Hacker News Reader

dspearsonon Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked

It's odd to me, as a Brit, to see that this stuff was not mostly public anyway. (looking at you https://github.com/alphagov)

dspearsonon Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked

I don't follow. It allows citizenry to identify wage discrimination and other malpractices, people can get paid on the value of their work and not just how good they are at gaming the wage negotiations. Plus most of the civilised world has this thing called a "union" and "workers rights" that generally prevent your imagined scenario from happening.

What has medical data got to do with this? You can't very well go up to a disabled person and say, hey, you cost society more money, maybe you should have been born less disabled, you cost too much, pay more. Societal safety nets exist for a reason, and how much one is compensated for equal labour as your coworker... I don't see how it's related at all to the "make the disabled pay more" eugenics argument.

dspearsonon Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

http://textfiles.com/

people familiar with the culture

dspearsonon I use zip bombs to protect my server

I work for one of the largest Swiss ISPs, and these mailboxes are still to this day read by actual people (me included), so it's sometimes worthwhile even today.

dspearsonon Wild – A fast linker for Linux

Under what circumstances would commercial companies be required to buy a license?! If they provide Linking as a Service?

dspearsonon OpenBSD 7.5 via QEMU on Hetzner physical machine (no phys. access / KVM console)

I do the exact same for Illumos, just ripped ideas from depenguin.me (which is how I previously installed FreeBSD after they discontinued the rescue system).

dspearsonon Jellyfin: We're Good, Seriously

I haven't noticed any difference or problems with the Android TV application vs the Android or web client. What exactly is broken or not great for you?

dspearsonon Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

How can you commit treason against a foreign country?

dspearsonon The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

It was not a state actor. There were plenty of high profile people and projects being owned just for the fun of it back then.

dspearsonon The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)

Next we'll be hearing that ~el8 was a CIA front. :)

dspearsonon Fukuoka court rules ban on dual nationality is constitutional

If a child chooses to get a USA passport, surely this means renouncing Japanese citizenship?

dspearsonon About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

This is a naïve question, but why on earth are unions isolated to one company so often in USA? Surely an industry-wide solution would be more effective.

dspearsonon NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild

Nobody is forcing anyone to work for these scumbags. It is a choice.

dspearsonon The product I worked on for the last 4 years is now open-source

It is wrong. I'm sorry to be blunt, but here we are.

Just because pepsi tastes like coca cola, doesn't make it coca cola.

Open source/free software places no restrictions on use/modification/distribution, end of story. With the sole exception of copyleft, which disallows you to distribute & withhold source, i.e. stopping you from depriving others of the very freedom that you benefitted from.

This places restrictions on use. Ergo it is not open source. Attempting to muddy the waters by using hand-wavey "you get most of your freedom!" type talk just muddies the waters and is precisely why the term got trademarked and why a definition exists. And it really is not hard to understand.

dspearsonon QA workers at Blizzard Albany are unionizing

It's the norm, rather than the exception, here in Europe. My employment contract is set through collective bargaining and I work at one of the largest tech employers in Switzerland. Being represented by a union is just standard fare. I don't understand the hostility to it across the pond.

dspearsonon Swedish slow TV: The great moose migration [video]

European Union legislation mandates that all 27 member states must by law grant all employees a minimum of 4 weeks of paid vacation. (but yes, in practice, many offer more. one of the benefits of the EU, and of welfare states, is that there is a floor through which nobody should fall. the EU Working Time Directive is another thing for which I am grateful.)

dspearsonon Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved (1991)

Modern society does a pretty good job of that already. How many prescriptions for antidepressants do we issue in the western world? tl;dr, I consider them lower risk than horse riding, or working in a startup.

dspearsonon Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved (1991)

True enough, but his health declined in his late 80s. David Nichols is still going strong in his late 70s, Albert Hofmann died at 102, Ram Dass died at 88. I don't see psychedelics, and their use, as being particularly risky to physical health and longevity. Especially since many of us already consume red meat, tobacco, alcohol, etc.

dspearsonon Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

iRedMail stack on a hetzner machine. Migrated mails with getmail and dovecot import, but it isn't perfect, and no calendar etc. But nobody is ever kicking me off a platform again.

dspearsonon Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

I received the email on Monday. I, too, was in the boat of having friends & family using it. It was a mistake to trust their promises, but this was from back in the day of "do no evil." They said free forever, now ask me for >$1000 a year.

