contras1970

he's going from Iceland to us-west (Oregon). surely his RTT is dominated by the length of the cable, not any useful work.

my closest AWS DC is in Frankfurt with HTTP ping below 40ms. if i consider 100ms for actual work, the overhead for serverless is 46%. still impressive, i would have expected >100% there.

that's not accepted as a good answer on SO. do you have any examples?

this reads a bit like a parody of the all-inclusive movement. the first half of the article chronicles how she took offence where none was offered, and instead of "my bad", there's a whole 'nother half of it talking about "improving the way people give each other feedback".

as others have suggested, (part of) the issue is with the nature of the site itself. we can talk about elitism, seniors shitting on "noobs", whatever. the truth is, there's all walks of people on SO. there's a continuous barrage of bare-naked prompts for "do my homework for me", there's a continuous barrage of "(i don't even know which side is up, but) what's wrong with this gymnastics equipment i'm using?" questions. if you're any kind of regular in that kind of environment, you'll eventuaatlly get exhausted. the only way they can improve the site for "beginners", however ill-defined that term is, covering both the blatant homework cheaters and honest learners, is to limit engagement by force. "you seem burnt out, you can't post comments or answers for a week. come back when you're in a better mood." that seems like a sure-fire way to drive away their knowledge pool and ultimately their revenue stream. another way is to rate-limit the crappy input, but that doesn't seem to be what the article is hinting at at all.

for all the bitching about how toxic SO is, this is not my personal experience. however, that doesn't mean i think the format of the site has merit. IMO, if you want to fix the experience for honest neophytes, you need to enable dialogue. a newbie asks a ill-posed question, a senior points out the misconceptions, asks for clarifications. the newbie comes back with more information, improved followup. senior is finally in position to provide a red-meat answer.

i just described a mailing list, and that's a format you cannot sell with the kind of margin SO has been raking in. they could ditch their programmers and employ a bunch of writers to collate the wisdom of various product-specific mailing lists into an encyclopedia, but they're not interested. i understand that, it'd be a hell of a pivot. but if they push on catering to the lowest common denominator, they're doomed.

I had about a half days' worth of work typed up into the browser's text field and when I clicked "submit", all of my work vanished and Firefox only showed a page stating that the certificate was invalid and that nothing could be done about it.

that's not a valid argument against HSTS! the browser behaviour with regard to your data is outrageous, and shouldn't be tolerated. and i'm saying this as a longtime firefox user. the browser just sucks, big time.

"luckily", as a vim junkie, i can't stand the textarea at all, and do anything that requires more effort than, say, this comment, in vim, then copy/paste over when i'm done. still, we should have gotten $VISUAL embedding fifteen years ago: what's happened, Mozilla? lining up your Pockets the whole time?

this reminds me of the Boeing 737 MAX8...

there are numerous ways that could've oopsed in.

that's why i said "dishonesty at the org level". i don't think there's any one particular person in mozilla at the prenda law-level of crookedness, but what exactly is their company culture around privacy that they end up casually slipping a surveillance tool into a web page that's ostensibly against surveillance?

There are sites that just block requests from the EU, there's a difficult-to-measure chilling effect on small businesses

food safety regulations have a chilling effect on businesses that would try and sell arsenic-laced food.

dumping poisonous byproducts of a manufacturing process in a river will also net you a stomping by the society, another instance of a chilling effect of regulations.

i'm happy with these chilling effects, they relieve me of the need for constant vigilance. they enable our society to function. we do not need to fear for our mental of physical health and (private) lives all the time, we can focus on higher-order things instead.

s there any outcome where ISS melts, short of re-entry?

i don't think so. should the cooling system fail, the sources of heat (mechanical work, biological processes) would cease way before that.

yes, but the topic is the price of egress.

i thought this was obvious to everybody: public clouds want to lock you in, so they make it very cheap and easy to get data in, but charge stupendous amounts for getting your data out.

death by cold is [...] the default problem in space

well, actually... you need lower-energy atoms for higher-energy ones to rub against to carry away the excess. there's not many atoms in vacuum, so the default problem in space is overheating. see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Contro... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_cooling_and_ventilation...

