thedufer (u/thedufer)

thedufer commented on The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024) predr.ag/blog/wifi-only-w... · Posted by u/epicalex

vghaisas · 14 days ago

I've collected a list of fun stories of this form and post them when this comes up:

- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt

- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...

- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...

thedufer · 14 days ago

> Can't log in when standing up

This reminds me of a recent issue I had. I had just gotten a new laptop from IT. While picking it up from them, I had generated myself a password, put it in my password manager on my phone, and then entered it twice to set it on the laptop. Everything worked great. But when I got back to my desk, the password didn't work! I tried a bunch of times, watched myself hit each key to eliminate typos, etc.

I went back to IT and they asked me to demonstrate. But this time it worked! I walked back to my desk, thoroughly embarrassed. But a couple hours later I had to log in again and once again could not.

After thinking about it for awhile, I realized that I was typing at IT while standing over a sitting-height desk. Sure enough, typing in that position fixed my issue. I carefully watched what I was doing this time - something about the exact layout of the keyboard and the weird angle I was typing at ensured that I was making a particular typo I typed in that position - just a single letter switched to another, every time. Sure enough, making that one substitution to my intended password got me in.

thedufer commented on Why I love OCaml (2023) mccd.space/posts/ocaml-th... · Posted by u/art-w

neonsunset · 3 months ago

> has an edge on some domains due to having unboxed types

If a language makes "unboxed types" a feature, a specific distinction, and has to sell "removing global lock" as something that is a massive breakthrough and not table stakes from 1.0, it can't possibly be compared to F# in favourable light.

thedufer · 3 months ago

OCaml predates multicore CPUs. Having a global lock was basically free at the time it was invented. It's totally crazy to dislike a language because the authors made a decision that was obviously correct at the time.

thedufer commented on I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars rameerez.com/send-this-ar... · Posted by u/sebnun

arcastroe · 3 months ago

hmm.. if you reduce latency from one second to a hundred milliseconds, could you celebrate that you've made it 10x faster, or would you have the same quibble there too?

Edit: Thinking about this some more: You could say you are saving 9x [of the new cost], and it would be a correct statement. I believe the error is assuming the reference frame is the previous cost vs the new cost, but since it is not specified, it could be either.

thedufer · 3 months ago

> if you reduce latency from one second to a hundred milliseconds, could you celebrate that you've made it 10x faster

Yes you can, because speed has units of inverse time and latency has units of time. So it could be correct to say that cutting latency to 1/10 of its original value is equivalent to making it 10x the original speed - that's how inverses work.

Savings are not, to my knowledge, measured in units of inverse dollars.

thedufer commented on Kerberoasting blog.cryptographyengineer... · Posted by u/feross

cybergreg · 5 months ago

Good overview of Kerberoasting, still a common attack chain. A couple things though: To obtain access to a service, you actually need to get a service ticket (TGS) from the KDC (Domain Controller) to authenticate to the service, not a TGT. The TGT is the first ticket acquired during authentication to the domain. In addition, the "salt" is not a true salt but a concatenation of the domain and principal name, so even worse. Active Directory (invented at MIT) supports RC4, AES128, and AES256 encryption types, however you can effectively disable RC4 via Group Policy. The reason RC4 is still supported is to support legacy systems. Many organizations use old software that only supports RC4. For example, I've run into many manufacturing and small businesses that have no choice but to use it and can't upgrade the software due to $$$. Anyway, good stuff! Shout out to Tim Medin, who published this back in 2014.

thedufer · 5 months ago

> you actually need to get a service ticket (TGS)

If we're being pedantic, TGS ("ticket granting server") is the service you get service tickets from. Service tickets are (occasionally) abbreviated ST, as you'd expect. The TGS is a logical part of the KDC, distinguished from the AS which grants TGTs.

thedufer commented on In a milestone for Manhattan, a pair of coyotes has made Central Park their home smithsonianmag.com/scienc... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

trhway · 7 months ago

It is in US:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/birds-win...

>a far cry from deaths due to cats.

No, they are about the same. The 3.5 billion is the top estimate similar to how 4 billion is top estimate for killed by cats. The lower estimates in both cases around 1 billion something.

thedufer · 7 months ago

That's an interesting update. I remain a bit skeptical based on the fact that the obvious sources I'd look to for this sort of thing haven't updated on that study (it seems to be https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1676/23-00045), and I'm not really able to evaluate it on my own. USFWS (https://www.fws.gov/story/threats-birds-collisions-buildings...) is citing the previous numbers, as is Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird%E2%80%93window_collisions).

