The 500-mile email story seems to be the Hacker News equivalent to Reddit's SR-71 speed check story [1]. It keeps coming back again and again because everybody loves it.
> you can't trust libraries blindly, even one of the most used and broadly adopted ones
There is a corollary to development and debugging. When things break in mysterious ways, we tend to go through a familiar song and dance. As experience, skills and even personal networks grow, we can find ourselves diving ever further in the following chain.
1. "It must be in my code." -- hours of debugging
2. "Okay, it must be somewhere in our codebase." -- days of intense debugging and code spelunking
3. "It HAS TO be in the third party libraries" -- days of issue tracker excavations and never-before-enabled profiling runs
4. "It can't possibly be in stdlib..." -- more of the same, but now profiling the core runtime libraries
5. "Please let this not be a compiler bug" -- you become intensely familiar with mailing list archives
6. "I will not debug drivers. I will not debug drivers. I will not debug drivers."
7. "I don't even know anyone who could help me figure out the kernel innards."
8. "NOBODY understands filesystems!"
9. "What do you mean 'firmware edge case'?"
And the final stage, the one I have witnessed only one person ever achieve:
10. "Where is my chip lab grade oscilloscope?"
Apart from bullheadedness, this chain also highlights another trait of a good developer. Humility.
It happens, but usually on traffic passing through the UK from europe on it's way to USA, and I don't know the intricacies of how it works but it doesn't downgrade high profile ports/IPs (like google, facebook).
in my case it was a IRC server which was built identically to another 2 nodes in other parts of the world- When I looked into why I found no good reason so I dug in to it and was presented with a GCHQ/NSA project called "Tempora".
I ran a bunch of tests using the popular `openvpn` software suite and a bunch of VPS providers who were cheap enough (tilaa, vultr, linode and AWS) and the common trend was exactly what I described.
If I pinned the ciphers then the data would not be tampered, if I allowed a weaker cipher then my "response" would say the server was only capable of TLS1.0 despite me connecting to the same server minutes earlier on a different port with TLS1.2.
I will do a write-up on this and submit to HN as I assume this is still in place and all references to what I describe seem to have been removed from google.
I'm beginning to feel like one of those tin-foil hat people since I spent considerable time looking at documents surrounding this before and it's just vanished. :(
I add the name of whomever I'm mailing whenever I enter my address, like "cryptarch+microsoft@gmail.com".
If they remove the "+microsoft" portion mailing me, that email is sent to my spambox and reported to spamcop, because I did not sign up with that address; the address I signed up with has the +etc infix.
Eventually I figure companies will get wise to this and I'll have to set up my own server which does the same trick with an underscore instead of the "+" sign.
Haha. Looks like the punch bowl is empty. Somebody make another round of kool-aid!
You know, I've heard this type of irritating comment so many times over the years. I've been on HN since day two of its public launch, back when it was called Startup News. It was a magical time, mostly because everyone was universally supportive. This isn't a rose-tinted view of the past, or selective memory. It was the reason I was blown away by this internet community.
The cynical comments would pop up on Reddit, mostly from pg's essay posts. I couldn't understand their point of view. Were they jealous? Did they care so much about what other people were doing with their lives that they would choose to mock them publicly? I didn't know, but I felt lucky that HN wasn't one of those places.
Then as HN grew, it started here. Mostly people remained supportive, but there was this undercurrent of negativity that kept creeping in, proportional to HN's size.
Now I wake up nearly a decade later to see many people who share your ideas, that only fools would dare gamble their youth, that taking anything but the safe and rational route is "drinking kool-aid," that pg's essays are manipulative, and so on.
And so I realize that YC founders now have their own community, separate from HN, and the electrifying experience of the early days of Startup News is no longer present.
But I was there. I saw it, I flew to SF and met a bunch of YC co's, I saw their optimism and courage, and you could not be more mistaken about the type of people they are.
