aaronchall

Can you give any reasoning for why Gentoo would be an optimal easy approach, as opposed to maybe, SELinux for example?

When I am in an advisory role, with my own reputation at stake, I must always recommend the hard choice known for superior long-run results over the easy thing with fast but inferior long-run results.

Doing the hard but superior thing builds competency in doing the hard but superior thing, which makes it easier to do the hard but superior thing over the long run.

Contrariwise, doing the easy but inferior thing builds competency in doing the easy but inferior thing, which makes it easier to get stuck doing the easy but inferior thing over the long run.

Pardon what may seem like hyperbole, but recommending inferior solutions to others because it's easy feels like, to me, malicious incompetence.

Security is a high priority to me but I'm also optimizing with respect to a lot of factors.

I decided on NixOS.

The defaults start out locked down. The firewall has only port 22 open, so give your root user a decent password, and immediately set up your user with a public/private key, test it works then turn off root login via ssh and password logins.

NixOS also only installs what you configure, and remove what you don't, so if you like utils that are considered standard, like 'which', be sure to include them in your configuration.

With NixOS I feel like I know exactly what's on my system at any given time, and nothing should be there that I didn't put there by declaring I want it there.

I have my system set up to update daily so it gets security fixes immediately.

I also have a reproducible system built on a functional build tool called Nix. I can replicate the system easily. If I want lockfile level reproducibility (like rust or npm), I can use flakes.

Are there other distributions more focused solely on optimizing security? Maybe, but the core NixOS development are extremely security conscious and I trust them more than any other group of core distribution group.

Ask the Democrats and judges if they think that's reasonable.

And where will you ship them to? Smaller cities don't want them and they'll be inhospitable enough they won't want to be there either - they'd rather ship themselves back where they can stay close to their drug sources and still rotate with their panhandling around enough that the locals don't get too familiar with them.

So if you want to do something about the vagrant encampments being in the city you live in, the most effective thing that you can do is move to where they aren't, which is what everyone else who cared that much about it already did long ago.

Mutually assured destruction means that his entire ass is destroyed - there's a lot more of NATO than there is of him.

This is so obvious to me that I'm having trouble reading their post as anything but tongue-in-cheek.

But perhaps they were indeed being sincere?

EDIT: On review of their prior posts, it looks like they were.

(I suggest you take it).

They stopped me at one of those tables once and I'm not black.

Comparing a font using all caps with a font using lowercase isn't a fair comparison, we know that all caps is harder to read (source: some paper at some point as an undergrad when I had no bibliographic database - and my own experience).

I agree with the comments that see no real benefit to the rounded corners except for the one comment I read that points out that we see sharper corners as more fragile.

I think there may be some sunk-cost bias here - if you spent a lot of time and energy making rounded corners at a time when CSS didn't make it easy, now you'll have quite a bit of cognitive dissonance concluding that rounded corners are no better than sharp ones.

I'm pro-protestor (in this case) but this guy makes a valid point and I don't see why the comment was dead (downvotes maybe?), so I vouched for it.

I'm not surprised. I'm only surprised that it took this long for the activity to be uncovered.

So you got code reuse via copy and paste!

That's a very good point, and I think it's a suboptimal filter.

But I also think this explains the status quo.

Steel man argument for the opposing position:

At a certain point, no matter how well paid, you're going to want your future employee to do something that seems pointlessly redundant to them, and to do it as conscientiously as possible in spite of not knowing the importance of the task you want them to do.

Might as well get that test out of the way as soon as possible, with their own document that they can supply to cross-validate it, right?

/steel man argument

Is this actually good? Are you going to needlessly turn away really smart people who should be objecting to seemingly pointless tasks? Should really good employees object outright to doing things they think are a waste of time? Maybe they should? Or maybe they should acquiesce after a bit of pushback even if they don't understand it?

Maybe this is an adequate speed-bump for applicants - if simply accepting resumes means that you get a much greater percentage of unqualified applications, perhaps it's worth it to select for those willing to tolerate the exercise?

Should we police flat-Earthers?

They seem to so desperately want the world to be flat that they will come up with any argument that whatever conclusively disproving new evidence they just looked at to prove their idea was somehow manipulated or in some other way confounded.

Surely when others hear their sincerely delivered explanations some will also conclude that the world is flat.

Is there a cost-benefit analysis we should perform here?

What are the costs and benefits of policing misinformation about other subjects?

Does it put high-level business logic at the top or the implementation details at the top?

Which is preferable, and why?

Asbestos is an extremely stable mineral fiber and sharp like glass. If you get it on your skin it may penetrate but it will eventually probably slough off. If it gets in your lungs, it has nowhere to go and can continue damaging tissue for the rest of your life. Similarly, if it gets inside your body through other routes, it has nowhere to go. The lawsuit is about the product being marketed for feminine hygiene.

Presumably if women put it on their privates every day, and it contains asbestos fibers, they will eventually have enough asbestos migrate internally to cause cancer, for example, in their ovaries - just like asbestos causes lung cancer when inhaled.

Although I know I'm wrong 99% of the time I sometimes get that feeling about my fellow programmers when I look at code...

I'm not trying to judge you harshly. I'm trying to understand.

In your first post in this thread, "high tier" NixOS users were called condescending sadists. This is a libel as far as I can tell based on my own experience.

