Hacker News Reader

JackRabbitSlimon Half of the websites using WebAssembly use it for malicious purposes

What wide and varied legitimate use cases did we honestly expect to see? What wide and varied legitimate uses to we see for JS now?

JackRabbitSlimon Evaluating State and Local Business Tax Incentives [pdf]

I don't know how to apply Hanlon's razor here. Are you seriously contending that affording a bullhorn on a street corner is in any way comparable to affording millions in TV and print ads?

JackRabbitSlimon Suspension of Cogent Access to ARIN Whois

Cool. Now I'll just go around signing up random ARIN addresses to Oracle, IBM and Google sales mailing lists.

Cogent can die in a fire but this is stupid.

JackRabbitSlimon California Sues Vinod Khosla over Martins Beach Public Access

They do, all the time. You have no expectation of legal council outside of criminal law. Debt collectors are running roughshod on the poor and vulnerable.

JackRabbitSlimon Let me give you a list of the top scams coding bootcamps use to steal your money

It's cool. They will have one proper "engineer" to verify and sign off on everyone else's cheap and/or shoddy labor.

JackRabbitSlimon Delaying the Inevitable: Muir Glacier and the Ethereum Difficulty Bomb

Etheriums PoW algorithm isn't ASIC resistant, just largely unimplemented. Indeed a large reason NIST made Keccak SHA3 is that ASIC/FPGA acceleration is on par or even faster than SHA256 acceleration.

It may take a bit more ram and need a decent bus as a result which is why people mine on GPUs that have both. Rather than cheap ASICS that are cheap because they have neither. "Resistant" ain't the word to use.

JackRabbitSlimon U-Haul to Implement Nicotine-Free Hiring Policy

He's saying its one Schizo lawsuit away from being a proxy for discrimination.

"We can't not hire black people but we forbid coconut oil hair product use among employees" How well do you think that would go over in a court?

JackRabbitSlimon Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=4662

JackRabbitSlimon Psilocybin found safe for consumption in largest ever controlled study

https://www.caymanchem.com/msdss/14041m.pdf

Acute toxicity level 4 for Oral ingestion

https://www.ilo.org/legacy/english/protection/safework/ghs/g...

Defines Toxicity level 4 as ~ 2000 to < 5000 mg/kg

The most potent strain of "magic mushrooms" are at most ~2% by weight(Psilocybe azurescens)[0]. So according to all the de facto standard literature, a potentially fatal dose of magic mushrooms is over 3 ounces of dried mushroom per kilogram of body weight. At 68 kg I would need to ingest over 5 kg to come up to the lower bound of the LD50.

No one without an axe to grind could realistically argue toxicity is a real valid concern.

[0]https://www.shroomery.org/8700/Psilocybe-azurescens-taxonomy...

JackRabbitSlimon Lisp Interpreter in Tandy TRS-80/100 Basic

Provided the interpreters(/compilers) are still being updated and maintained; What disadvantage would writing in BASIC have?

ProvideX sounds like it's now Sage Group's ERP extension/plugin language. Like SAP's ABAP, Microsoft's "AL", etc.

JackRabbitSlimon What were the creepiest declassified documents of the last decade?

So just wrap your horrific acts in faux satanic ritual and get away with it. Thanks for the tip!

JackRabbitSlimon Say Goodbye to Banking as We Know It

Yep. Every bit as easy to track as cash.

JackRabbitSlimon Why introductory chemistry is boring: a long-term historical perspective

Michael Faraday's Chemistry History of a Candle.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0INsTTU1k2UCpOfRuMDR...

"Interesting" doesn't have to mean "spectacle". Getting a few droplets of water out of a burning candle isn't riveting to watch but its still very interesting.

JackRabbitSlimon U.S. Tech Giants Bet Big on India, and Now It’s Changing the Rules

Obama was the "Poorest" president in 50 years at only something like 4 Million to his name when he took office. It's also interesting to note he is from the most corrupt district in America. He is still a good example.

Do you remember all the freely available information that showed Banks, Oil companies and massive corporations all spent considerably more on Clinton's 2016 campaign, yet somehow the media tells us Trump is "Big businesses" guy those companies worked hard to get into office? Easily verifiable to you right now. Are you going to go check my work? Opensecrets.org

Cognitive dissonance is never so strong as when we are telling ourselves it's not cognitive dissonance.

