HN user

benregenspan

354 karma
Posts0
Comments116
View on HN
No posts found.

I'd love for Google to figure out something comparable for the Drive API (currently it's not possible to grant read/write access to a single folder; you need to grant access to the entire drive!): https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36760598?pli=1

I think the fact that the above issue has been open for a very long time is one indication of how difficult and sensitive this type of access control API is. The Google Drive API could be a proving ground for getting the UX right for this (including tricky details like how to manage persistent access to a folder with clear disclosure and user controls).

Is the "Jia Tan" XZ Utils compromise not a good example? That relied on code snuck into a release that was not in source.

(It was caught before being promoted into a stable Debian release, yes, but this sort of relied on a happy accident, too close for comfort)

The first octet of the IP it resolves to is "192", maybe someone implemented the check for private/internal range wrong and is only looking for that.

What I'm wondering is if this requires sending the full list of extensions straight to a server (as opposed to a more privacy-protecting approach like generating some type of hash clientside)?

Based on their privacy policy, it looks like Sift (major anti-fraud vendor) collects only "number of plugins" and "plugins hash". No one can accuse them of collecting the plugins for some dual-use purpose beyond fingerprinting, but LinkedIn has opened themselves up to this based on the specific implementation details described.

I think the point is that some of the extra words OP is complaining about aren't needless. It's on the writer to know their audience, but it's also asking a lot to tune a message in a PR review to the one particular person who demands bluntness, especially if they don't know that person well. If the majority of people in the organization respond positively to a certain style (which may involve some amount of phatic speech), then the person who is "over-writing" here is probably making a good decision.

Once I build rapport with someone, I tend to be more blunt, but still balance that with the fact that other people may be reading the interaction, and I don't want to model a rude communication style.

An organization can choose to promote a very direct approach to feedback (Bridgewater is famous for this), but it requires top-down work to get everyone on the same page, not just expecting one developer to mind-read another.

It seems like the goal of the default configuration is preventing script injection while being otherwise very permissive. Basically, "safer than innerHTML, even when used very lazily". But I would expect guidance to evolve saying that it almost never makes sense to use the default and instead to specify a configuration that makes contextual sense for a given field.

The default might be suitable for something like an internal blog where you want to allow people to sometimes go crazy with `<style>` tags etc, just not inject scripts, but I would expect it to almost always make sense to define a specific allowed tag and attribute list, as is usually done with the userland predecessors to this API.

being the type of slurry that pre-AI was easily avoided by staying off of LinkedIn

This is why I'm rarely fully confident when judging whether or not something was written by AI. The "It's not this. It's that" pattern is not an emergent property of LLM writing, it's straight from the training data.

It's mystifying. A relative showed me a heavily AI-generated video claiming a Tesla wheelchair was coming (self-driving of course, with a sub-$800 price tag). I tried to Google it to quickly debunk and got an AI Overview confidently stating it was a real thing. The source it linked to: that same YouTube video!

Welcome to Gas Town 7 months ago

For anyone who takes doing their taxes seriously, this is a nightmare. Every pint ordered involves a capital gain (or loss) for the buyer. At a certain point you're doing enough accounting that you might as well be running the bar yourself (or just paying in cash)!

Pop-ups are back, and they’re worse than ever

The article opens with a screenshot of genuine pop-ups, and they are clearly so much worse than the (still annoying) modals presented later in the article. In the past, sites spawned a mess of popups that extended out of the browser window and persisted even when the page was navigated away from. Now if you don't like what the page is doing, you can at least just navigate away.

Having seen similar patterns play out at other companies, I'm curious about the organizational dynamics involved. Was there a larger dev team at the time you adopted microservices? Was there thinking involved like "we have 10 teams, each of which will have strong, ongoing ownership of ~14 services"?

Because from my perspective that's where microservices can especially break down: attrition or layoffs resulting in service ownership needing to be consolidated between fewer teams, which now spend an unforeseen amount of their time on per-service maintenance overhead. (For example, updating your runtime across all services becomes a massive chore, one that is doable when each team owns a certain number of services, but a morale-killer as soon as some threshold is crossed.)

I wouldn't call using the most commonly accepted (and concise) terminology a "sales ploy". If you want every service to be accompanied by a wordy explanation of how it works, then every article would need to mention that the current status quo involves complicated taxpayer subsidy in the form of dependent care FSA accounts and a host of state-level programs.

"Need" is a strong word. But I think the point is that if you expect wildly spikey traffic/don't want the site to go down if it receives a very sudden influx of requests, going static is a very good answer, much cheaper than "serverless" or over-provisioning.

At the peak of its attack, the AI made thousands of requests, often multiple per second—an attack speed that would have been, for human hackers, simply impossible to match.

This part is pretty hype-y. Old-fashioned deterministic web app vulnerability scanners can of course be used to make multiple requests per second. The limiting factor is probably going to be rate-limiting on the victim's side / # of IP ranges the attacker can cycle through, which would apply to the AI-driven vulnerability scan too.

they'll continue holding pennies from previous years?

I think most of the ones from previous years are all in people's junk drawers, couches, etc., and only go back into circulation when someone decides to dump them into a Coinstar machine. Retailers are already reporting shortages.

But in this context, is it so important to distinguish between whether something is physiologically addictive vs. just seriously habit-forming? Except for substances where withdrawal is genuinely life-threatening, the practical difference seems to be in degree, not kind. Nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, but (I know having experienced both) so can breaking a bad social media habit.

(And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)

It's expensive in the US because one company has exclusive sales here (patent protection?), but you could try calcefidiol, weekly dose and is supposed to get levels up rapidly. Apparently it's the common form to take in Spain, and it's further down the metabolic pathway vs cholecalciferol. (I take but still have to get levels checked)

You are how you act 9 months ago

At least that involves good deeds. This article actually seems to pervert it into a hustle culture thing. His beliefs and values don't matter, it doesn't matter that he became a devoted abolitionist in his later life, what matters is that he got out there and built stuff.