News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

ChristianBundy

Re:To Post or Not to Post on Sunday June 28, 2020 @08:25PM (#23673182)
Hey, welcome!
On what grounds could "he" sue?
Of course. This isn't controversial.

If someone takes a bunch of hostages then we need people who can de-escalate and rescue them, but that isn't what most cops spend their time doing every day.

Re:Dynamic linking on Saturday June 27, 2020 @02:03PM (#23663415)
How do you ensure that all of your AUR packages are up-to-date? The makepkg workflow makes installation easy but I didn't update my AUR packages very consistently until I used a helper.
Re:Trust, Slavery and the African School of Economics on Friday June 26, 2020 @03:39PM (#23656083)
Could you give an example?
> Data scientist fired for retweeting study showing non-violent protests are more effective

This is a blatant misrepresentation. The tweet talked about "race riots" and Democrat election results. Many people would argue that the point of direct action is not to sway electoral votes toward the Democratic party.

Re:The Problem with Bill Gates on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @05:09PM (#23633917)
Nitpick: It depends on what "over one hundred billions" means. You could only give $1 to 1 billion people of you have $101 billion, but if you have $999 billion then you could give $998 to 1 billion people without violating the digit constraint.

My guess is that it's closer to your estimate, about 1 day of wages, but it could be 2.7 years of wages at most.

> We can discuss the merits all day long but not the legitimacy of the government to decide who can and cannot stay.

Why can't we discuss the legitimacy of the government?

I've seen people get offended by celebrities with insensitive takes, but I've never seen anyone on HN get cancelled because of a comment. The worst I've seen is "this is wrong and here's why" or "I don't want to talk to you".

Generally I've seen people reach for "cancel culture" when:

1. Fear-mongering the left over perceived injustice.

2. Defending bad takes by tone-policing any disagreement.

Can you point to a comment by john_moscow where they've been 'cancelled'? Or maybe a comment by you?

Re:How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015) on Monday June 22, 2020 @12:17AM (#23597312)
Interesting. Is it possible to tell which Diffie-Hellman primes are used on an HTTPS connection?

Back in 2016 I noticed that OpenSSL was using the wrong primes (https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/fb015ca6f05e09b11a...) and since then I've been very curious to know how prevalent the previous DH primes are.

Are you linking to "a politically organized body of people under a single government" or "a race of people, large group of people with common ancestry and language"?
Re:Why Desktop Linux Still Matters on Sunday June 21, 2020 @02:13PM (#23593947)
I agree that the assertion was at the beginning of the article, but I don't think the remainder of the article is predicated on this claim. In other words: I don't think the order of magnitude invalidates the rest of their argument.
Re:FlexBuffers on Saturday June 20, 2020 @10:29PM (#23589248)
Thanks for this explanation!

Off-topic: I see a few links in your HN profile, is that the best place to keep up with the projects you're working on?

Re:FlexBuffers on Saturday June 20, 2020 @10:27PM (#23589237)
Yeah, protobuf requires that both parties agree on a schema whereas CBOR is self-describing like XML or JSON.
Re:FlexBuffers on Saturday June 20, 2020 @09:37PM (#23588985)
> Any others?

Would BIPF fall into this category? It's a serialization format for JSON: https://github.com/dominictarr/bipf

Why are you a nationalist?
Re:No Code on Monday June 15, 2020 @11:12PM (#23535599)
"It's a prank!"
> the message it would send to current and future customers

What exactly is that message? Maybe:

"If you make your money by separating families, putting kids in cages, and deporting asylum-seekers to places where they're in danger, then we don't want your money."

Do you see anything wrong with that message?

> But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy.

It really isn't. Private institutions are under no obligation to collaborate with public agencies unless explicitly required by the Defense Production Act[0]. Please remember that the government is meant to serve us, not the other way around.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

I learned a new thing today, thanks for posting this!
Re:Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone on Saturday June 13, 2020 @01:57PM (#23511255)
Again, I don't think that we should threaten each other with total annihilation, but if someone is threatening you and ignoring your requests that they stop threatening violence what other avenues do you have? Fight or flight.

If given the option to run away, you should absolutely do so -- but that shouldn't stop you from learning self-defense in case the 'flight' option isn't available.

We shouldn't have guns, but I don't think that we should disarm ourselves unless everyone else agrees to disarm themselves as well.

Re:Is there still room for debate? on Saturday June 13, 2020 @12:02AM (#23506646)
Yes, if you advocate for political positions that hurt people then the people hurt by your ideology are unlikely to be happy with you.

> taken out of context

This seems orthogonal to the problem you've described. Just because you're getting ripped for your opinions doesn't automatically mean that your positions are taken "out of context".

Obligatory: It's impossible to argue with hypotheticals. Please point to a position you've taken and how it's backfired and we can take a look at who was in the wrong.

