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nbadg commented on Show HN: Anchor Relay – A faster, easier way to get Let's Encrypt certificates   anchor.dev/relay... · Posted by u/geemus
masfuerte · 16 days ago
If users delegate their DNS to you, what's stopping you issuing a certificate to yourself for their site?
nbadg · 16 days ago
Certificate transparency logs are likely the only realistic way, but you could make the same argument against your DNS provider. Trust has to start somewhere.

Whether or not something like this makes sense to you is probably a question of your personal threat model.

nbadg commented on MapLibre Tile: A next generation geospatial format optimized for rendering   arxiv.org/abs/2508.10791... · Posted by u/mtremmel
alexmuro · 16 days ago
This is interesting, is there a reference implementation that exists somewhere? Will there be a fork of tippecanoe that can encode these files or something different?
nbadg · 16 days ago
"As of January 2025, implementation has started for MapLibre GL JS and MapLibre Native." [1]

Github shows java, js, rust, and typescript folders, though I didn't poke any further beyond literally just looking at the folder names. [2]

[1] https://maplibre.org/roadmap/maplibre-tiles/

[2] https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-tile-spec

nbadg commented on Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big   eidel.io/exit-tax-leave-g... · Posted by u/olieidel
olieidel · a month ago
Yes, that's true, but the implementation is.. not very elegant.

In theory, the exit tax should ensure that Germany gets the taxes of the sale of your company. So, if you ever sold your company once you're no longer in Germany, Germany wouldn't get those taxes, so it charges you immediately once you leave Germany in a sort-of "virtual" sale.

This, of course, sucks tremendously because you actually haven't sold your company, and "normal" people don't have this sort of cash on hand.

Other countries have "smarter" exit tax implementations and only charge you when you actually sell your company in the future. I think that's pretty fair. It also doesn't hinder people from leaving the country.

nbadg · a month ago
As an immigrant to Germany, I've often made the observation that Germany frequently has a really severe implementation problem. So I'm generally very sympathetic to that idea.

That being said, I'm not entirely sure that's the case here, and this is often also brought up in the context of strengthening the inheritance tax in Germany. In both the inheritance tax and the exit tax, the inherent applicability conditions are such that the end result is that there simply aren't that many people in a situation where it actually has a measurable impact. For the exit tax, you'd need to find people who 1. want to leave Germany, 2. already started a company here, 3. that company grew large enough that the Wegzugssteuer would really be a burden, and 4. that don't have enough liquidity, or cannot raise enough liquidity by selling some of their ownership, to cover the tax. That ends up being a really small number of people, which always eases questions about the reasonability (Angemessenheit) of the law. And in the context of inheritance tax, there's the added point that there's a floor to its application.

As another commenter mentioned, even for those situations where the exit tax actually is burdensome, just as with inheritance tax, there are two really simple solutions: first, create a floor for the minimum valuation by which the exit tax is actually assessed, and second, allow you to "sell" shares to the German government as a means of paying the tax, turning the Finanzamt into a silent shareholder in the company. I think both of these would be substantial improvements to both the German exit tax and inheritance tax.

nbadg commented on Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big   eidel.io/exit-tax-leave-g... · Posted by u/olieidel
bigstrat2003 · a month ago
Presumably you paid for that infrastructure in the form of taxes while you did business in the country. Why, then, should the state have additional claims on the money you made? Were the taxes they collected already not enough?
nbadg · a month ago
That's not what the exit tax is, though. The German exit tax is effectively just a way to give the existing capital gains tax a way to tax unrealized gains when you leave the country, to prevent you from dodging taxes on capital gains by simply leaving the country.

In other words, it's not an additional claim. It's simply an enforcement mechanism for the money you already hypothetically owe.

nbadg commented on Puerto Rico's Solar Microgrids Beat Blackout   spectrum.ieee.org/puerto-... · Posted by u/ohjeez
cinntaile · 2 months ago
That's the case everywhere in the world, it's not a tech issue. The tech exists.
nbadg · 2 months ago
The technology certainly exists, though some of it is pretty new and not all of it is mature or commoditized (particularly in the context of high levels of penetration of variable renewables on the grid).

That being said, politics aren't the only reason why it might not be deployed. Capitalization issues, for one, are also common. Additionally, you have to make a judgement call about what you consider included in "politics" -- for example, does corruption count?

nbadg commented on Writing a postmortem: an interview exercise I like (2017)   danielputtick.com/writing... · Posted by u/wonger_
spankibalt · 3 months ago
> The “blameless” aspect is crucial: a good postmortem avoids conclusions like “Dan wrote a bug and it brought down our service” and instead says “Dan wrote a bug and it brought down the service: we need to improve our testing and deployment processes to make sure that they catch this category of bugs in the future.”

The offending dog's name is still there...

nbadg · 3 months ago
As it should be. The purpose of post mortems is to prevent future incidents, and obscuring the facts of what happened by removing names detracts substantially from clarity of understanding and, therefore, defeats the point.

There are two important things that make something blameless: phrasing and culture. If you've phrased something in such a way that there's a clear value judgement, your phrasing isn't blameless. And if you're writing in a culture where, no matter how precise the phrasing, the simple existence of a name will make people blame them for what happened, then your culture isn't blameless. Both are required for a blameless post mortem.

Also, think of it this way: no amount of anonymization will prevent the people involved from knowing who did what. If they're privately blaming the person for the incident, it's still not a blameless post mortem.

No amount of verbal wallpaper can fix a broken culture.

nbadg commented on A proposal to restrict sites from accessing a users’ local network   github.com/explainers-by-... · Posted by u/doener
xp84 · 3 months ago
Doesn't CORS just restrict whether the webpage JS context gets to see the response of the target request? The request itself happens anyway, right?

So the attack vector that I can imagine is that JS on the browser can issue a specially crafted request to a vulnerable printer or whatever that triggers arbitrary code execution on that other device. That code might be sufficient to cause the printer to carry out your evil task, including making an outbound connection to the attacker's server. Of course, the webpage would not be able to discover whether it was successful, but that may not be important.

nbadg · 3 months ago
Or simply perform a timing attack as a way of exploring the local network, though I'm not sure if the browser implementation immediately returns after the request is made (ex fetch API is called) but before the response is received. Presumably it doesn't, which would expose it to timing attacks as a way of exploring the network.
nbadg commented on Ovld – Efficient and featureful multiple dispatch for Python   github.com/breuleux/ovld... · Posted by u/breuleux
paddy_m · 3 months ago
This looks really cool. I get multiple dispatch, multi methods, and CLOS method specialization confused in my head. I can understand what this does... But when do you use it.

Can people list some times when they actually used multimethods to solve a real problem? How did it work out? Would you do it again?

nbadg · 3 months ago
Also, dependent types, IE value-based dispatch. Which can be incredibly useful when dealing with enums. That alone is enough to make me curious to try it!
nbadg commented on Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android   holdtherobot.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/mikenew
nbadg · 4 months ago
As far as I'm aware, the proposed mechanisms for this have to do with the distance to the focus point -- in other words, the fact that the display is close, not that it's a display. The virtual distance to the display, and hence your eyes' focal distance, is definitely something you can change in VR, and presumably also AR, so I think this would actually presumably be better, wouldn't it?
nbadg commented on The future of solar doesn't track the sun   terraformindustries.wordp... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
Calwestjobs · 4 months ago
i used standard chain link fence on top of my small greenhouse and it works even with such big "holes", no mechanism, just manual labor but needs good forecast which can be issue.
nbadg · 4 months ago
Chain link fence is a really clever solution!

u/nbadg

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