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cbisnett

275 karma · joined February 22, 2014

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cbisnett··on Scientists discover beer bottle in the Mariana Trench (2024)
What’s the chance this was dropped off one of the research vessels at some point? It seems unlikely to drift given it sank to the bottom.
cbisnett··on An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations
Ahh yes, 4D chess
cbisnett··on An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations
Windows doesn’t have application permissions like Mac, iOS, and Android. An app doesn’t specify what it need to be able to do, it inherits the permissions of the user that launched it. Not a great permissions model, but it’s legacy all the way back to the earliest versions of Windows.
cbisnett··on An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations
It’s not that we’re spying on users for fun. We’re analyzing the browser history so determine if the history contains any sites that are associated with malicious activity. We definitely don’t care about your pr0n
cbisnett··on An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations
Thanks for the feedback on not understanding what we sell from the homepage. We sell an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) product that we manage with our 24/7 SOC. To perform the investigations on potentially malicious activity, we can fetch files from the endpoint and review them. We log all of this activity and make it available to our customers. We are an extension of their security team, which means they trust us with this access. We’ve been doing this for more than 10 years and have built up a pretty good reputation, but I can see how that would freak some folks out. We also sell to businesses, so this is something that would be installed on a work computer.
cbisnett··on An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations
Actually we just thought it was interesting that an attacker installed our EDR agent on the machine they use to attack their victims. That’s really bad operational security and we were able to learn a lot from that access.
cbisnett··on Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim
It’s only GUI, but you can have it perform the edits over SSH. So it appears to be all local for you, but the files are actually modified on the remote host.

https://zed.dev/blog/remote-development

cbisnett··on Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim
I’ve been using Sublime Text for more than a decade and I gave Zed a try recently. I don’t have good reasons like the author, but I kinda wanted to see what the hype was about.

I really liked everything about it including the much better LSP support and the base key map for Sublime Text was very close so I felt at home quickly.

Then I tried actually writing code in my usual workflow and this is where things started to fall apart. I’ve been writing in Ruby for almost 10 years now and when I type things like `def<tab>` I’m used to Sublime filling in the snippet and allowing me to quickly enter and tab through the components. Same for a bunch of really common Ruby concepts like blocks. I found this to be very limited and even though I created custom snippets they never would render with the correct indentation. I think the Ruby language extension just needs some additional work and probably doesn’t get much attention. For me I didn’t have time to figure it out and contribute so I went back to Sublime Text.

I will definitely continue to play with Zed and see if it gets better because of the native AI integration. I’m not an AI fanboi and I usually avoid it, but being able to supply the open and existing files as context when asking the assistant to generate things like tests performed much better with context than without and were much closer to how we write and format tests.

cbisnett··on Hacker’s Delight (2012)
This is a really great book for anyone interested in compiler development, JIT compilation of higher-level languages, reverse engineering, or anything that involves understanding or generating assembly instructions. This is not a book about hacking from the perspective of breaking into systems or finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in software. The term Hacker in the title is a reference to an early meaning of the word that referred to someone who liked to tinker and understand how things worked.

When I was doing a lot of reverse engineering and vulnerability research work this book gave some really great insight into some of the compiler optimizations that I would come across. Highly recommended for anyone trying to take their skills to the next level.

cbisnett··on Show HN: Tecktok – Triplebyte for Singaporean, Indonesian and Indian Engineers
Just my opinion, but you may want to consider renaming the company. Hearing someone say “tecktok” is likely to have potential users searching for “techtalk” or similar. Not to mention it’s very close to tiktok, which I’m sure you know is banned in India.
cbisnett··on Y Combinator Failed Startups
This article says Atrium ran out of money, but I feel like Justin Kan’s blog post said they gave tens of millions back to investors when they shut down.
cbisnett··on Datto S-1
Direct link that renders outside of the SEC website frame: https://sec.report/Document/0001193125-20-257812/d36878ds1.h...
cbisnett··on The SaaS website content you need to close sales
Really solid article. I enjoyed the examples of known successful companies embracing, instead of ignoring, the comparisons to competition.

> ...prospective buyers are going to discover your competitors, anyway.

cbisnett··on Ask HN: Best Bank for Startups?
We are also in the invite queue for the Stripe Corporate Card, but decided to make a switch as we didn't know how long the wait would be. Brex is working on features for expense reporting and authorization is what were were told. While I don't think it's on par with Expensify, maybe one day in the future it will be which will mean one less service for us to manage.
cbisnett··on Circle Packing
I was surprised to see the Wikipedia page didn’t mention any best-effort algorithms but I guess they can’t list everything.

I like the natural noise you get from Poisson Disc Sampling [1]

[1] https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/dbb02448b0f93e4c82c3

cbisnett··on Stripe stops returning fees when issuing refunds
I received an email on February 19 from Stripe where they notified us they are no longer returning the Stripe fee when you issue a refund to a customer. Previously they would return the whole fee or a partial fee in the case of a partial refund.