FWIW 3.5 billion is not the top estimate, although I'm not sure how to interpret the way the estimate is stated ("annual mortality may be minimally 1.28 billion–3.46 billion or as high as 1.92 billion–5.19 billion"). What does it mean to have a range for each end of the range? The author only quotes the absolute lowest number from the study in press about it (see https://www.lehighvalleynews.com/environment-science/3-5-mil...), but maybe is just preferring to be conservative.

thedufer commented on In a milestone for Manhattan, a pair of coyotes has made Central Park their home smithsonianmag.com/scienc... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

trhway · 7 months ago

>You’re probably aware that in North America alone for all cats kill between 10 and 30 billion native birds and small mammals a year

and how many of those birds and mammals were old and ill and would be killed by other predators in similar situation in non-developed areas? Why didn't you specify that comparative number? May be because that would have shown that the cats are just doing the job of other predators pushed out by humans?

Btw, the cats kill up to 4 billion birds annually. At the same time 3.5 billion birds die hitting glass of the buildings. Cats kill old/ill. The birds hitting building aren't majority old/ill. Thus killings by cats are mostly beneficial to the bird species while glass buildings make tremendous damage to the bird species.

thedufer · 7 months ago

> At the same time 3.5 billion birds die hitting glass of the buildings.

Do you have a citation for this? Are you comparing North American cat deaths to worldwide building collisions? Estimates I'm seeing of North American center around 600 million, a far cry from deaths due to cats.

thedufer commented on Tell HN: Beware confidentiality agreements that act as lifetime non competes · Posted by u/throwarayes

kirubakaran · 8 months ago

It's funny how states like Washington are notorious for enforceable non-competes, to be "business friendly".

Meanwhile California bans non-competes, and its GDP is 4th largest in the world if it were a country!

"incumbent friendly" vs "startup friendly"

thedufer · 8 months ago

I'm not sure what conclusions you think we should draw from that. California's advantage over Washington is primarily one of size - Washington's GDP per capita is actually about 3% higher than California's. The most generous interpretation I can think of is that you're crediting the non-compete difference for California's far larger population, which is tenuous at best.

thedufer commented on The Missing 11th of the Month (2015) drhagen.com/blog/the-miss... · Posted by u/xk3

strogonoff · 8 months ago

The latent font designer in me balks at the thought of taking a typeface and intentionally making one character look more like another character.

Was it some technical constraint of the typewriter that caused “1” to become more like “l” come XX century?

thedufer · 8 months ago

Typewriter keys cost money, and dropping the 1 allowed them to drop a key without significantly affecting the use of it. As far as I can tell, that's effectively the entire rationale.

This wasn't meaningfully the case prior; the printing press would've just needed more copies of 'l' if they'd dropped the 1s, and letters weren't as significant a portion of the cost of the machine, anyway. And afterwards came computers, which need to distinguish between the characters even if they're displayed the same way.

thedufer commented on OxCaml - a set of extensions to the OCaml programming language. oxcaml.org/... · Posted by u/lairv

munchler · 8 months ago

> Because sum:int * product:int is a different type from product:int * sum:int, the use of a labeled tuple in this example prevents us from accidentally returning the pair in the wrong order, or mixing up the order of the initial values.

Hmm, I think I like F#'s anonymous records better than this. For example, {| product = 6; sum = 5 |}. The order of the fields doesn't matter, since the value is not a tuple.

thedufer · 8 months ago

Labeled tuples are effectively order-independent. Your implementation's order has to match your interface's order, but callers can destruct the labeled tuples in any order and the compiler will do the necessary reordering (just like it does for destructing records, or calling functions with labeled arguments). I don't think this is materially different from what you're describing in F#, except that labeled tuples don't allow labeling a single value (that is, there's no 1-tuple, which is also the case for normal tuples).

thedufer commented on Dotless Domains lab.avl.la/dotless/... · Posted by u/wibbily

Biganon · 9 months ago

The "correct" way would be to add a dot at the end

thedufer · 9 months ago

Why would that be more correct? A trailing dot indicates that a domain is fully-qualified, but that's not the issue here. The browser is trying to decide whether your query is a search string or a URL.

Also, a trailing dot would indicate the opposite of what we want - we're using single-label domains that only work if we can rely on search suffixes to qualify them.