Hacker News Reader

rpnson Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth

If they're someone else's words, they'll put them in quotation marks. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

rpnson Another GitHub outage in the same day

Not quite, that one is an earlier outage while this one started at (or a bit before) 19:01 UTC.

The history for today is a bit of a mess really: https://www.githubstatus.com/history

rpnson Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help

This is what the Windows Vista/7-era UX guidelines say/said on on the matter:

Consider providing menu item icons for:

- The most commonly used menu items.

- Menu items whose icon is standard and well known.

- Menu items whose icon well illustrates what the command does.

If you use icons, don't feel obligated to provide them for all menu items. Cryptic icons aren't helpful, create visual clutter, and prevent users from focusing on the important menu items.

From: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-...

rpnson Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

There is a bit more detail on these pages:

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

No full detail though. Having said that, the second link is particularly interesting as it goes though various companies with comments about each.

rpnson Intel BE200 WiFi 7 cards locked to 14th gen CPU and Z790 chipset

I think there is something going on, as the BE200 is E keyed rather than A+E keyed like the AX210. It physically won't fit in the slot in my AMD laptop where I previously installed an AX210.

rpnson Recover lost text by coredumping Firefox

You can reopen closed tabs and windows from the History menu. It will restore the state of forms, so that form state is retained somewhere (presumably memory).

rpnson UK’s NHS Covid-19 App

FWIW, as the comment in the source hints at, it's needed for Bluetooth low energy scanning: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/blue...

rpnson Raspberry Pi Opens First High Street Store in Cambridge

Traditionally (in the UK), it was reserved for large, varied shops like department stores. However, the American usage to mean any shop has certainly been spreading in business-speak for a fair while.

From the OED (the entry has not been updated recently):

> Chiefly N. Amer. and elsewhere outside the U.K. In early use, a shop on a large scale, and dealing in a great variety of articles (see quot. 18082). Now, equivalent to the British use of shop n. 3.

> The use of the word in this sense has not become common in the U.K. except in Comb., as chain store n. at chain n. Compounds 3, department store n. at department n. 5 (see under the first elements), store detective n. at Compounds 1d(a), in which it still refers to a large shop.

rpnson Kernel Side-Channel Attacks

The two knowledge base articles linked are also interesting:

Speculative Execution Exploit Performance Impacts - Describing the performance impacts to security patches for CVE-2017-5754 CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715

https://access.redhat.com/articles/3307751

Controlling the Performance Impact of Microcode and Security Patches for CVE-2017-5754 CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Tunables

https://access.redhat.com/articles/3311301

rpnson Intel Responds to Security Research Findings

It comes across as fairly defensive. Presumably the statement was hastily put together, but it's not really the tone you want to strike when you have a lot of worried customers wondering what is going on.

> Intel believes its products are the most secure in the world and that, with the support of its partners, the current solutions to this issue provide the best possible security for its customers.

A rather bizarre statement of nothingness, and also an odd thing to say in a statement that just named AMD and ARM.

> Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.

It's interesting to note what it doesn't say – as it would seem to imply that for some workloads the performance impact will be significant.

rpnson Linux page table isolation is not needed on AMD processors

Slightly better link: https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10133447/

rpnson Update: Looking Glass Add-On

It required turning on via an about:config preference, the code on GitHub seems to have changed since then for the separately installed version.

If you look into the repo history you can see what it was doing before:

https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr/blob/21ff53d2d5baab591d2...

rpnson It is easy to expose users' secret web habits, say researchers

I don't think you'll find 'easy' as a definition of trivial in a mainstream dictionary (rather things like 'of little value or importance'). It probably is just computing jargon, though I recall it being used when studying mathematics and meaning 'self-evident' (e.g. a trivial solution).