* We’ll no longer return Stripe’s fees from the original transaction when you refund a customer.*

While this isn't a huge deal because we don't issue that many refunds, it seems a bit petty to stop returning these and we'll have to make sure our accountant treats this correctly. I'm guessing they ran the numbers and realized this would add up to quite a bit across all their customers.

cbisnett··on Sunsetting Hire
I wonder if Google has unintentionally created a self-reinforcing feedback loop where potential customers don’t trust the products will be supported for more than 24 months which leads to limited adoption which in turn leads to the products being canceled before 24 months. Pair that with other HN comments that have described a situation where it’s easier to get promoted from launching a product vs maintaining an existing product. I understand the startup-like culture where they are looking for huge successes but I think they abandon these products before they’ve had enough time or exposure.
cbisnett··on A giant whiteboard for $14 plus nails
When we moved into our current office we wanted huge whiteboards since we end up using them for all kinds of notes, illustrations, todo lists, etc. We looked at large boards and they were terribly expensive to ship and a pain to mount. We also looked at whiteboard paint and things similar to what’s mentioned in the article but found lots of issues with erasure, ghosting, and staining over time.

We ended up using custom printed ThinkBoard [1] stickers. We were hesitant at first but the price is relatively cheap for the size and we got them printed with our company logo with a high transparency value so it wouldn’t distract when writing over it. I can honestly say that they are amazing! We put up 2 so far. One is ~12ft x 4ft and the other is ~16ft x 5ft. We’ve been using them for over a year and have no staining or ghosting issues and we regularly leave things on them for weeks at a time. One swipe with the included microfiber cloth and it looks as good as the day we put them up. It’s basically just a big sticker so it’s pretty easy to install with 2 people. I’m not sure yet how the wall will fare when we peel them off but I imagine it won’t be bad. We also sanded the wall behind where we stuck the second board to remove any paint bumps or inconsistencies and it’s really slick. I wouldn’t say it’s required but if you have a little time and a sander I would recommend it.

[1] https://www.think-board.com/

cbisnett··on Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
Given the privacy issues and general data hoarding by Facebook, giving them additional access to purchase history and account balances seems like it’s going to make the problem worse without much upside.
cbisnett··on Ask HN: Blogs about Being CTO/Head of/Lead Dev?
The Gusto co-founder describes his role and changes as they grew to 100 engineers in this blog: https://engineering.gusto.com/how-my-role-as-cto-has-changed...

I found it reassuring I wasn’t the only founder who still felt they could provide more value by helping build and architect the product than just simply managing budgets and recruiting.

cbisnett··on Escaping Docker container using waitid() – CVE-2017-5123
Just to clarify the terminology here:

- A vulnerability is a sofware bug that has particular behaviors and ramifications that allow it to be used maliciously.

- An exploit is a crafted piece of input data that is designed to trigger a vulnerability to execute arbitrary code, crash the target (Denial-of-Service), etc.

> In 2017 alone, 434 linux kernel exploits where found, and as you have seen in this post, kernel exploits can be devastating for containerized environments.

There are a few places in the article like this one where the correct terminology is vulnerability not exploit. cvedetails.com aggregates vulnerabilities. Places like exploit-db.com aggregate exploits people have written to take advantage of vulnerabilities to enable them to perform some unintended action against the target.

Edit: formatting

cbisnett··on Crypto Anchors: Exfiltration Resistant Infrastructure
Out of curiosity I went to look at the pricing for Amazon’s CloudHSM service for AWS and nearly spit out my drink. $5,000 up front cost per device and $1.88/hr and they suggest running two for high availability. At those prices I don’t think you’ll see this catch on anytime soon.
cbisnett··on The Tiny West Virginia Town Haunted by an NSA Secret
I'm not sure if the people interviewed knew or not but the main reason the governor declined to purchase the base for $1 was due to the high renovation costs to turn it into a prison and the operating costs for a facility that large. This is an entire base with numerous buildings and neighborhoods. It is esentially a self-sufficient city.

http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/20160726/sugar-grove-navy-...

cbisnett··on Patent Application: Full body teleportation system (2006)
A friend of my wife's worked at the USPTO for a few years as a mechanical engineer reviewing patent applications. He said they would regularly get applications for time travel machines and perpetual motion machines and they would have to spend a bunch of time writing up why it was rejected. It was a right of passage usually reserved for the new guy ;)
cbisnett··on The Boring Company [video]
This is Elon's response to a Twitter users similar comment about earthquakes. I don't know enough about physics to say if he's just throwing things out there or if he already did some research.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/824300186834898945

cbisnett··on BitTorrent Inventor Bram Cohen Will Start His Own Cryptocurrency
“Sometimes people have this misapprehension that Bitcoin is a democracy. No Bitcoin is not a democracy; it’s called a 51% attack for a reason. That’s not a majority of the vote, that’s not how Bitcoin works.”

So I get that he's trying to get at the fact that it's not a large majority, but 51% is a majority.

cbisnett··on I’m starting an internet company and detailing the entire process
You might have to fight John McAfee for the name ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)

cbisnett··on Mobile Holoportation
> The greatest challenge was bandwidth, which we reduced by 97% using an innovative approach to compression.

Waiting for the Pied Piper partnership announcement.

cbisnett··on Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted
According to the Shift Payments FAQ you must reside in one of the following states to spend bitcoin via Coinbase: AL, AZ, CA, DE, DC, GA, ID, IA, KS, ME, MS, NE, NV, NJ, NC, ND, OK, PA, PR, SD, TX, VT, WA, WV

[1] https://www.shiftpayments.com/faq