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darkr

1,654 karma · joined September 11, 2012

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darkr··on Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?
> until the train went off the rails

Ironically the core application is written in rails, which may be part of the issue

darkr··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
C is a weakly typed language. It’s statically typed, which is a different thing
darkr··on Ask HN: How do you handle clients who don't pay on time?
For customers who repeatedly do this - put your prices up by 10%. Offer 10% discount for paying within net 15.
darkr··on New iPad Air, powered by M4
> iPad Air is a fantastic value

TIL American English treats “value” in the financial sense as a countable noun

darkr··on Benchmarks for concurrent hash map implementations in Go
It’d be nice to have in stdlib, but it’s pretty trivial to write a generic wrapper for it
darkr··on US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
air source heat pumps, though they're improving won't do well in extreme cold; even if they can operate they'll still be running at much lower efficiency.

For temperatures significantly into negative territory a ground source heat pump would perform far better, where it can draw on a source of heat that will always be at least above freezing.

A hybrid system doesn't seem like a bad trade-off though..

darkr··on Designing an IPv6-native P2P transport – lessons from building I6P
yes - this is also part of the privacy extensions spec: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4941
darkr··on UUIDv47: Store UUIDv7 in DB, emit UUIDv4 outside (SipHash-masked timestamp)
It’s not uncommon. Google AIP spec requires it for example. I think the main driver for it is implicit idempotency.
darkr··on Open office is giving you secondhand ADHD
It's basically a long form linkedin article.
darkr··on The Seven-Year Rule
Incorrect
darkr··on Problems with Go channels (2016)
At least historically, google engineers had 20% of their time to spend on projects not related to their core role
darkr··on Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly
> IMO the culling over managers over the past few years is really a way to make sure you don't have someone you can discuss career development, promotion, and pay increases with

That’s the point, surely

darkr··on Half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya: new research
> those nuclear weapons quell a lot of our more violent habits, hasn't been a world war since

It’s only been 85 years, give it a bit more time…

darkr··on David Lynch has died
The first season is a masterpiece. Second season goes off the rails and loses direction fairly early on
darkr··on Rust's Two Kinds of 'Assert' Make for Better Code
Similarly python in optimised mode with -O or -OO flags will disable asserts.

I see asserts as a less temporary version of print() based debugging. Sometimes very useful as a quick and dirty fix, but 9 times out of 10 you’re better off with some combination of a real debugger, unit tests, tracing/logging, and better typing or validation.

darkr··on Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time
Great PR move, but surely better to invest in more basic security measures supported by their app (chain of trust, verified callers/messaging etc). Instead their app is primarily a react native sales tool. Part of the reason that o2 was so affected by scammers calling from south Asian call centres with “the latest offers” was because they used to do exactly this with their customers.
darkr··on Breaking Down OnlyFans' Economics
Americans are weird. I’ve been going to the same barber for years. He doesn’t know my name, barely says a word and it’s just so comforting.
darkr··on We spent $20 to achieve RCE and accidentally became the admins of .mobi
If there’s any scope for a user to inject JavaScript, then potentially this gives a vector of attack against other internal things (e.g admin.domain.com, operations.domain.com etc)
darkr··on The Insecurity of Debian
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/s...
darkr··on Ask HN: Any tools to do generic WiFi imaging?
Cheap stud finders are usually not great. The good ones are radar-based using similar frequency bands to wifi, but they cost lots of $$
darkr··on The EU should be the heat-pump pioneer
In the UK, dew point highs will peak above 22 degrees multiple times per year, so the safe temperature to cool to is something like 25 degrees.

Might provide some benefits on really hot days, but it’s still uncomfortably warm for working in.

darkr··on The EU should be the heat-pump pioneer
It would only need to be 4.7 to beat a gas/oil system that is 100% efficient.

In reality, a very good gas based system that is well specified and installed might reach 80% as a whole. Most UK gas/oil heating systems are significantly lower.

darkr··on The EU should be the heat-pump pioneer
WRT cooling with water based system there are a few of issues:

1. A system that also provides cooling isn’t allowed under the heat pump government grant.

2. You might actually need planning permission for this

3. Especially in a humid environment like the uk, you can end up with condensation and damp issues, which you really don’t want in an underfloor slab install

If you also want cooling, better to go an air-air based system (aka air conditioning)

darkr··on The EU should be the heat-pump pioneer
Those figures are for the unit itself. It takes a lot less energy to heat air than it does to heat water, but water retains heat for much longer.

What matters is the SCOP for the system as a whole.

In a traditional Victorian house with a fireplace in every room, radiant heat will provide far greater efficiency than a forced air system, in which all of that warm air will literally go straight up the chimney.

darkr··on The EU should be the heat-pump pioneer
Another issue with heat pump rollout, at least in the UK is a severe lack of qualified heating engineers with a basic understanding of thermodynamic principles.

Thus you get plumbers with experience installing gas boilers, resulting in poorly specified and installed systems that provide nowhere near the efficiency that they should reach.

This then leads people to say “heat pumps don’t work” or “heat pumps are expensive to run”, which only feeds into the whole anti net-zero rhetoric.

darkr··on The EU should be the heat-pump pioneer
This. The cost of installing and upgrading a big old drafty Victorian house to a COP 4+ efficiency where the running costs actually beat oil/gas would have a break even point way past the end of my lifetime.
darkr··on Twilio confirms data breach after hackers leak 33M Authy user phone numbers
Based on the reports that I’ve read so far, this vuln was different to the one I found, which was on an authenticated endpoint.

Definitely some similarities though, I’d love to see some concrete technical information on it.

darkr··on Twilio confirms data breach after hackers leak 33M Authy user phone numbers
This doesn’t surprise me. I found an information exposure vuln on the user registration endpoint a while ago (given a phone number of an authy user who had previously registered via another customer, retrieve all other numbers/devices/timestamps, email addresses and other info for that user).

It took them two years to fix it.

darkr··on Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
TBF, after riding up a few SF hills in the summer I’m pretty gross
darkr··on The Irrevocable SSL Certificates of Cloudflare
Revocation for random domains is kind of a moo point as chrome doesn’t do OCSP default, just CRLsets that are pushed out with browser releases, that probably won’t include your domain.

Better instead just to have shorter TTL certs.

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