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fubarred

59 karma · joined December 16, 2014

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fubarred··on Ask HN: Should I report my main competitor for PCI Violations?
Most def. Modified Golden rule: "Treat others as they wish to be treated" Some people wish to be treated different than I would, so it might be worth anticipating their expectations.

Meta: http://inewsdesign.com/2012/11/21/richard-bransons-tip-why-y...

fubarred··on Ask HN: Should I report my main competitor for PCI Violations?
Giga-up-vote. It's too easy to slip up on security hygiene and either lose a jobs, customers, investors, reputation &| be sued. There's just too many liabilities and it's hard to pull off without being (legally) interpreted as a threat.

It is laudable to Do The Right Thing(TM), but the personal cost is likely nonzero sum.

Be aware, tread carefully, CYA.

fubarred··on Show HN: A curated list of remote jobs
Np. :)
fubarred··on The “What Are Monads?” Fallacy
Check out https://youtu.be/xKRndVoo2ms, it explains how monads can refactor messy things like call chaining if you're building SQL-like result interfaces.
fubarred··on The “What Are Monads?” Fallacy
Yup, people will still ask "WTF are monads?" just like they'll soon ask "WTF are (combinators|arrows|...)?", and there will inevitably be more tutorials, as per [0]. :)

It's clarity of explanation that makes anything teachable &| learnable.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKRndVoo2ms

All signs of superhuman nature appear in man as illness or insanity. ~ Nietzsche

fubarred··on Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
Config is ultra-sensitive information. It's like not having the right .gitignore if you're backing up /etc in git or not having enough password log filters.

The issue is that ultimately, one has to trust some infrastructure as being of an ultimately trusted network (whether it's Puppet/Chef/cfe2+ or offline authoritative CA's)

fubarred··on Environment Variables Considered Harmful for Your Secrets
Ultimately, secrets need to live somewhere and need to be accessed as plain text. Just make sure that the access as small window is as possible, and try to obliterate it after use, if possible.

If one absolutely needs to centralize secrets (TLS/SSL private keys, entropy sources, etc.) (at risk of SPOF or some HA setup), use some PSK style setup that delivers them directly, out-of-band (via separate NICs) or prioritized ahead of regular traffic. Keep it simple. Otherwise, prefer something like zookeeper with encrypted secrets (again PSK keying per box). Try to not deploy the same secret on every box, if possible. Also, try to avoid magic secrets if you can too (remove all local password hashes, use only auth keys).

If you're uncomfortable with plaintext secrets, encrypt them (as end-to-end as possible) and require an out-of-band decryption key at the last possible moment.

It's like having a secure document viewing system... ultimately, someone will need to browse just enough of the plaintext version, or it's not a document viewing system.

fubarred··on Space cadet keyboard
Notice: caps lock is out of the way, as it should be.
fubarred··on The “What Are Monads?” Fallacy
There's a bigger issue: using computational and mathematical complexity that is confusing to large swaths of mere mortal coders. This is sadly why languages, to pick on some easy target religions like PHP and so on have proliferated.

Sure it's possible to reduce LoC and look clever with ever more complex representations of computational structures, but it's another thing to write supportable code that's straightforward to debug, improve and maintain.

If someone wants to use a "research" language in production and/or want perpetual job security, there are plenty of languages for those requirements too.

(There's never a perfect Turing power language for anything, only better fits than others. Clarity for a new-hire reader should be most valued goal after functionality.)

fubarred··on A relatively simple fix that could prevent planes from disappearing
The most terrible reality is that the capability for tracking virtually all long-haul airframes (99.999%) already exists. It's called Inmarsat FANS-1/a ADS-C, which is now being offered to all airlines for free, post-MH370. It was present on the MH370 airframe (but for a cost), and could've located it to within tens of square miles instead of millions.

http://www.inmarsat.com/news/inmarsat-provide-free-global-ai...

http://www51.honeywell.com/aero/common/documents/FMS_DirectT...

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~cjr/CPDLC.htm

fubarred··on The 10 Most Edited Pages of Wikipedia in 2014
It would also be interesting to have the "top X most corporate-spin control pretending to be content but got caught reverting and adding edits" pages.
fubarred··on Something New in Garage Doors
Some of these designed wouldn't work in places like San Francisco if you own a vehicle that just barely fits into said garage. The entire interior/exterior operating clearance would need to be available and measured carefully.
fubarred··on Something New in Garage Doors
It's only when someone gets killed from something is anything done and then it's quickly forgotten back to the regular pattern.
fubarred··on Something New in Garage Doors
Loud, yes. Extension springs are still found on single-piece doors.
fubarred··on Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
Wow, sounds like the typical heres-the-teaching-plan-dont-ask-me-why, NCBLA, spoon-fed idiocracy. Back in highschool, thankfully we had one honest guy that just let us do whatever the fuck we wanted (which was pretty awesome).