Re:Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone on Friday June 12, 2020 @03:01PM (#23502488)
I think of it like nuclear weapons: it'd be great if they didn't exist at all, but if they do exist and are stockpiled by people who want to hurt us, then the only responsible action is to arm ourselves in self-defense.

In other words:

> An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

> -- Huey P Newton

Re:Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone on Friday June 12, 2020 @02:52PM (#23502413)
> anarchists

> state

Why would you think that anarchists are trying to start a state?

Re:Test Anything Protocol on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @08:26PM (#23483823)
> The whole point is to allow language/harness agnostic tooling, but the only tool of note seems to be smoulder. Everything else seems to be trivial things like showing pass/fail with emoji tick/cross symbols, etc.

Interesting. In the Node.js ecosystem there are loads of different interfaces (https://github.com/substack/tape/#pretty-reporters), but my favorite is node-tap (which also comes with coverage tests and such).

Re:Quotebacks – Quote the Web on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @01:20PM (#23468613)
Today: Maybe subresource integrity? That would let you advertise the exact state of the webpage, but you'd need to save it somewhere for verification.

Alternative: Isn't there some way to save an HTTPS request in a way that others can verify that the webpage was signed with an authorized certificate?

Future: I wish authors would sign their content directly rather than depend on TLS and certificate authorities. P2P networks do this well (because they have to) but it hasn't caught on in the rest of the web.

Re:Looking back at how Signal works on Friday June 05, 2020 @07:43PM (#23435270)
> Meanwhile, yes, Matrix took years to add encryption, but it works much better than Signal, even with quite a few small bugs.

I'm not sure which Matrix client you use, but clients like Riot don't even let you opt out of sending read receipts unless you edit `/etc/riot/config.json` to enable experiments and then go into the settings to disable read receipts. Problems like this (and issues like this [0]) give me the impression that Riot isn't designed for people who need privacy.

(Yes, there are other Matrix clients [1], but my understanding is that Riot is the flagship interface.)

[0]: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/8961

[1]: https://www.matrix.org/clients/

Re:To defund the police, activists rewrote city budgets on Friday June 05, 2020 @11:02AM (#23429348)
> where the civilian is armed

Nitpick: Cops are civilians too. Every time the cops show up, the community has to deal with an "armed civilian".

> situations where the civilian is armed (which is not always known by dispatch nor the cops themselves, until it's too late)

Cops aren't the only government employees that interface with the [potentially armed] public though. Parking enforcement officers don't have guns, and it doesn't seem to me that they're regularly ambushed. I've found three cases where this has happened, although I'm sure there are others:

- Campus parking officer stabbed my school janitor (https://nypost.com/2018/06/29/campus-parking-officer-stabbed...)

- Ex-Federal Protective Service cop gets intoxicated and shoots at parking enforcement (https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/shots-fired-at-park...)

- "Man with AK-47 approaches parking officer during argument about tickets" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDJ4OsYXul0)

Anyway, yes, there are lots of people with guns, and that means that they may act erratically (to neighbors and government employees).

Showing up with guns and threatening them with violence makes many people behave more erratically, not less, and my hope would be that we don't have to worry about "what if that guy has a gun" because 'maintaining public safety' means replacing their broken headlight rather than giving them a ticket and a court date and demanding to search their vehicle while you're at it.

Re:To defund the police, activists rewrote city budgets on Thursday June 04, 2020 @10:07PM (#23424297)
The fact that you're asking me a question like that illustrates that you haven't read anything that I've said.

Community self-defense is absolutely necessary, and I'm not taking the position that acts like murder should be shrugged off. No amount of healthcare and housing and social programs will completely eradicate anti-social behavior, and at the end of the day we need to maintain public safety.

My point, which has been echoed by the various links that I've shared (and the article (which you're commenting on (which you should read!))), is that the vast majority of public safety problems don't need to be solved by the police. Quoting an article, because explaining this repeatedly is getting exhausting:

> Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested.

> So when we turn a problem over to the police to manage, there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we should try to figure out how to not get the police involved.

People experiencing mental health crises don't need cops, they need social workers. Someone with a broken tail light doesn't need a cop, they need someone who can quickly and safely replace their tail light.

There are a small number of situations where public safety might require violence, but police officers are over-armed and under-qualified for the vast majority of calls they show up to. Last year the most common 911 call in my city was for an "unwanted person" [0], which I understand to mean 'experiencing homelessness', where cops really can't do anything to help. I'm optimistic that our communities would be better served by less-armed and more-qualified professionals who can use tools other than violence.

[0]: https://www.wweek.com/news/2019/02/06/portlanders-call-911-t...

Re:Germany bans digital doppelganger passport photos on Thursday June 04, 2020 @09:16PM (#23424029)
Selective enforcement. If everything is illegal then you can enforce the laws however you like.

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