you have to first survive the freezing trip to Venus. So you need heating and air conditioning. A lot. Of both.

the heating part is very, very wrong. the AC would be Atmospheric Control, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Sy....

it would have to ignore underscores as well. does your grep have that functionality bundled under a convenient flag? does your browser's ctrl-f have it for eg. github?

well, these two things (strongSpaces couldn't have been "undocumented": i knew about it from a cursory glance at the language a few years ago, never wrote more than a hello world in it) made me shy away from the language. i mean, it's niche and all, that does not help, but those two things did decide which way the scales went.

re [0]: whether FUBAR and f_u_b_a_r mean the same thing or not is a matter of semantics, not syntax (it's in the name: "meaning").

re [1]: i use zsh where setopt errexit and setopt e_rR_EX_it mean the same thing, and it's really annoying. all it does is complicate search in man pages and code, i'd say this feature has negative value. e_rR_EX_it is extreme, but consider that zshoptions(1) documents ERR_EXIT while bash(1) lists errexit. i never know which to search for, and i end up mixing various spellings in zsh code. now shell options are a tiny slice of my shell scripts, but doing this for all identifiers? ugh!

i think the arguments in [1] are weak, unsubstantiated, and admissions of negative value.

λf. (λx. f (x x)) (λx. f (x x))

that's a gross mischaracterization of the situation.

copyright doesn't mean "i get paid", it means "i get to withhold" (see all the out-of-print books, abandonware, etc).

GPL does not mean "you have to contribute back your changes" at all: "The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourc...

one is about taking access away (for whatever goal), the other is about taking that option away (for the benefit of users).

GPL "abuses" copyright to prevent conveyors from closing off software from its users. make the provisions of GPL the law, and copyright of software can go.

so you install dstat in /usr/bin/dstat + /usr/share/dstat (because you are root), and an attacker creates /home/eve/bin/dstat with /home/eve/share/dstat/evil.py. why would you run /home/eve/bin/dstat? if eve can get you to run dstat from here ~/bin, why wouldn't she just have ~/bin/dstat with completely different contents?

i'm still convinced this is cargocult security.

no, it's just cargocult security.

edit after your reply: if you install in /tmp, you'll end up with /tmp/bin/dstat and /tmp/share/dstat. you're concerned that an attacker could smuggle something into /tmp/share/dstat, but /tmp/bin/dstat is of no worry? what exactly is the threat here?

access control of `../share` in an unknown part of the filesystem is a matter for some concern. Given that the binary can be put basically anywhere, it would seem to be perilously close to CWD.

another edit since i cannot reply to you: do you have any examples of the "threat model [which] includes that you can't trust every part of the filesystem you're working from"? something concrete, specific. a particular install prefix that would let you create $prefix/bin/dstat but $prefix/share/dstat would be dangerous.

aaand, see my reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989237

expert vim

    :he

this is somewhat shorter:

    qq0i"<Esc>A",<Esc>jq@@

    :%s/.*/"&",/

around minus 50 degrees F

== around -45.56C (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-50+F+in+C)

One would think that a sexual organism never having heterosexual sex would be a huge evolutionary fitness disadvantage

Genes do not "care" for individual organisms. If they did we would be immortal. Jared Diamond argued that the presence of homosexual uncles/aunts is the same kind of an advantage as the presence of no-longer-breeding grandparents.

such a trait would be extremely uncommon.

Homosexuality is pretty rare, isn't it?

i wonder why he has the "wrapper over wc" which does just what wc does?

    #!/bin/sh

    total=0

    for FILE in `find . -type f -name "*.txt"`

    do
        wc -w $FILE
        words=`wc -w < $FILE | tr -d ' '`
        total=$(($total + $words))
    done

    printf "%'d" $total

    echo " words"

    wc -w $(find . type f -name "*.txt") | sed '$s/total/words/'

then there's the inefficiency of running wc twice per file. while this is not exactly bitcoin-level disaster, it rubs me the wrong way...

    wc -w $(find . type f -name "*.txt") |
    awk -v t=0 '
      { print; t += $1 } 
      END { print t, "words"; }
    ' 

    wc -w **/*.txt(.D)

Words can not be violent.

sure, sure.

please explain how Facebook did not contribute to the Rohingya "situation" in [Myanmar].

please document how violence-inciting speech never helps spark actual violence (xenophobic violence everywhere since the dawn of speech).

i know, i know... guns don't kill people, people kill people. the issue is: we're all latent murderers. civilization is a very thin veneer. if we were all perfectly rational, maybe we could all get along much better. but were but speaking [animals] and need all help we can get to maintain our outward civility.

i know it's a very fine line to tread, but we must not conflate the baby with the bathwater.