I'm not saying that it's all wonderful, or that they're giants, or that there are "normal" people and "special" people interested in startups. I'm saying that startups are started by regular people, like you and me, and that without a supportive community, it's incredibly difficult to start anything.
I didn't even care about getting rich. I just wanted to help somehow. But I'm just happy that their community grows and grows and becomes stronger in spite of your negative voice, and all the negative voices across the internet. It seems like proof that you have to not care what people think to get things done.
`security.ssl.treat_unsafe_negotiation_as_broken` to `true` and `security.ssl.require_safe_negotiation` to `true` also. Refusing insecure algorithms (`security.ssl3.<alg>`) might also be smart.
I don't know how this website actually works, but if I wanted to make a website like this, here's how I would do it.
The first thing on my mind would be avoiding detection. You can't spin up 5 DO droplets and do your work from there-- every IP you use needs to be a residential IP, and you need thousands of IP addresses. You could go to the trouble of building your own botnet, but that's illegal and very difficult.
Luckily, there's an application called Hola that has convinced 20 million people to willingly join their botnet, and you can buy yourself access to it right here: https://luminati.io .
You'd think that would be the hardest part, but that service means it's the easy part. Now I'd need to go learn PhantomJS and start creating accounts-- being sure to keep each account appearing at a particular IP address. The hardest part is generating some credibility for these accounts. They should always look like they're active-- so I'd be sure to have each account load far more posts than they vote on, and I would upvote plenty of things that I wasn't paid to upvote. Just to generate some randomness.
But that only gets me part of the way there-- these accounts would also need to contribute. My first thought is that you could just scan for reposts in the default subreddits and then repost popular top-level comments from the previous post. I've actually seen this pointed out a few times on reddit. With the amount of comments reddit gets, they probably don't have the resources to detect duplicates.
Hackernews would be significantly harder-- I have no idea how you could generate relevant comments without doing it by hand. That's my guess as to what they're doing.
I love this thing you've made. I've been exploring the world with radio since long before the WWW was invented. I used to carry a shortwave radio with me wherever I traveled back in the 1970s and 80s. I would lie there in the dark in Japan listening to the broadcasts out of North Korean screeching about the "Great Leader" (Kim Il-sung) or in Thailand listening to the Khmer Rouge (whom I couldn't understand, but I knew who controlled Cambodian broadcasts) or in the UK listening to Africans (not putting on a show for Americans but putting on a show for their own people) or on the East Coast of the US listening to callers to talk shows in the UK arguing about local issues. What do people there talk about amongst themselves? What do they like to listen to? What does such-and-such language sound like? I loved exploring the world this way.
My kids don't understand how magical the world is today--how they can do what cost me so much money and time and effort by doing nothing more than poking a few icons on their phones. These things don't mean much to them; they were born into a world where magic was just daily life.
But, things like this are still magical to me, even though I've been a developer for decades. Somehow, even knowing how the "tricks" are done, I still think it's magic. Just tonight, I fed YouTube into my HD TV and watched as someone walked around my old neighborhood in Tokyo with a 4K camera. Then again where I used to live in Seoul. And a couple of days ago, I found something for my father out in the desert a thousand miles from here by using Google Street View to "drive" down a remote highway, looking around until I found it. And now I can just spin the globe and point at a dot to hear a broadcast coming from that location. I've been listening to online broadcasts for 20 years using lists of online radio stations, but this is so much nicer.
I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who sees all of this as real-world magic.
Building a container from scratch in Go (Liz Rice) @ Container Camp 2016 -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utf-A4rODH8
What's a container really let's write one in go from sctach (Liz Rice) @ Golang UK Conference -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPuvDm8IC-4
Cgroups, Namespaces and beyond: What are containers made from (Jerome Petazzoni) @ DockerCon 2015 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK5i-N34im8
Building Containers in Pure Bash and C (Jessica Frazelle) @ ContainerSummit 2016: https://containersummit.io/events/nyc-2016/videos/building-c...
First two are basically the same talk, but it doesn't hurt to hear the same ideas more than once.