codesections's comments

codesections | 2 months ago | on: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

> At some point you stop being a passenger and start being cargo.

It’s much worse than that – FedEx would never treat cargo like that. If they took cargo further away from its destination than it started and then left it there for the customer to sort out, that would break so many SLAs …

codesections | 1 year ago | on: You Don’t Know Jack about Bandwidth

How does OpenWRT fair on these metrics? Does it count as a "debloted router" is the sense used in TFA? Or is additional software above and beyond the core OpenWRT system needed to handle congestion properly?

codesections | 1 year ago | on: International Reply Coupon

Quoting for context:

“ In 1920, Charles Ponzi made use of the idea that profit could be made by taking advantage of the differing postal rates in different countries to buy IRCs cheaply in one country and exchange them for stamps of a higher value in another country. His attempts to raise money for this venture became instead the fraudulent Ponzi scheme.[24] In practice, the overhead on buying and selling large numbers of the very low-value IRCs precluded any profitability. The selling price and exchange value in stamps in each country have been adjusted to some extent to remove some of the potential for profit, but ongoing fluctuations in currency value and exchange rates make it impossible to achieve this completely, as long as stamps represent a specific currency value, instead of acting as vouchers granting specific postal services, devoid of currency nomination.[25]”

codesections | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: How does Hacker News avoid (successful) DDoS attacks?

Yeah, I thought of that. But (especially given political polarization) I would expect that there'd be at least someone with an axe to grind and the necessary technical skills. I mean, there's certainly no shortage of criticism of Hacker News/some HN moderation actions even on HN (or "the orange site" as it's known in some circles).

codesections | 3 years ago | on: Overlapping markup

If I'm understanding you correctly, in that model a Paragraph should have a parent Page (and there should be a clear answer to the question "what page is this paragraph on?"). Is that correct? If so, that doesn't match how most paginated texts are formatted, where paragraphs frequently start on one page but finish on another

codesections | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Technical forums that are not dominated by pedantry?

Find small communities.

In my experience, everything you said is 100% true -- once groups get big enough. But each of those points is, equally, 100% false for small groups.

For example, the Raku community is fairly small, so the r/rakulang subreddit is friendly. For that matter, even the [raku] StackOverflow tag is friendly! Last I checked, the same was true of the corresponding Rust tags, though I know they've grown a lot since I was a regular there.

codesections | 3 years ago | on: Elon’s Out

> This is an appeal to authority that is not valid

I'm open to that criticism; I'm typically pretty skeptical of appeals to authority myself.

But to be clear: the appeal to authority I'm making isn't "legal opinion of a lawyer" (I agree that's very weak) but rather "opinion on corporate law by a Wachtell attorney who practiced corporate law" (Wachtell is probably the best corporate law firm in the world, and clearly in the top handful)

codesections | 3 years ago | on: Elon’s Out

> This is such an absurd thing [for Matt Levine, a former 3rd Circuit clerk, Yale Law grad, and Wachtell M&A attorney] to say it's hard to find a way to charitably respond.

If your interpretation of the post suggests that a highly qualified attorney is getting the basics of US law absurdly incorrect, you might want to reconsider whether you're understanding the intended meaning.

(Here, Levine is making a specific claim about the remedies that the Delaware chancellory court typically employs, not about the authority of US courts)

codesections | 3 years ago | on: Detecting unauthorized physical access with beans, lentils and colored rice (2021)

> The other thing that comes to mind would be quantum systems that can only be measured once. Unfortunately I think that practically you would need a system that is "only twice" so that it can be compared, but I have this sense that anything that can be measured twice can be measured 3 times.

Just spitballing, but you could do it with a "once only" system if you could generate it reliabilly/deterministically enough that you don't need to measure it post-generation

codesections | 3 years ago | on: The Victim Cloud: Gullibility in the golden age of scams

> From banking law about 10 years back now, I would expect that the bank would be on the hook for Deborah's transfers in the first story. … I would have taken that case if I were a plaintiff's lawyer.

I disagree, for two reasons. First, an outside-view argument: lawyers who currently practice in that field apparently disagree:

> Deborah reached out to more than thirty attorneys. Only one called her back. Deborah’s eldest brother consulted another, who called her situation “a terminal case.” “There’s no life here,” he said. Her claim was dying, if not already dead.

Second, on the merits: most of the fraud protections have requirements that the defrauded customer notify the bank promptly (either after the fraudulent transfer or after the next bank statement). See, e.g. [0]. It looks like that didn't happen here.

[0] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/100...

codesections | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

Running `feh` in an ssh session (or other terminal session without a graphical display) will print

    "Can't open X display. It *is* running, yeah?"
That's not quite an insult, but seems to be the in the same spirit
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