Hacker News: great_wubwub

New comment by great_wubwub in "How far can you go with IX Route Servers only?"

great_wubwub — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:29:31 +0000

Calling these Magna not Manga is a miss.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines"

great_wubwub — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:57:15 +0000

> this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site

Not true. Cloudflare can't block only a single web site _by IP address_ but that's pretty common with IPv4, The same is true of Fastly and AWS and I'd be shocked if there's a mass-market CDN out there that has a unique IPv4 address per customer.

They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).

New comment by great_wubwub in "Eat Real Food"

great_wubwub — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:41:47 +0000

No, what I meant was "haven't we been basically ignoring science on nutrition since the 80s?" I think we have.

For those who don't believe me - go find some old family photos of your parents or grandparents, whichever generation would have been young adults in the 1960s or 1970s. Compare them to people of the same age born any time after, say, 1990. Nothing come of one sample, but people from the previous generation just weren't fat in their 20s like we are.

Yes, there's more to it than that. But food is a big part of it.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Eat Real Food"

great_wubwub — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:54:42 +0000

The man is stark raving bonkers mad in that head-in-the-sand, if-I-ignore-science-then-it-can't-hurt-me way but (and OMG I think I'm going to throw up a little in my mouth even coming close to agreeing with anything that come out of his mouth) isn't that basically what we've been doing with dietary guidelines since the 80s?

Like, don't get me wrong, RFK will kill N*10^5, N*10^6 people with his outlook on diseases, but....how many people have had their lives wrecked by "fat makes you fat", "ketchup is a vegetable", and "eat a balanced diet composed entirely of sausage, flour, and sugar"? As a GenXer I've been dealing with the echoes of this for a long time.

New comment by great_wubwub in "An Implementation of J (1992)"

great_wubwub — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 03:17:31 +0000

Me too, but

> This document describes an implementation of J in C. The reader is assumed to be familiar with J and C.

New comment by great_wubwub in "OMSCS Open Courseware"

great_wubwub — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 22:07:05 +0000

I have not applied to this program but I've gone through a part-time MBA. I doubt that an online program for working professionals is as rigorous about references as, say, undergrad admission to an Ivy League program or Oxford or Hogwarts or something. Just get a couple of coworkers with a similar advanced degree to write something that says "this person exists and I think they can handle the load" and you'll be fine. Remember that college is a business; if you look like you can both handle the program and pay for it, they'll let you in.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Transparent leadership beats servant leadership"

great_wubwub — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:05:29 +0000

I once worked for a guy who'd obviously seen the term Servant Leadership on a bumper sticker somewhere and figured that meant he was the leader and we were the servants. Worst boss I ever had, and I've been doing this 30+ years and have had a bunch of bad bosses.

Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?

New comment by great_wubwub in "The Lucas-Lehmer Prime Number Test"

great_wubwub — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 22:13:07 +0000

/r/whoosh

New comment by great_wubwub in "Monotype font licencing shake-down"

great_wubwub — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:45:08 +0000

I think there was a single web page that summarized all of that. IIRC it was extremely well written and gave me warm happy fuzzy schadenfreude vibes.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Monotype font licencing shake-down"

great_wubwub — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 01:34:12 +0000

This reminds me of the Blue Jeans Cable / Monster Cable shakedown nonsense.

https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/index.htm

I wish I could find the original writeup from Blue Jeans, it was frickin' magnificent.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy"

great_wubwub — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:12:45 +0000

> 5. Top secret information

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

New comment by great_wubwub in "Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy"

great_wubwub — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:36:10 +0000

> Trust, security, and privacy guide every product and decision we make except ones that involve money.

-- openai, probably.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k"

great_wubwub — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 11:57:55 +0000

PTP is more precise so it's much harder to synchronize over long distances. Even in data centers it benefits from hop-by-hop participation from the routers involved.

New comment by great_wubwub in "BGP zombies and excessive path hunting"

great_wubwub — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:59:29 +0000

> Things get more interesting when AS64510 signals for 2001:db8::/48 to be withdrawn by Cloudflare (AS13335)

Typo - shouldn't that be AS64511?

...and...

> The MRAI specifies the minimum amount of time ... between each BGP advertisement update.

Each update _per prefix, per peer_. RFC4271 sec.9.2.1.1 says

--- [MRAI] determines the minimum amount of time that must elapse between an advertisement and/or withdrawal of routes to a particular destination by a BGP speaker to a peer ---

New comment by great_wubwub in "Amazon Rivian electric delivery vans arrive in Canada"

great_wubwub — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:46:51 +0000

> Being associated with delivery vans would dilute the Tesla brand

Counterpoint: Mercedes-Benz fleet vans.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Replacement.ai"

great_wubwub — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 19:23:31 +0000

> It's bog standard for employees...in the UK and for multinationals including American companies

^^^ that's the thing. Contracts are by country, not by company ownership.

I worked for an F100 multinational US-based company for many years. My coworkers in the EU (including the UK at the time) got contracts. A buddy who was a bona fide rock star in the US got one. I know VPs got them.

I got nothing, as did the vast, vast majority of my US-based friends. And while I'm not a rock star, I'm pretty well known within my niche and am not a bottom-feeder. It really is as bleak as you might fear.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Replacement.ai"

great_wubwub — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 16:25:35 +0000

I'm not sure where you live, but employee contracts in the US are very rare in tech. Unions, execs, and rock stars - that's about it. The rest of us are at-will and disposable. Worker protections in the US are limited to "the machine can't eat more than two of your fingers per day" and "you can't work people more than 168 hours in a week".

New comment by great_wubwub in "Attention is a luxury good"

great_wubwub — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 20:22:55 +0000

> No product is even remotely for the consumer anymore, they’re all just minimal pretenses to try and advertise you and extract more of your attention and money.

This is a beautiful sentence.

I would add that under modern-day aggressive hyper-capitalism all attention can be translated to money, so it's all just products whose job is to get you to buy more products.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Modern Linux tools"

great_wubwub — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:30:23 +0000

I've been playing around with this over the years and this is what I put in my .rgrc:

--smart-case --no-messages --hidden --ignore-vcs

and then point to it with

.zshenv 3:export RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/.rgrc"

Not perfect and sometimes I reach for good old fashioned escaped \grep but most of the time it's fine.

New comment by great_wubwub in "An illustrated introduction to linear algebra"

great_wubwub — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 15:34:11 +0000

ooh, yeah, prime numbers is an even better idea.