The insane thing is that almost everyone affected by this is likely to be highly technical, and in positions in which they have a say in how corporate spend happens.

I migrated away this week. I had to explain to my friends and family about this bait-and-switch, and have them all using Google Takeout. C'est la vie. I had not self-hosted mail infrastructure since I was a teeanger, but here I am again. Thanks, I guess?

dspearsonon Back Orifice (1998)

Had a lot of fun with bo2k and friends. cDc zines got me in to hacker culture and probably contributed to my career trajectory.

dspearsonon Learn C and build your own Lisp (2014)

I can also recommend the following books by Nils M Holm:

LISP From Nothing (https://t3x.org/lfn/)

LISP System Implementation (https://www.t3x.org/lsi/)

Scheme 9 from Empty Space (https://t3x.org/s9book/)

They're more leaning towards the LISP implementation side, and far less on the learning C side, for which there are far better options.

dspearsonon Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

Not quite true; zcash is best-of-breed and works well. Dead on for this being a devastating error though. I regret advocating Signal, and this destroys Moxie's credibility in my eyes. A shame, because the Signal team did good work to bring strong encrypted communications to the masses. Instead of focusing on fixing usability, stability, and group messaging that scales, they push this in (which nobody asked for) just to make a few people rich through network effects.

Mobilecoin is a pre-mined Monero rip-off (that Moxie has clear links to) with centralised Ripple-esque consensus, and puts UK Signal users into uncharted regulatory waters. Downright sleazy.

dspearsonon Medium Tells Journalists to Feel Free to Quit After Busting Union Drive

I really don't understand the lack of unionisation in the USA. In Europe it is endemic, even in tech, and seems to have nothing but positive impact for workers. (I'm represented by Syndicom.)

There is power in a union.

dspearsonon Dungeon Magazine

Or similarly: for i in `seq -w 001 221`; do wget https://archive.org/download/Dungeon_Magazine_$i/Dungeon_Mag...; done; wget https://archive.org/download/Dungeon_Magazine_Annual_2010/Du...

dspearsonon LSD Chemist William Pickard to Be Released from Prison

"Crack" and cocaine are literally the same drug.

dspearsonon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2020)

Swisscom | Junior System Engineer | Full-time (80-100%) | ONSITE (Bern, Switzerland)

Working on the interface of infrastructure, applications, and data, you build systems that handle petabytes of data, process millions of messages per second, and serve thousands of jobs per day. The platform you make integrates Swisscom's products and opens the door to new, cutting-edge, data-driven products. Your work empowers dozens of engineering teams, hundreds of colleagues, and the entire company to gain new insights and dream up new possibilities.

Joining the data lake team, you design, implement and operate an enterprise-grade big data platform. While building large-scale systems, you automate them and ensure they are reliable, available, and secure. You work with top-notch big data technologies and their related ecosystems, hosted on the premise and in the cloud. With your expertise, you improve the reliability of this highly available platform.

More information, and applications, here: https://jobs.swisscom.ch/professionals/offene-stellen/young-...

dspearsonon How to Get Tenure

"The Dignified Professor"

excerpts from "'Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!' Adventures of a Curious Character" by Richard Feynman, Bantam Books: New York, 1986

I don't believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don't have any ideas and I'm not getting anywhere I can say to myself, "At least I'm living; at least I'm doing something; I am making some contribution" -- it's just psychological.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they are not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it's the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any ideas, and if you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't even say "I'm teaching my class."

If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.