nicklaforge's comments

shellshock_detector.lua seems to let this more obscure exploit slip by, undetected:

http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q3/696 http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q3/734

> slow down on Rust news until it's a little closer to usable?

"Usable" is an ironic way to spell "hackable".

You mentioned the words "news" and "use". Does the H in HN still stand for something? Maybe HN stands for "HTTP News"?

don't ever read beyond mass media headlines for HEP; just go here instead: http://profmattstrassler.com

You found his political opinions (!) misguided, so you are celebrating the fact that he's gone? Annonymous post or not, you should feel like a cruel dunce for even imagining it.

I do feel sorry for those who know you. Surely there's more to life than feeling good about yourself because you were able to call your ideological opponent a racist / conservative (yawn). Although, it may be difficult to fathom that the man was less one dimensional (and less cruel) than you seem to be.

Uriel was a good man, who sure as hell wouldn't have been seen posting anything like you did in response to another human's death.

I have to laugh at hose of you who fault Rob for following anything but the most mainstream recourse in resolving his crisis as proof that he's to blame, didn't do his homework, etc. Consider this: despite the (somewhat strange, in my mind) phenomenon of various Plan 9 alumni (and Google employees in general) using Macbooks for daily use, the fact that these folks are proven experts at bringing up ports of their own research operating systems on new machines from just their hardware documentation should key you into the fact that these Apple products were purchased with all the expectations of an appliance! I.e., not things to be mucked around with, but the result of a commercial transaction that ought to be judged on its capacity to perform as advertised and supported if necessary.

Getting a closed, commercial product (with a baroque unix base) to bend over backwards to perform basic functions like backup and installation is not a Plan 9 user's of fun. I would hazard a guess that the greatest reason Rob got burned could have been the naive expectation that programs will perform their designated task simply and correctly?

Considering Apple's user-base, on the other hand, idiot proofing the system seems to be a much higher priority. Which is the main reason why I still don't understand why Plan 9 people can stand to use Macs.

"Knot theory" always concerns strings that are joined at either end to form a closed circuit. Regardless, I don't think abstract mathematics does much for you when the problem is so simple and 'practical'.

Every 'news' site that comes to mind aggregates content in some way, and by your comments, you seem to be after news aggregation. On the other hand, I think the good news sites also have a sizable membership that shares a certain expertise. For Slashdot, it might have been Linux. For this site, it seems to be web start-ups. Yet, even people like me, with no overpowering interest in web start-up news (though I'll admit to having worked for one), still find a subset of the discussion of interest, and I'm sure this is a side effect of the high level of discourse.

My point here is that it's difficult to maintain that core membership purely through aggregation instead shared interests and expertise. In other words, the quality really comes from the people involved and not the technology for aggregating external links. For me, my go to discussion group was 9fans, which is pretty quiet these days. If I really wanted to find interesting things to talk about, I'd seek out those involved individuals, who of course haven't gone away, but just moved on to other things. I get the feeling that in the age of Twitter and Google Plus, news will become centered around people, and that aggregation sites will go the way of phpBB.

Please, somebody: I'm privy to know as well. I've just visited hacker news asking myself the same. Slashdot by now has become long in the tooth several times over and is ostentatiously geeky and reeks of conspiracy theory; Reddit lacks the level of discourse here. OSNews? Hackaday? 9fans? Lambda-the-ultimate? All are much closer to Hacker News at its greatest, the last probably even greater, but they all require too much baggage of the reader in the way of commitment and even specialization.

Perhaps I'm in the minority regarding my next quibble, but: I don't care about web start-ups. At least, I'm not employed by one, and I don't care to know exactly what Jeff Bezos is thinking __right now__. I like Hacker News for its capacity to impart that fascinating tidbit about technological advances, exciting advances in physics and science, and DIY articles from embedded projects to mathematical nuggets.

Since its decline as an icon, Slashdot is much less interesting than the news section that begins each issue of Science magazine, or any issue of Physics Today. What about Phys.org? Why does it have such a terrible reputation here? Admittedly, the comments were why I always went to Slashdot, and Phys.org comments seem to be made mostly by amateurs and spectators with too much time on their hands (think: armchair Star Trek physicists).

I'm not the only one feeling this way. See these Google Plus posts: https://plus.google.com/116810148281701144465/posts/h95SSbSJ... https://plus.google.com/114765095157367281222/posts/VfmNKPBd...

I believe that Rob Pike has made the point that garbage collection is required to make the concurrency model practicable. Being Go's foremost raison d'être, its use of CSP should not be ignored or abused, or you won't be getting much out of Go. That's not to say that low-latency garbage collection isn't interesting, or that Go's authors haven't been around this block. (You might be interested to read http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/concurrent_gc/concurrent_gc.pdf )