zzzcpan

It's more complicated.

For most websites today if someone can intercept traffic somewhere close to the server they don't even need the keys, they can just fake responses to pass CA validation and issue valid certificates with their own keys and MITM like there is no encryption.

And coldboot attacks performed by a hosting provider staff of dumping memory and finding keys isn't that realistic of a threat, just like putting servers into a locked cage on someone else's property isn't much of a protection.

Right, there is plenty of confidence that climate change is real and caused by humans, but pretty much zero confidence in the long term effects of climate change on human population.

You are missing the point. Solving the truck problem is exactly what you shouldn't do, well, at least until your system is resilient. Because it could be something entirely different, it could be law enforcement raiding a data center and your wall around it won't protect it from them. So instead you approach the system in terms of what it has to rely on and all possible states of the thing it has to rely on. Which maps to a very small number of decisions. Like whether a server is available or not. If it's not available it really doesn't matter which of the infinite things that could happen to it or to a data center it is in actually did, you simply don't return it to users if it's not available and have enough independent servers to return to users in enough independent data centers to achieve specific availability. It's really not difficult.

I understand that most of those leetcode corporations don't care much about resilience, likely even incapable of producing highly reliable systems, and may give you a false impression that reliability is something of an unachievable fantasy. But it's not, it's something we have enough research done on and can do really well today if needed, we are not in titanic era anymore.

I have high confidence in these things (not in "predicting the unforeseeable"), because I've done them myself. My edge infrastructure had like half an hour of downtime total in many years, almost a decade already.

It's not difficult, it's just different. It's the difference between predicting that a truck might crash into a data center and building concrete wall around it, and designing a system in a such way that users only ever resolve to servers that are currently available regardless of what happened to some of them in a data center that had a truck crashed into it.

The whole idea behind resilience is to cover unforeseeable risks, the turkey problem just doesn't apply here. I would even say if the system doesn't solve the turkey problem it cannot be called resilient. And high availability without resilience is not practically possible.

Honestly, you are not making any sense. This is not how engineering works. If you design for resilience, you get more resilience and you build confidence as you see the evidence how the system works in real world. Furthermore, with resilience you have to always cover all risks, it's just that you don't immediately reach fine granularity of decisions that don't trigger failover to servers in different countries, you improve granularity as you learn from actual operations and modify your designs accordingly.

I remember when I first deployed DNS routed system it was too reactive, constantly jumping between servers, monitoring was too sensitive, it didn't wait for servers to stabilize to return them into the mix and exponential backoff was taking servers out for far too long. But even given all that it was still able to avoid outages caused by data center failures and connectivity problems.

In web and online infrastructure pretty much nothing is out of your control except for two things: ISPs people use and domain name registrar you use for your domain name. And even domain name registrar centralization can be mitigated against by having multiple domains from multiple registrars and promoting different domains to different users and having backup communication channels to inform users about new domains in case something happens.

Other than that it's your choice whether to make your infrastructure dependent on a bunch of unreliable centralized SPOFs from big corporations or build highly available infrastructure relying on servers from many different providers running your own DNS servers with DNS routing, failover, etc. You will definitely beat Cloudflare's availability this way many times over.

Wouldn't that make you more happy, not less? Always figuring out how to improve things and having endless possibilities to improve them is almost a definition of fun.

once-objective mainstream journalism

Objective journalism was never ever a thing. That's why Manufacturing Consent happened and all the works from Edward Bernays and all the way to Noam Chomsky.

What journalism had before though is just more consistency in worldview, because mass media was very centralized and pushed much more consistent propaganda with nothing to oppose it.

It's more like a mix of solar and wind energy investors with fossil burning energy investors, both benefit from shutting down nuclear reactors. Solar and wind investors just want to have their huge returns with nothing wasted, as each kWh is pretty expensive, but lacking nuclear power most of the energy generation will still go to burning fossils, who will profit massively from it. Happened in other countries too, like Ukraine, which was recently forced to temporary stop some reactors to benefit those two groups and of course make things worse for the climate.

It takes a lot to produce and push government propaganda. It would require a tech company to essentially turn into a government run news organization if they were to do it. Which kind of defeats the purpose of even having different businesses, rather than all of them being propaganda producing news outlets.

It's a private company, it's very unlikely for them to outright push government propaganda. They'll probably just censor "political activism" on the platform altogether and someday if government establishes tighter control of the platform they might be forced not to censor some of it, like things that undermine the US government.

You are confusing opinions with evidence and facts. Obviously you acquire knowledge by reading papers where people are doing research and experiments and presenting evidence, analytics and all the facts from which you can make your own conclusions.

But isn't this part of the point? Philosophically science is about being interested and studying broad range of topics and areas to judge everything for yourself and make your own conclusions, not trust expert opinions. In my experience, whenever I have to rely on an expert opinion I usually feel bad later when I acquire more knowledge in the area myself, as those opinions are almost always wrong.

The original comment is about dang jumpyness and unfairness in moderation. He won't touch some people for the things he will shadowban or downweight others. Whatever you can praise dang for, moderation isn't one of those things. On HN there are effectively no rules and no objectivity, only what moderators say goes.

I sort of agree, he's definitely trying to enforce policies to advance an agenda while claiming pretty subjective justifications [1] for any action that he takes to shut down discussions. But to me that agenda looks like it's just about rich capitalist interests - just trying to make this place mostly corporate, capitalist friendly, not satisfy anyone's interests and "intellectual curiosity" as he likes to claim.

[1] Subjective justifications cannot teach anyone anything, as people can't know what exactly is the problem, only that they have to shut up, because moderator doesn't like what they are discussing.

