Hacker News: vogon_laureate

New comment by vogon_laureate in "UK Government plans new powers to label dissenting movements as 'subversion'"

vogon_laureate — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 20:30:49 +0000

Given that the Palestine Action is a proscribed terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act, and its co-founder said just one day after the Oct 7 massacre: “When we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa flood [Hamas' name for the massacre] we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.”

Yes.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "A Love Letter to FreeBSD"

vogon_laureate — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 20:19:23 +0000

OpenBSD's philosophy of simple config files and secure defaults are among its best features.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "UK Government plans new powers to label dissenting movements as 'subversion'"

vogon_laureate — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:51:03 +0000

Given that the Palestine Action co-founder said just one day after the Oct 7 massacre: "When we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa flood, we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world."

Yes.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "UK Government plans new powers to label dissenting movements as 'subversion'"

vogon_laureate — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:46:27 +0000

And violently sledgehammered a female police officer breaking her spine.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "A Love Letter to FreeBSD"

vogon_laureate — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:01:01 +0000

BSDs taught me how to Unix in a way that I just wasn't able to manage with Linux before. This was during the early RedHat 5.x days and I just found so many pain points with the RPMs and odd file hierarchy inconsistencies for different packages. I tried to setup a firewall for my office network and struggled with iptables (or was it ipchains back then?) and found the documentation confusing.

I tried OpenBSD to setup a firewall system and fell in love. Everything just made more sense and felt more cohesive. PF rules syntax was just so much easier to work with and flexible. I loved the ports system and the emphasis on code correctness and security. The Man pages were a revelation! I could find everything I needed in the command line.

I tried all the BSDs, and each have their own strengths and weaknesses. FreeBSD had the most ports and seemed to also have good hardware support, NetBSD had the most platform support, DragonflyBSD was focused on parallel computing, etc. They all borrow and learn from each other.

BSDs are great and I heartily recommend people give them a whirl. This article in The Register is also worth a read:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/switching_from_linux_...

New comment by vogon_laureate in "June Huh dropped out to become a poet, now he’s won a Fields Medal (2022)"

vogon_laureate — Thu, 08 May 2025 13:48:54 +0000

Fine, but can he solve the Riemann Hypothesis in iambic pentameter?

New comment by vogon_laureate in "UK's Online Safety Act comes into force"

vogon_laureate — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 15:47:10 +0000

I love how this got downvoted. I literally consulted on the draft legislation.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "UK's Online Safety Act comes into force"

vogon_laureate — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 11:45:19 +0000

No one thinks Al-Qaeda/ISIS are moderate. Furthermore, a large part of ISIS' recruitment success was as a result of its slick social media operation.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "UK's Online Safety Act comes into force"

vogon_laureate — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 11:01:19 +0000

Because pedophiles and terrorists exist and this is why we can't have nice things.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "UK's Online Safety Act comes into force"

vogon_laureate — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 10:59:33 +0000

The Online Safety Act came into being under a Conservative government.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "UK's Online Safety Act comes into force"

vogon_laureate — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 10:58:20 +0000

The Online Safety Act provides for Ofcom to develop its own codes of practice and guidelines based on the provisions of the act and public consultation (including with the platforms). It has an enormous amount of leeway in deciding how to implement the Act.

Ofcom has operational independence. Neither its investigations nor its enforcement actions are directly controlled by the Government. The Government does approve Codes of Practice but if it doesn't approve, it can only request modifications. It's still up to Ofcom to decide how to interpret and implement. Secretary of State interventions are, by convention, rare and subject to Parliamentary scrutiny.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)"

vogon_laureate — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 13:46:04 +0000

I'd say that, at least with Tibetan Buddhism, there are things like deity yoga, wrathful and peaceful manifestations, Dakinis and Dharma protectors, Bodhisattvas, all are essentially theistic in nature. Adi-Buddha in the Vajrayana tradition is also a "primordial" Buddha, so it has many of the hallmarks of theistic religion.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)"

vogon_laureate — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 13:27:53 +0000

tldr: author has shocking revelation that a major religion is "functionally theistic".

New comment by vogon_laureate in "CSS Classes Considered Harmful"

vogon_laureate — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 10:36:34 +0000

This gives big bikeshedding vibes. I always liked the idea of semantic markup, but humans are messy and complex and we will always find ways to bring that chaos to utopian systems. Classes and IDs work fine most of the time. Documenting your styles is good practice. Using BEM or Tailwind has the benefit of adhering to a system and base classes that others can make sense of without much effort. CSS is OK. Our energies are better spent on more important things.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "Apple is right not to rush headlong into generative AI"

vogon_laureate — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 20:38:52 +0000

For real. I can't believe how little improvement there has been to Siri over the years.

New comment by vogon_laureate in "GoboLinux"

vogon_laureate — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 16:55:19 +0000

I like that userland is kept separate from base as much as possible, but agree it could be even better. I do think the BSDs have more coherency than Linux on the whole. Would be nice if we could simplify things down even further, but I suspect it just becomes one giant bikeshedding exercise, which is probably why it's easier to just cling on to hier https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?hier

Colin Percival praises Netflix’s support for FreeBSD

vogon_laureate — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 22:19:57 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/1699545780661743980?s=46&t=nlkd7MyDx7hxs7_ZY5jilA

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37412185

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by vogon_laureate in "Keystroke timing obfuscation added to SSH"

vogon_laureate — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 07:41:20 +0000

This attempts to hide inter-keystroke timings by sending interactive traffic at fixed intervals (default: every 20ms) when there is only a small amount of data being sent. It also sends fake "chaff" keystrokes for a random interval after the last real keystroke. These are controlled by a new ssh_config ObscureKeystrokeTiming keyword.

Keystroke timing obfuscation added to SSH

vogon_laureate — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 07:41:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230829051257

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347865

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by vogon_laureate in "AI-powered hate speech detection will moderate voice chat in Call of Duty"

vogon_laureate — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 07:36:33 +0000

"ToxMod" will automatically flag spoken harassment, bullying, and discrimination.