All of the borderline-useless hazing you might have missed at a "top 50" school (one of the UC's):

    - Java to MIPS asm compiler in both Java and C++
    - Reimplement the major parts of OpenGL pipeline in C++
    - Hack on MINIX 2.x kernel, reimplement some *NIX tools
    - Gates up superscalar, pipelined, branch-predicting, microcoded integer CPU in VHDL and its own microcode language
    - Caching HTTP/1.0 proxy server
    - Interface various hardware to PICs, FPGAs and PALs
    - Problem sets upon problem sets, ad infinitum
    - Coed dorms where the doors are always open, but you won't have time for more than just hooking up
    - Sleepless all-nighters (2-5 per week) and all the junk food your meal plan can afford (because you won't have time to cook)
fubarred··on Show HN: A curated list of remote jobs
Github is highly remote-able.
fubarred··on Something New in Garage Doors
If there were such a thing, it had fatigued and/or rusted to such a degree that it clearly failed to contain sufficiency energy because a ceiling tile had to be replaced and the ceiling above that had to be patched. (Cheap rental house with ancient crap.) Don't rely on safety properties as a first-line defense, they are a fail-safe, and sometimes they just don't work.
fubarred··on Something New in Garage Doors
No, you had something entirely different so don't try to trivialize something you don't know anything about. Ours fired through the ceiling of the garage and gouged the underside of the roof sheeting because of how the door and springs was engineered. It went off like a slingshot and sent metal fragments upwards at high velocity. Also, they looked like they were from the early 1970's and the springs separated completely as a result of metal fatigue into 3 segments plus some other bits of shrapnel here and there.
fubarred··on Show HN: Lux, a linux kernel updater preferring Git to patching
I guess if you really, really had a use case for it, binary patching using one of the open-source solutions might be feasible. Otherwise, HA load-balancing FTW.
fubarred··on Ask HN: Should I report my main competitor for PCI Violations?
https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/why_...

(unofficial site) http://www.pcistandard.com/card-association-fines/

fubarred··on Ask HN: Should I report my main competitor for PCI Violations?
Anonymously! Don't make yourself a target!
fubarred··on Show HN: Lux, a linux kernel updater preferring Git to patching
So not kgraft, kpatch, etc. http://www.infoworld.com/article/2851028/linux/four-ways-lin...

Looks DKMS for the kernel itself.

fubarred··on Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
The latter realized the futility of it sooner than the former.
fubarred··on Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
It only matters to people that enjoy taking tests and those that can't be bothered to understand what being successful at a job requires.
fubarred··on F-35 stealth jet 'will not be able to fire its guns until 2019'
It looks like it's just a 5 barrel General Dynamics GAU-12/U.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-12_Equalizer#Specification...

^- Same video as YT

What's delay in integrating this into the platform? Haven't they done this several times before? Or is this a low priority item (how often do jets use their cannons)?

fubarred··on F-35 stealth jet 'will not be able to fire its guns until 2019'
Bonus hilarity is presence of the Jump to Conclusions Mat guy.
fubarred··on Something New in Garage Doors
Think they would ship to the US? (Unless there are fire/safety/code regulations regarding garage doors.)
fubarred··on Something New in Garage Doors
The springs of most conventional garage doors are a hazard to life (if you have a two-story bldg) and property. When the garage door is down, those suckers are cocked like a pistol with the weight of said door. And when one or more fails spontaneously, they will follow Newton's third law and shoot upwards into whatever or whomever happens to be there, with metal shrapnel going in either direction. I've had to repair a garage ceiling and replace all of those springs (once one spring goes, all of them should be changed.)
fubarred··on Something New in Garage Doors
Neat. Seems some folks have their hangar setup as an upscale loft as well. (Apart from "ranch" homes that share a common landing strip.)
fubarred··on Corrupted initramfs during boot (2012)
Sounded like too small of a debouncing cap/s on/around the nic, undersized vcc/gnd planes and/or too small of a power supply to handle peak current.

The other thing, once a system is booting, is always make sure RAM, storage, CPU and nics are all working, so test those individually: memtest86+ (or rowhammer or latest memtest86 non-plus), iozone, prime95, iperf or their equivalents.

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