Yeah, CRDTs don't require keeping history of every change forever or at all. In other words, all the changes coming from a bad actor can be merged locally into a single change or a small set of changes or whatever is appropriate that will actually be propagated to other nodes. Plus nodes can easily know how far all of them have progressed and drop history before the most far behind point. Only during outages history should grow a bit more than usual.

I'm not sure what you are getting at. A model is essentially an unproven hypothesis, it can never be proven and confidence in the model depends on the evidence. With models on the effects of climate change (aka impact models) the confidence is pretty much non existent, there were literal studies done to show that, it's actually a huge and complex ongoing research area. So the predictions of doom is nothing more, but propaganda, that conveniently forgets to say that such predictions are very likely to be wrong.

There is no science today that can make any kind of confident predictions on the effects of climate change on human population in 30 years from now.

Well, we have displaced people from different wars right now, but only some predictions on the possible effects of climate change, and I believe consensus among them is not even favoring the "civilization collapse" side.

Human civilization is just not at the point when it can afford to worry about pretty much unpredictable long term global environmental risks.

If you want to compare which problems are worse, plenty are much worse than slow effects of climate change, like wars, contagious diseases, exploitation of poor people, poverty and inequality in general, political systems controlled by the rich that want to keep it that way, etc. Those problem cause massive suffering and even death. And what's the worse that could happen to humans due to climate change? Some foods might disappear, some people might need to modify their houses for new weather, some might need to relocate. It's not insane to simply ignore the problem altogether, it's very rational. Now how to solve all those actual problems is a big question.

It's usually a measure of similarity to the mods, not pg, i.e. whatever dang thinks is interesting goes, if you are not "a good hacker" like dang - too bad for you. Although I do remember there was a pg article not so long ago that was so dumb and nonsensical it was flagged off the frontpage only to forcefully reappear a few hour later.

Right, essentially you have to be aware that you are testing the state space the code might end up in, which is very different from just hitting every line of code or every branch.

Right, it's a bit useless trick. I guess the author is just exploring how to organize help, maybe thinking about larger scripts or maybe doing it for the article. Either way it's hard to see it going anywhere with sed. If you were to explore parsing and organizing help, I'd suggest starting with a simple pure shell loop like this:

   while read -r line; do
      case "$line" in 
      "###"*) 
         echo "${line#\###}" ;;
      esac
   done <"$0"

This is just a logical fallacy. Some people changed their minds when presented with new facts, sure, but only some, some didn't and most people likely changed their minds when presented and bombarded with opinions, propaganda, etc., but not facts.

Facts is a loaded term here. Facts cannot rely on trust, those are called authoritative opinions, not facts. And opinions about vaccination are still just opinions, not facts. If you say, for example, that it's hazardous not to vaccinate, like the article does, it's not a fact, it's a judgement and advertising judgements is the essence of propaganda, it's basically the opposite of a fact, dystopian use of the word fact. But actual decent factual picture about vaccines is complicated, it's about balancing many big and small risks: catching the virus while you live your life, catching something at the clinic while getting vaccinated, having complications from vaccination, being subjected to unnecessary treatments and drugs because doctors want to profit from you that may also cause complications, or just being able to afford it vaccination, and so on. Not to mention all the unknown unknowns and not knowing how to evaluate the risks involved. And poor but still factual picture would at least not advertise any judgement and would present the reasoning for everyone to make their own conclusions.

It's not possible to reliably anonymize data and still be able to infer something from it, the idea is just too logically broken. Because the whole reason for anonymity is to make sure no information about any individual or a set of individuals of the size decided by those seeking such protection can be inferred from the data by the parties that want to infer something from it. While "differential privacy" assumes that not being able to infer information about relatively small sized sets of individuals decided by the parties who want to infer something from the data is "privacy". It isn't of course, it's a pretty dystopian use of the word privacy. Hence why corporations love this stuff, privacy without privacy is godsent to them.

There is huge difference between relying on libraries or independent implementations of software in a form of source code that may or may not have bugs, and relying on an organization that sends binary blobs to you, that has to keep their development process secure, infrastructure secure, physical security, developers not compromised, backdoors not forced through laws, state agencies not threatening and forcing to implement backdoors, etc. OpenWhisperSystems essentially asks you to trust they can do all of that, but of course they can't, while an open source PGP implementation doesn't ask you to trust them and rely on their competence on running highly secure infrastructure. So, don't be fooled by propaganda organizations put out, there is a huge difference in what you can rely on and Signal here is exactly as weak as EncroChat.

Breaking "hand rolled" crypto is a very hypothetical threat, almost a non-existent threat, as in practice software with centralizedly controlled distribution model has many much much bigger weaknesses that advanced threat actors are going to exploit, like updates. Assuming they even can successfully break such crypto at scale, imagine how much effort would it take just to get to the encrypted bytes given all the VPNs, TOR and overlay networks providing extra layers of encryption and privacy/anonymity hiding who talks to whom by sending packet through other countries.

I guess what people should learn from this is that encryption isn't a protection without solving problems caused by centralization first.

Hell, consider how non-welcome a person who thinks Rust sucks would feel on news.ycombinator.com. (tip: very non-welcome)

That would be me. I literally got shadowbanned for criticizing Rust when I first became a member on HN. But I don't feel unwelcome by HN, only by mods, who I don't think of highly anyway, as this pushed me to pay attention to what mods actually do over the years. Nowadays they punish my account again, at least they didn't ban it this time, presumably this time it was because of my opinion on something corporate capitalist they didn't like.

It seems futile to resolve each individual's sense of welcome; to provide a safe-space concurrently for religious white nationalists and black trans activists, and assorted fringes.

No matter how fringe, if mods allow, people will still be able to defend and express their opinions here, so only mods can make them feel unwelcome here.