Then was a list of disliked phrases, and second to last in that list was the instruction to read the manual. I believe in reading manuals, as difficult and time-consuming as the effort may be. This made me think expectations for using the project were wrong.

Now you're linking to a repo you made to attempt to give new users a guide to getting started.

You clearly made an effort to be part of the solution. This is admirable.

I'm trying to connect dots here - what I think happened was, in the course of trying to get help filling in the blanks, you probably exhausted the patience of others trying to help you.

I question if what you've been trying to do works at this point in the project's lifecycle. What you're trying to do is hard enough in a completely mature project. In an environment where we acknowledge the incompleteness of documentation, new command line APIs that are evolving, and new ways of doing things (I'm currently thinking of containers after looking at your guide, and flakes as well), communicating a true North is extremely difficult especially if you aren't one of the core developers immersed in the current state of change.

I don't think the project is mature enough to declare a "right way" to do all the things. I don't think we have enough mature users to support filling in all the blanks, yet, either.

I'm sorry you've had the experience you've had. Maybe after taking a break, you can resume your efforts, but with tempered expectations. We're all asking a lot of people who volunteer their time to build what should be acknowledged as a strategically important approach to computing.

We need more experts. The experts we do have are over-worked and under-appreciated. Perhaps you can help us there one day too.

Maybe you should look within.

I'm still a long ways from understanding everything Nix/NixOS completely, but I've never gotten these kinds of comments apart from the extremely reasonable "you should start out by reading the introduction docs" - that the directions lead with.

And if you have a problem with that, I can see how you might have provoked that kind of response that seems so out of character to me.

I ask questions when I have them, and sometimes I get answers from them, and sometimes I answer them myself.

But I started off reading as much of the docs as I could tolerate before and while getting started, and always trying to self-help before asking for help.

We all make decisions based on what we think we need and the reality of our situations.

I feel badly for people who don't think about the second-order effects of their decisions, though. If one chooses to only do enough to get by starting at a young age, they'll still be waiting tables (or some equivalent) in their 60's, one paycheck away from disaster.

On the other hand, working more than you need has compounding effects. Ben Franklin got about his business with a hand-cart early in the morning in his 20s and 30s and was in shape to retire in his 40s - and could indulge in public service, invention, scientific experimentation, and exploration to his hearts desire after that.

We can't all be Ben Franklins, though I think more of us could do so with better decision making.

I enjoy the mainstream memes that are top ranked in r/antiwork - righteously quitting from unethical organizations where bosses routinely break their promises, labor negotiations that worked out (isn't that pro-work?), and PHB incompetence - like automation unrecognized and lost.

But there seems to be a more insidious core flogging a fantasy where entry-level-jobs that should be staffed by high-schoolers have over double minimum wage compensation and full benefits.

I'm reminded of the MLM (multi-level marketing) fantasy of, "forget about product orders (the real work that makes the arrangement legal), just get more people to pay you to get in your downline and they'll sell for you and you'll be able to sit back and make money for the rest of your life without doing anything." - which makes the business arrangement into a pyramid scheme.

The problem with pyramid scheme MLMs is the market gets saturated quickly and runs out of greater fools willing to support it.

I see a very similar attitude in the anti-work crew, where the fantasy is, "if the billionaires would just give everyone a thousand dollars a month then we could just sit back and relax the rest of our lives."

I presume they're looking for inconsistency that could indicate a lack of conscientiousness.

At times when I have been anxious to get hired, I have had no problem demonstrating that I can fill out a bunch of redundant forms when required.

Sometimes you need to be able to do that sort of thing, even in the best organizations.

On the other hand, I don't think I'd intentionally add that to my hiring process.

There are better ways to check for conscientiousness than saying, "please do this redundant activity perfectly."

I'd ignore that particular individual's comment. A full case study should include a qualitative discussion of the competition, and the more granular, the better.

Far from unethical, it's a best practice.

Source: I wrote a lot of papers like this for business school.

It's my understanding that more upvotes and fewer comments is considered good on the HN ranking algorithm.

Both or not is a false dichotomy. I would say, start with rust, which seems to have the most interesting ideas, then every once in a while, reassess.

20 years ago I picked python, with just a business and political science degree...

Perhaps you'll think I'm crazy but...

I have long theorized that State Department infrastructure is intentionally insecure to allow the dissemination of information or disinformation that we want foreign interests to get.

I'd like to recommend Elm at work but I can't because it's still below a major version of 1, which implies there may be a good deal of rework in the short term.

I did get an Elm app upgraded from 0.18 to 0.19 without too much extra work, but I'm concerned a major version release may bring much more changes.

I have been trying to get emacs set up how I like it based on my prior experience with spacemacs, using the highest level config settings, with the goal of having the most powerful IDE and document generator I can get while writing as little elisp as possible (by using `M-x customize` and `M-x list-packages` only thus far).

I was very excited when, for the first time ever, late last night, I created a Haskell code block, did C-c, C-c, and got a hello world to show up!

I have never been able to get ob-haskell to work before, and I have been fighting it off and on for years, using the same tactics.

They might not be paying a big price today, but they do pay a price - their reputation is damaged and when other potential customers look at who to use, they give more consideration to alternatives.