News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

scolby33

Re:Beg Bounties on Monday November 13, 2023 @10:23PM (#38258672)
Why is most of the substance of this post giant block quote links to his own Twitter? Clicking through to those is painful; it’s not like the author can’t afford to host some screenshots on his own domain.
Re:Web Scraping for Me, but Not for Thee on Saturday August 26, 2023 @03:30AM (#37270594)
Look up that case. The victim suffered third-degree burns and required skin grafts. The myth that it’s a ridiculous, over-litigious case is just that: a myth. The coffee was absolutely too hot.
Re:The many issues plaguing Nix on Friday August 11, 2023 @04:45PM (#37093779)
I would use Guix over Nix in a second if only Guix had support for ZFS. I don't even need root or /home on ZFS, which I admit can be tricky.
Re:PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model on Monday June 19, 2023 @01:47PM (#36394276)
I question how important an extension is if there’s not enough incentive to port it to the new paradigm, at least eventually.
I've been subscribed to this for years, and it brings me joy every time an astronomical event pops up in my notifications. Big thanks to the author, Canton Becker, who clearly does this out of a passion for remembering to look up.
As someone with just a touch of classical knowledge from high school band and such, I’ve truly enjoyed and learned a lot from the Classical Classroom podcast (https://classicalclassroomshow.com/).
Re:What domain name to use for your home network on Monday August 16, 2021 @12:24AM (#28194924)
I truly do not understand why this problem has gone on for so long. It's clear that many people think `.home.arpa` is ugly. It boggles my mind that the IETF and ICANN can't come up with some agreement to get `.home` or something similar codified like RFC 7788 tried to do. This just seems like a fight between giant bureaucracies while meanwhile the users suffer and bad decisions like assigning `.dev` are made. I get that there are rules around this sort of critical infrastructure and its management, but come ON. /rant

With the rant ended: can anyone explain to me why all the relevant organizations can't get together and assign a TLD for this purpose that doesn't end in `.arpa`?

Re:Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone? on Saturday July 31, 2021 @02:22PM (#28020476)
Just this week in Pittsburgh, I saw an official corporate poster up in a McDonald's advertising a "competitive starting wage" with an 8.5″x11″ sheet taped to it reading "STARTING RATE UP TO 10$/HR." I doubt they'll have much luck at ≤$10/hour. Sure, it's more than the minimum ($7.25/hour), but the "up to" weasel words don't give me confidence.
Re:Is the F-35 officially a failure? on Thursday April 29, 2021 @10:56AM (#26981975)
I think you'll find that the president who led America through WWII couldn't climb a flight of stairs on his own. Whether or not your assertion about Biden is true, it doesn't seem to matter one way or the other when it comes to leading a nation.
It’s a shock mount (probably [1]), meant to reduce noise transmitted from the table or the boom arm or whatever the microphone is attached to.

[1] https://en-de.neumann.com/ea-87

Re:Google Removed ClearURLs Extension from Chrome Web Store on Wednesday March 24, 2021 @04:39PM (#26572581)
The developer addressed this comment here https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon/issues/102#issuecomment-8...
In Rust, the signature of the function would be along the lines of `-> Result<whatever, Error>` and you'd have no choice but to handle the Error case of the Result or to panic. Either way, not a segfault.
Re:An oral history of the hamburger icon (2019) on Friday December 04, 2020 @10:02AM (#25302956)
Keybase uses a concrete image of a hamburger[1] for their "etc." menu, which I assume is a nod to this name. It made me chuckle when it clicked for me.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/uB5JTVE.jpg

Re:GTA V – The Wormy Fountain on Sunday March 22, 2020 @12:17PM (#22656069)
I see what you did there, I think. It’s interesting: I don’t mind capitalization and the a/an substitution here, although I could see the capitalization being confusing in another context. However, it’s/its and to/too almost always take me out of the flow of the text and force me to read it again to figure out the proper meaning. As a native speaker, I would still say I forgive the mistakes, but they do undoubtedly hurt my comprehension of whatever I’m reading.
Re:Hacking up your own shell completion on Friday March 06, 2020 @12:41AM (#22501245)
I use fish as my main shell. Sometimes I find its documentation a bit obtuse, but I love the sense of humor in its tag line: “a shell for the 90s.” It was first released in 2005.
What is the MAC-like construction for an OTP cipher?
Re:A common mistake involving wildcards and the find command on Sunday February 09, 2020 @10:25AM (#22282517)
Perhaps `shopt -s nullglob` has been set?

“If set, Bash allows filename patterns which match no files to expand to a null string, rather than themselves.” [1]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Shopt...

Just to help others searching for "confused lieutenant," I believe it's usually known as the "confused deputy problem," perhaps as a reference to Barney Fife. I do like the image of a confused lieutenant though.
Re:My name causes an issue with any booking on Sunday November 10, 2019 @04:08PM (#21500218)
I had a friend in college named jane smith, capitalized as so—that is, not capitalized. She always entered it this way and it always appeared to be correct until the next nightly database cleaning job ran and gave her initial capitals. Eventually the registrar told her that nothing could be done but that a note was made in her file to ensure her diploma was printed properly. Of course it wasn’t, but they did re-print it free of charge without complaint.

(Name changed to protect the innocent.)

Re:Personal information and ads on Twitter on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @06:59PM (#21198200)
If you hold down Alt/Option on the Fastmail security page you can enable 2FA without a phone number. Their helpful support person cautioned me to not lose my 2FA device or recovery codes :)
This was still possible as of March of this year. I was instructed to hold down <Option> on Mac.
How are people in the Bay Area any more vulnerable than people anywhere else? I agree with the GP; this feels like oversurveillance and scares me.
Why is the conclusion that the operator is padding its schedule instead of simply that the busses run on time? I understand that in the real world the former seems more likely, but I don’t see how that conclusion is supported by the data presented. (Caveat lector: my prob & stats is weaker than it should be; there’s a good chance I’m missing something obvious.)
Re:Firefox/Normandy/PreferenceRollout on Saturday May 04, 2019 @10:06AM (#19826524)
This. After extensive reading about studies and Normandy here and elsewhere, I’m unable to find a straight answer about this. Does anyone know?
Re:Uppy 1.0: Your best friend in file uploading on Sunday April 28, 2019 @08:28PM (#19774852)
One of the listed features is direct uploads to S3. I haven’t looked, but I’d wager it’s either supported or easy to add uploading to other S3-compatible services!
Re:Bad Habits Creeping into Your Writing? on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @05:42PM (#19742869)
I think it’s because the recipe itself cannot be copyrighted but the blog post around it can.

I know I read this somewhere, but can’t find the reference now. So, take this with a grain of salt or a starting point for your own research :)

Re:Brunei implements stoning to death under anti-LGBT laws on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @07:55PM (#19568237)
“On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.”[1]

It doesn’t have to be tech.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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