HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

akerl_

13,342 karma · joined January 3, 2014

akerl.org

me@lesaker.org

submissionscomments
akerl_··on Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law
Are you saying that you don’t think that the GDPR text is written to apply outside of the EU, or that it does say that but it’s not relevant because it’s not viable for anybody to enforce that?
akerl_··on FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
Design changes are not part of the self certification process, they’re part of the type certification process, which has always been handled by the FAA.
akerl_··on FAA lets Boeing sign off on 737 MAX, 787 airworthiness certificates again
As has been noted in several of the comments, the crashes were a result of a faulty design, not aircraft failing to meet the design.

The self-certification here wasn’t part of the chain of events that led to the crashes; it appears to have been related to other issues the FAA uncovered as a side effect of their investigation.

akerl_··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
Not really in the way the media would have you believe.

Like “I was scared for a couple minutes on a Friday morning until I saw the vendor status page” is orders of magnitude away from the bar here.

akerl_··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
What would your damages be? They’re not actually going to charge your credit card for 34 billion.
akerl_··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

Looks like this is a bug w/ S3

akerl_··on TLS certificates for internal services done right
Where are you seeing this? LLMs make it easier to do bulk data analysis / scale attack patterns, but I've not seen anything to suggest they're incentivizing people to do OSINT against random individuals to fire off targeted attacks on home LANs.

The juice isn't really worth the squeeze for the token spend any more than it was worth the human energy.

akerl_··on TLS certificates for internal services done right
How many people out there have attackers doing individualized research to identify services on their home LAN so they can chain a network attack with CVEs in their self-hosted service?
akerl_··on U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Iranian negotiators
Don’t worry, they got data from a whole 5000 people in Australia and 300 people in Afghanistan!

I’m sure that’s generalizable to the whole country’s worth of 28 and 40 million, respectively.

akerl_··on U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Iranian negotiators
> Countries with fewer than 100 test-takers were excluded from the ranking due to limited sample size and are shown in gray on the map above.

How generous of them.

akerl_··on U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Iranian negotiators
Your original link makes fairly clear how disingenuous it is to call the figures a national average:

> Data from International IQ Test (IIT) are based on data from 1,352,763 participants worldwide who took the same IQ test on the website.

> Becker’s estimates are categorized by source. T = value is based upon actual test results from said country. E = value is a best-guess estimate based upon measured values of nearby countries.

Opening up the actual paper from Becker they're citing is basically a wandering tour where they try to find whatever numbers do exist and then math their way out of the fact that the sample sizes are small and the tests are different everywhere.

Various entities have performed IQ tests on people in many nations. But taking that and trying to flip it to say we've derived average national IQ is junk science.

akerl_··on Bought an expired domain. Then I inherited their AWS Root account
I don’t suppose this was related to the recent Netvue/Birdfy outage that they claimed was due to a registrar issue and lasted over a week?
akerl_··on Since Linux 6.9, LUKS suspend stopped wiping disk-encryption keys from memory
The reason this bug is unexpected is that the user is expecting to have to enter their password (because they expect the key to be wiped on suspend), and then _they are_ asked for their password. But there was a copy of the key elsewhere in kernel memory that was never cleared.
akerl_··on Since Linux 6.9, LUKS suspend stopped wiping disk-encryption keys from memory
Managing an Apple fleet is similarly fine, and that includes using any of the MDM tooling that also does key escrow on enterprise Filevault devices.
akerl_··on Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%
> I recently heard that a trip to Popeye's for a family of 3 recently cost $68 in Florida.

Does it?

akerl_··on Free the Icons
We've managed to make the entire corpus of open source software but the thing that's a "Hard Problem" that nobody can find a way to do is making the icons look good?

It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.

akerl_··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
I mean sure, but if you started talking about google.com as a subdomain, real humans would correctly look at you funny.
akerl_··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
Are you working on the not-TLD parts in parallel? If you don't get the TLD, do you plan to launch on a more traditional domain?

The marketing stuff makes it look like the TLD is your main focus.

akerl_··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
It just feels a bit like you've decided to solve the hardest possible side quest first.

Everything else on your roadmap could have been built and shipped in the universe that exists, and then if down the road it's working, you could have aimed for your own TLD.

Instead you're putting the TLD first and any of the actual functionality that end users might want afterwards.

akerl_··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
What is the premise for being able to do "one person, one subdomain" that isn't a privacy/security nightmare?
akerl_··on Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast
Is the point of the site to build reputation, or to share opinions and discuss topics?
akerl_··on Ask HN: How do I capture the right audience and find the product market fit
I'm saying you're driving backwards down the highway, and you're asking how you can read the signs better because they all look blank.
akerl_··on Ask HN: How do I capture the right audience and find the product market fit
It seems impossible that you know the problem is real but don’t know who the right people are to tell about it.
akerl_··on Ask HN: How do I capture the right audience and find the product market fit
How did you decide what to build without knowing who you’d be building it for?
akerl_··on AURpocalypse now: a look at the recent AUR attacks
You think that users having to find and download software from the Internet at large is both similar to the AUR model and has preferable handling of these issues?

Can you elaborate?

akerl_··on Systemd 261 released with systemd-sysinstall, IMDSD, and storagectl
I think it's clear at this point that the allegations don't worry them. They tried debunking them by pointing out that the overwhelming majority of these are separate daemons that are entirely optional, can be packaged separately, and don't affect anybody who doesn't want to use them. The people raging against systemd didn't feel obligated to take those facts into account.

So they're just doing their own thing, and the distro landscape seems a clear indication that their own thing looks pretty compelling to basically every distro with any meaningful market share.

People may as well make the pitch that Linux is "taking over everything".

akerl_··on AURpocalypse now: a look at the recent AUR attacks
There are also dangers of being on older versions in Debian that rely on maintainers identifying and correctly back porting critical changes.

Fwiw the Arch docs are pretty clear that the AUR is a Wild West and that you should be vetting anything you find there before you run it.

akerl_··on AURpocalypse now: a look at the recent AUR attacks
The AUR is, in my opinion, a pretty convenient selling point if you use any esoteric software.

It’s basically like a crowdsourced set of people’s tips and tricks for installing stuff on Arch, all written in the format Arch uses for packages.

Similar to how I’d not blindly take code from an AI and whack it into production, I wouldn’t blindly take an AUR PKGBUILD and execute it. But it’s nice to have a place to go see “huh, I wonder if anybody has shared their approach so I can borrow from it”.

akerl_··on "No Feigning Surprise"
Your examples sort of underscore why “assume positive intent” matters a lot for how you engage but not a lot about what you engage on.

Working against the feigning surprise thing, if somebody says “oh I don’t know what DNS is”, the problem isn’t with offering to help them understand DNS, it’s leading in without projecting shock/alarm.

If somebody is blocking your promo, assuming positive intent doesn’t mean you just let them do it, it means you escalate by focusing on the root issue (“this person is affecting my promo and they’re not giving me any actionable signal as to why”), not speculating on their intent.

akerl_··on AURpocalypse now: a look at the recent AUR attacks
Yay isn’t in the official arch repos? The only way you get stuff from the AUR is by explicitly pulling down to repo and building with makepkg or explicitly finding and installing an AUR “helper”.
← PreviousPage 6 of 34Next →