Hacker News: spc476

New comment by spc476 in "Should QA exist?"

spc476 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:13:49 +0000

At a previous job, the team I was on [1] had a dedicated QA engineer (unofficially---he was the only QA engineer that ever worked with our team). Before we got bought, we worked closely with the QA engineer. He had access to the source repo, could compile and test our stuff, and we constantly told him of new features we were working on to give him a heads up. During this time, we were our customer's (yes, we only worked with one customer, who was paying us seven figures per month for service) favorite vendor. Over the 10 years or so of this time, we had like two regressions hit production, and those were found during deployment and we could roll back immediately.

We then got bought out and new management put in. They siloed QA and made it impossible for us to even talk to them about what we were doing. Within a year, we had one deployment fail four times in a row and went from favorite vendor to "utter trash vendor we can't get rid of." Our QA engineer quit, as well as the rest of the team (I was the last to leave). I'm still surprised they still have that customer.

[1] We were the only team having to deal with SS7. It wasn't easy hiring programmers for it, and I think at the highest head count, we had like five members (including the manager when we had one [2], but not including QA, which was "officially" never a part of our team).

[2] If it was tough hiring programmers to deal with SS7, it was even harder to hire managers to deal with programmers dealing with SS7. I think for half the time I was there (over 10 years) I had no official manager and reported to a director or higher in the company.

New comment by spc476 in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

spc476 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:26:55 +0000

I went through the lists. In 1985, of the top 10 movies, you had two direct sequels, two adaptations, leaving six original movies. In 2025, of the top 10 movies, you had two direct sequels, two remakes, three franchises (maybe sequels?), one that is a part II (so sequel?, also an adaptation), one adaptation and it seems one original movie. My, how times have changed.

New comment by spc476 in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

spc476 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:16:10 +0000

Survivalship bias. Here's a list of movies released in 1985: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_1985>. How many of those are good? How many have you heard of? Here's a list of movies released in 2025: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2025>. Same questions.

New comment by spc476 in "Build Your Own Forth Interpreter"

spc476 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:48:01 +0000

I've already done that---ANS Forth for the 6809 (https://github.com/spc476/ANS-Forth).

New comment by spc476 in "I still don't understand this SYN attack, but now I can block it easily"

spc476 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:38:31 +0000

When in the past you learned that the recommended value for the TTL was 64 and you didn't think any operating system would pick a value much larger than that.

New comment by spc476 in "I still don't understand this SYN attack, but now I can block it easily"

spc476 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 08:14:24 +0000

I'm checking the TTL of IP packets, which is only 8-bits in size, and in practice, are decremented per hop (the early IPv4 RFCs state it is in seconds; I doubt it was ever used that way). DNS TTLs are 32-bits in size and represent the number of seconds a DNS record can be cached, They are separate from the TTL of IP packets. The TTL for CDNs is specified in HTTP headers and again has its own specification.

Getting back to TTLs for IP packets---I recalled the recommended TTL of 64 from admittedly years ago. I just now checked my copy of _TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1_ by W. R. Stevens, published in 1994, so yeah, a few decades ago. Of all the Unix systems mentioned in that volume, they all defaulted to a TTL of 60, except for Solaris 2.2, which used 255 (surprised me!). I no longer have access to Solaris to check (did at my previous job) but I don't think there are many people using Solaris to view my site.

I've checked the page you linked, and they don't link to the source for the table given, where the various values of TTL denote forwarding scope or range, nor have I ever seen such a table before. I know my Linux and Mac OS-X systems use TTLs less than 70, and I can get content from other continents. My comment on that: [citation needed].

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_live) at least links to references, so I found a list of TTLs per OS (https://web.archive.org/web/20130212114759/http://www.map.me...), but given the OSes listed, it's probably also from a few decades ago, but the majority are around 60, with Windows NT being 128, Solaris 255 and VMS anywhere from 60 to 128 (depending on version). So the TTLs being over 100 makes sense for what I was seeing---possibly a bunch of zombie Window boxes participating in a half-assed SYN attack using Brazil IPs for some reason. I can't say I'm horribly upset at that. But actual readers on Windows is concerning. I have no easy way to test for that, and I'd hate to go back to having ~100 half-open connections on my server.

New comment by spc476 in "I still don't understand this SYN attack, but now I can block it easily"

spc476 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 03:14:37 +0000

Yes.

No, it's always port 443. But yes, the destination doesn't ACK the connection.

No, the TTL just means it can make more hops; it doesn't mean the connection is kept open for longer.

No, the IP addresses are unique and rarely repeat.

New comment by spc476 in "I still don't understand this SYN attack, but now I can block it easily"

spc476 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:43:24 +0000

The destination IP address is my server, the one being attacked. I don't see the significant of the high-value octets.

Vibe Graveyard

spc476 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 10:09:28 +0000

Article URL: https://vibegraveyard.ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742339

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by spc476 in "How I learned everything I know about programming"

spc476 — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:53:51 +0000

Yes.

New comment by spc476 in "Why 451 Is Good for You – Greylisting Perspectives from the Early Noughties"

spc476 — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 10:47:44 +0000

Unless you whitelist the notification email, which I've has to do a few times.

New comment by spc476 in "Why 451 Is Good for You – Greylisting Perspectives from the Early Noughties"

spc476 — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 10:00:11 +0000

In my 19 years of greylisting, I have yet to have legitimate email fail due to it. And it was one of the easiest ways to significantly decrease the amount of spam. It's been worth it in my opinion.

New comment by spc476 in "AI is forcing us to write good code"

spc476 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:49:58 +0000

You forgot difficult. How do you test a system call failure? How do you test a system call failure when the first N calls need to pass? Be careful how you answer, some answers technically fall into the "undefined behavior" category (if you are using C or C++).

New comment by spc476 in "Project Gemini"

spc476 — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 23:53:21 +0000

There was (and still is to a degree) a group of people critical of TLS. One half of the group (which I think you belong to) bitch about it being mandatory. The other half bitched about the use of TLS instead of . TLS was the main point of Gemini.

And about the lack of file size: I proposed a way to sneak it in, and it was rejected outright. Oh well.

New comment by spc476 in "BlackRock's Larry Fink: "Tokenization", Digital IDs, & Social Credit"

spc476 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 03:59:22 +0000

Old Soviet joke: government pretends to pay us, we pretend to work.

New comment by spc476 in "Singapore to cane scammers as billions lost in financial crimes"

spc476 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 03:04:25 +0000

William Gibson got a lifetime ban for calling it "Disney with the death penalty" in a Wired article.

New comment by spc476 in " Htmx – The Fetch()ening"

spc476 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:58:19 +0000

And OpenAI was a non-profit. "Was" being the operative word.

New comment by spc476 in "The hardest program I've ever written (2015)"

spc476 — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:21:31 +0000

If I didn't want opinions, I'd join a cult.

New comment by spc476 in "Why do some radio towers blink?"

spc476 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:01:47 +0000

Changing a radio tower light bulb is not for the weak of heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b9LahaBJIk

New comment by spc476 in "Tags to make HTML work like you expect"

spc476 — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 20:14:23 +0000

Such questions can be jarring though. I remember my "Unix Systems Programming" class in college. It's a third year course. The instructor was describing the layout of a process in memory, "here's the text segment, the data segment, etc." when a student asked, "Where do the comments go?"