecessary.

You could maybe model or emulate a user in a capability system by providing the login's session manager an object with read/write access to the configured "user" directory, read and execute access to an applications collection, and full access to the root window. From there, when the user starts a new application it's given an object with access to a window created for it (by calling "createWindow" on the root window object, so it can't even do something like enumerate other windows or whatever), and whichever other requirements were configured as part of its install.

It's capabilities all the way down with no "user" involved.

tech2··on Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
Maybe? I guess the difference is that with a capability object model (or similar arrangement) the _only_ way the application has to interact with the outside world is via those objects/handles it's been granted. There's no risk of escape because they only have access to the handles the process has been provided.

It's almost the opposite of a permission model in some ways, permission models restrict access to a global array of functionality where capability models allow access only to what's been provided.

tech2··on Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else
You grant them capabilities, a handle which permits access to a particular directory, one which allows network access (or possibly even further limited than that) etc.

No user, just a series of object handles which permit them to perform the task and nothing more.

tech2··on Show HN: I made a discrete logic network card
I remember the 3c590 (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/20cb38a7af88dc40095da...) doing something awful too which required changing the PCI latency setting from 32 to 248 to avoid some catastrophic errors.

It's amazing how much stuff is hidden from view by drivers and firmware updates.

tech2··on United Airlines tells Boeing to stop building Max 10s and to switch to max 9s
I think that whole situation is what eventually meant MD being purchased by Boeing, Lockheed leaving civilian aircraft manufacture, and Rolls Royce being bailed out and semi-nationalised. The DC-10/L-1011 competition was an amazing period of time with some massive impacts in civil aviation, all because two companies fought (and both lost, kinda/sorta) over a segment only large enough for one of them.
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