Hacker News: mattstreet

New comment by mattstreet in "Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)"

mattstreet — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 20:59:13 +0000

"I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor"

Yes you have. You could go out today and find a job doing physical labor unless you are significantly physically disabled. It's not like there is an educational barrier to all of those jobs. (Yes, I know there is to SOME of them because they require skills and performing physical labor)

As someone that has done plenty of both, you aren't contributing anything to this discussion unless you try it.

New comment by mattstreet in "US military grounds entire fleet of F-35 jets"

mattstreet — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 19:03:48 +0000

Sure, that money actually paid people to do work and those people were then able to stimulate the economy, pay for their education, all that good stuff.

But that same money could have been spent to actually do something useful and it still would have had that economic impact.

*And now I see where everyone else already made this extremely obvious point.

New comment by mattstreet in "California High Court Rules Starbucks Must Pay for Off-The-Clock Work"

mattstreet — Sat, 28 Jul 2018 07:03:11 +0000

Is it? They already charge the amount they think meets the perfect balance of "as much as possible" and "not so much that less people buy".

New comment by mattstreet in "Uncontrollability of a bricycle (2014) [video]"

mattstreet — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 19:14:10 +0000

I believe you can buy hubs that are single speed and then if you flip them are fixie, might be cheaper to put that on a cheap bike than having a kid...

New comment by mattstreet in "TP-Link firmware sends six DNS requests and one NTP query every 5 seconds"

mattstreet — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 18:25:48 +0000

I'm a bit rusty, but I believe the way NTP works (at least the reference version which is commonly used) is that if a client sends too many requests in a short time, they are ignored except to reply with a "back off packet" which is called the KoD (Kiss of death) in NTP terms.

Security audits have found some issues with abusing the KoD so I'm not sure if it still works like that or if it tends to be disabled. (I was on one of the teams doing the audit, I found the "Skeleton Key" defect)

https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/rate.html#kiss

If you wanted to help the server deal with DoS even better, I would guess the best solution is to put a rate limiting firewall in front of it.

New comment by mattstreet in "Equifax Lobbied to Kill Rule Protecting Victims of Data Breaches"

mattstreet — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 04:40:46 +0000

You're going to encrypt publicly accessible sensitive data with a 9 digit number ? This is not even close to the current level of security. You don't get to make millions of guesses when some dumb website or clerk requires your SSN to do something.

To decrypt data you get to guess over and over again. An SSN would be a terrible key for that.

New comment by mattstreet in "State Supreme Court Says Digital Cameras Can't Be Searched Without a Warrant"

mattstreet — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 16:40:32 +0000

It doesn't matter what any court says when we don't do anything about officers violating someone's rights.

New comment by mattstreet in "State Supreme Court Says Digital Cameras Can't Be Searched Without a Warrant"

mattstreet — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 16:39:39 +0000

You don't have rights if you're within 100 miles of the border.

New comment by mattstreet in "Spoilerwall: Respond to port scanning requests with movie spoilers"

mattstreet — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 18:05:41 +0000

And then someone uses you in an DoS amplification attack instead of going after you directly.

New comment by mattstreet in "Spoilerwall: Respond to port scanning requests with movie spoilers"

mattstreet — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 15:54:15 +0000

Basically don't offer hackers any data amplification attacks, never respond with more data than it took for the attack to make the request.

New comment by mattstreet in "How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality"

mattstreet — Tue, 09 May 2017 18:59:10 +0000

Cisco Systems matches to 4.5% of your pay.

New comment by mattstreet in "The Disappearing Mass Housing of the Soviet Union"

mattstreet — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 17:40:55 +0000

Or we could feed people real food.

New comment by mattstreet in "Researchers are beginning to disentangle pain relief from addiction and overdose"

mattstreet — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 18:50:34 +0000

Probably a good decision to switch to NSAIDs (at least when possible) please don't flush meds again though.

New comment by mattstreet in "Charles Bukowski: The Slavery of the 9 to 5"

mattstreet — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 13:47:35 +0000

How is this inflammatory? Also, welcome to capitalism.

New comment by mattstreet in "Why HTTPS for Everything?"

mattstreet — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 19:13:28 +0000

Then it should also be noted that you really shouldn't use telnet to interact with HTTP or SMTP either. Telnet has issues if you send control characters, which wouldn't be used for either protocol, but might exist in embedded data you might want to send or receive. Just use netcat.

New comment by mattstreet in "Are ideas getting harder to find? [pdf]"

mattstreet — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 22:45:09 +0000

If we actually included the externalities of coal, the damage to property by acid rain, the health effects, the tearing the tops off our mountains to strip mine - then we could see things like scrubbing sulfur out as efficiency improvements.

New comment by mattstreet in "The pension gap"

mattstreet — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 22:25:54 +0000

Those in charge are seeing just how much they can take.

New comment by mattstreet in "Ransomware gives free decryption keys to victims who infect their friends"

mattstreet — Sun, 11 Dec 2016 05:40:42 +0000

Then the ransomware would just encrypt the files more slowly.

New comment by mattstreet in "NASA Scientists Suggest We’ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise"

mattstreet — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 01:05:23 +0000

People have had 50 years to start solving the problem on their own.

New comment by mattstreet in "DEA will ban chemicals contained in kratom, a popular herbal supplement"

mattstreet — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 14:25:51 +0000

So it's only plants that God made that are automatically safe?