[Myanmar]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... [animals]: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

That means your (or my!) WPF/WinForms/WinUI apps can all use the same controls if you like, using XAML Islands. I could take the now 10 year old BabySmash WPF app and add support for pens, improved touch, or whatever makes me happy!

that's not interesting. the interesting question is: will there be a SQL Server Management Studio for GNU/Linux?

America's first copyright law [...] was adopted because people saw benefit in rewarding the people who created books and maps.

that seems contrary to wikipedia:

The 1790 Act [...] specifically noted that it did not prohibit copying the works of foreign authors.

it seems obvious the act was meant to reward some people. please drop the humanistic angle, it's simply not there.

the radical, out-of-balance and ill-considered message was mainstream not that long ago. it's only seen as "extreme" by some because the Overton window has moved considerably. case in point: US politics.

http://jdebp.eu/FGA/introduction-to-redo.html

hoping jdebp will chime in..

that list reads like my typical woes with MS Windows... half the time or more they're caused by the hardware, not the software: ask anyone who does device driver programming.

back in the day (Windows XP era) i bought components and built a gaming computer, nothing extravagant but Windows, because games. there was a very narrow window between the newly installed vanilla OS booting up and BSODing. the problem disappeared once i managed to install drivers from the CD that came with the motherboard (had to act quick before the BSOD would hit).

hardware is crap.

    commit 277918494930ec3fb0c7fdbd4d35060a3bc6d181
    Author: imp <imp@FreeBSD.org>
    Date:   Thu Oct 25 17:17:11 2018 +0000

        Update comment for AMI00[12]0 override.
     
        The AML is even stupider than always returning 0. It will only return
        non-zero for an OS that reports itself as "Windows 2015", at least
        on the Threadripper board's AML that I've examined.
     
        Those AMLs also suggest we may need this quirk for AMI0030 as well.
        There may be other cases where we need to override the _STA in a
        generic way, so we should consider writing code to do that.

    diff --git a/sys/dev/acpica/acpi.c b/sys/dev/acpica/acpi.c
    index 515370d5584..bed7ecd411c 100644
    --- a/sys/dev/acpica/acpi.c
    +++ b/sys/dev/acpica/acpi.c
    @@ -2222,10 +2222,10 @@ acpi_DeviceIsPresent(device_t dev)
            status = acpi_GetInteger(h, "_STA", &s);
  
            /*
    -        * Onboard serial ports on certain AMD motherboards have an invalid _STA
    -        * method that always returns 0.  Force them to always be treated as present.
    -        *
    -        * This may solely be a quirk of a preproduction BIOS.
    +        * Certain Treadripper boards always returns 0 for FreeBSD because it
    +        * only returns non-zero for the OS string "Windows 2015". Otherwise it
    +        * will return zero. Force them to always be treated as present.
    +        * Beata versions were worse: they always returned 0.
             */
            if (acpi_MatchHid(h, "AMDI0020") || acpi_MatchHid(h, "AMDI0010"))
                    return (TRUE);

see the comment on lines 29-170!

you find a good candidate, give them what seems like a competitive offer, then they disappear, and you learn after a couple of months they preferred my position, but got better pay elsewhere, where the difference is definitely small enough that we would cover it. If only the candidate wasn't so polite!

or maybe: "If only you didn't try to shortchange the candidate!"?

numbers on offer are the honest signal free agents get in the job market. if the jobs are similar enough, why should the candidate expend extra energy to achieve what is the default state elsewhere? why should they risk receiving a could shoulder because they negotiated "too hard"?