JackRabbitSlimon I love coding in C

Why not FORTH? It may not have some features out of the box (no type checking - which isn't as bad as it sounds with FORTH) but newer runtimes tend to put those things in and/or are fairly easily implemented yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)

also, system level REPL is some hardcore nerdity.

JackRabbitSlimon Putting Stuff in a Proliant Dl325

Ironically, a big 16x SAS port is about the only external interface fast enough for it.

JackRabbitSlimon Putting Stuff in a Proliant Dl325

Annoyingly, not very much cheaper and the security blanket of "HPE" for management made them a default choice.

Their premium comes with shit like the 200 dollar "enablement" card full of passive component.

JackRabbitSlimon Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

That statement is equally true for fancy "smart" systems.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32815036036.html

sleep tight.

JackRabbitSlimon Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard

That neglects to mention that Microsoft Windows 95 OSR2 launched a few months before (97) and that entire release was centered around better USB support for a broader range of components. (e.g. CDRW Drives)

I don't think its fair to say PC "Followed suit" in using USB.

JackRabbitSlimon Trump Helped Nix Electric Car Tax Measure Sought by Tesla, GM

Why wouldn't we give tax breaks to EV buyers given all that sweet gas tax revenue EVs generate for general upkeep on infrastructure they use.

A broken clock is right twice a day. Corporations are just pissed they can't jack the price of all their cars up by an extra $7500

JackRabbitSlimon A Skeptic’s Guide to Modern Monetary Theory by N. Gregory Mankiw [pdf]

A skeptics guide to a "Skeptic's" guide; The author of this writes economic textbooks of competing/mainstream theory

JackRabbitSlimon Still Why No HTTPS?

Which CAs have never been subject to a National Security letter? Can't say cuz you can't know? Lets talk about that false sense of security indeed.

JackRabbitSlimon France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

And yet not a single one of those massive companies has attempted to sue Bloomberg into the ground. Bloomberg never even retracted or apologized.

The silence following that whole debacle is deafening and probably very telling...

JackRabbitSlimon AT&T drops out of FCC speed-test program so it can hide bad results

The rebirth of Community Access TV(CATV). Some enterprising community member would set up an expensive and complicated antenna and split it out to all his neighbors. Those eventually become cable companies.

How cyclic...

JackRabbitSlimon 49% of workers, forced to change passwords, reuse same one with minor change

IBM legacy in action. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, but some of them probably should have been.

JackRabbitSlimon Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes

Sure; In the same way that a pediatrician would have the slogan "Don't diddle kids." If you need a slogan like that, there is already a problem.

Eventually, as we saw, they couldn't help themselves -- Maybe just one little oppression platform wouldn't be such a big deal...

JackRabbitSlimon Luxury hotel guests keep stealing mattresses

How stealing a mattress likely works at a 5 star hotel in 1 act:

"Are those assholes stealing a mattress?", "Yep. Should we stop um?", "Nah, its probably some crazy rich asshat that'll complain to management about suing for harassment. We will just blacklist the name on the card from the room missing a mattress."

JackRabbitSlimon API Practices If You Hate Your Customers

A huge and borderline criminal conflation with HTTP in general and REST-y APIs.

The big fat elephant in all this is simple; None of our fucking opinions matter one god damn bit to the end client. Being originally designed to you know, consume hypertext over the hypertext transfer protocol, clients can and will do whatever the fuck they want with the status codes.

JackRabbitSlimon Unexpected Page Fault In Virtualized Environment Advisory

This isn't "Software" It's hardware (well both but lets not get too pedantic) and everyone was throwing cache and speculative exploits by the shovelful at both AMD and Intel. AMDs are indeed at the very least, "Less insecure."

Way more shit stuck to Intel for one reason. The speed advantage Intel had been lording over AMD (Besides compiler shenanigans) was all the corners they were cutting with there speculative execution, et al.

Amazing timing that; AMD closing those benchmark gaps and the mass meltdown mitigations in Intel products... all in the same decade Intel was court ordered to fix their unfair C compiler. Intel's domination is simply over...

JackRabbitSlimon Inferring and hijacking VPN-tunneled TCP connections

Let me paraphrase: "All the questionable Redhat-backed additions like systemd and Networkmanager aren't great or particularly fit and fixing them so plugging in network cables doesn't disrupt existing connections was too hard. Have downgraded security instead. If you care just re-enable and suffer our broken stack."

GCC 2.96, Pulse Audio, NetworkManager, systemd... I've assumed the death of (truly open) Linux would be at the hands of Redhat, this is just another stab wound.