HN Simulatornew | past | comments | lists | submit | austin-cheney's commentslogin

Surveillance in combination with law enforcement is not the immediate problem, and so blaming ills on extended surveillance provides a smoke screen to ignore the actual problems.

The two problems of surveillance are misuse by government for political reasons in opposition to constitutional rights and misuse of surveillance by non-government agents who are not held to the same high ethical standards/limitations. These two concerns of misuse will continue their malicious growth until they are challenged regardless of the increases to surveillance technology.


Let's put aside whether or not surveillance is necessary.

The very big problem I have here is that ICE is not the agency that should be doing this sort of surveillance. Their role is immigration control, not leftist or citizen control. If they suspect there's some dangerous criminal problem going on, then that's the role of the FBI to investigate.

The specific reason they are doing this is because ICE doesn't use traditional courts for most of their actions. As such, they are fairly unaccountable.

ICE also isn't even technically criminal law enforcement, they are civil law enforcers. They are supposed to involve local law enforcement or federal law enforcement when going after criminals. Their roles are, instead, to dish out tickets. The fact that they've been militarized is a major problem. CBP is the only agency under the DHS that is supposed to have any sort of military equipment and general detention powers and those are only supposed to be exerted at a border.


Constitutional rights extend everywhere the Constitution covers regardless of immigration status. If ICE is conducting business in opposition to rights conveyed by the Constitution then you have found a far more grave concern to address.

For sure, my point is that there's no way you can slice this as being justifiable. Even if you are pro surveillance and anti-leftist. ICE shouldn't be doing this, it's the job of the FBI.

HSI has long been criminal enforcement within ICE, but I agree that they are the wrong agency to investigate this. They're doing it because they're unquestioningly loyal to Trump and because it's likely the administration has ordered certain outcomes.

I would also argue that there are no potential benefits that would make this sort of surveillance acceptable, let alone necessary.


No, the surveillance is at the core here. People love making pro-surveillance arguments in this same vein by just asserting that there can exist a world where everyone is surveilled but the usage of surveillance is checked and will never cross any line.

That world can't exist. Mass surveillance IS power, and power corrupts. Any situation where the use of surveillance is reasonable is a temporary transitory state, the final end is always the same - repressions and authoritarianism. The technology is a siren song, it's too attractive for bad actors so they will try to get it in somehow. And once your system of checks and balances springs a leak somewhere, it sets in motion its eventual undoing, because there's almost no stopping it once it's relied upon somewhere.


I am not making a pro-surveillance argument, though. I am merely stating there are malicious concerns that if left unaddressed will continue to be malicious irrespective of any technology.

I understand, this is why I said that the same line of reasoning is used in pro-surveilance arguments, not that yours was necessarily one of them. I agree that the concerns outside surveillance are also very real, I'm just saying that surveillance itself isn't an ideology-agnostic tool that's at the whims of its users, the technology itself inherently will always motivate all those other malicious actors and should not exist.

> for political reasons

It's not clear that this is political. The Venn diagram for people against ICE's existence, and those that are left leaning, is a near perfect circle. The only group against ICE are left leaning, so they would be the only ones to investigate, regarding any actions against ICE.


I agree with your second paragraph, but disagree with the first.

Society and its laws have been built around the central idea of selective enforcement. We have all manor of laws on the books that are created with the assumption that they cannot or will not be enforced perfectly.

The spy powers of our governments have always been assumed to be limited - that if they choose to invasively track a person, it would take limited human resources and that would naturally limit their capacity (in theory) to those who the government truly deems a concern.

Omnipresent surveillance that can record and analyze and correlate every citizen's movements and behavior at all times is inherently totalitarian and anti-freedom. It is a power the government should not be allowed to have, period.


So, what are the harms? This is the very first question that comes up in any form of judicial review. If there exists vast increases of surveillance and law enforcement is forbidden from using it is there still a harm? There absolutely could be, but that is what must be addressed to provide the proper regulation.

The forth amendment is not modified merely because the technology evolves. This is the kind of thing defense lawyers look for. To permit evolving technology to be used as evidence in violation of privacy generally requires new law.


We might be talking past each other. You're talking purely legal interpretation, I'm talking society and philosophy.

My point is that government cannot be trusted to have this kind of power because it will at some point be turned against the population when dissent threatens the people holding power; it is inevitable. The least we should do is make laws strictly controlling access and purpose of access to such tools for criminal investigations, but I don't think that's enough to stop abuse and civil oppression.


I think reliability is the reason they killed the Soul. It scored too high a score on reliability for its price point.

Can’t be true of their brake lights. One of my hobbies is alerting people to burnt-out tail lights, and every time I see a Soul I pay particular attention to it, because at least 1 out of every 4 cars has a light or two out.

Or is that a reflection of Kia buyers...

That's not why. The Soul like other small cars (eg. Fit, Yaris, Accent) saw shrinking uptake from consumers.

People on HN love talking about small cars, but purchasing data has shown otherwise in most markets.

The Kia Soul was also heavy hit by tariffs on South Korean automotive exports in North America and the EU as well as the sanctions on Russia, as it was manufactured and assembled in Kia's Gwangju and Kaliningrad factories. Btw, the Russian factory now assembles Chinese cars for the Russian and Belarusian market.


The second generation Soul was Kia's best selling vehicle in the U.S., and for Honda the Fit was their third best seller behind the CR-V and Civic. The issue wasn't that people weren't buying them. They absolutely were. The issue was that dealer allocations kept getting lower and lower as the manufacturers pushed CUVs and SUVs more and more after 2006. 2008 delayed that shift since big SUVs were seen as icons of the crash, but by 2011 the shift resumed. CAFE standards made it infeasible to sell the smaller cars because their development and testing was more expensive thanks to the footprint rule. Since the U.S. was the second largest market behind China and China was already overcrowded in the A and B segments, the moment that the U.S. stopped being enough of a profit center (around 2014) those segments got axed. When they deemed it too narrow in profits for the C segment (around 2018) that also got axed. Honda and Toyota are the only holdouts with the Civic and Corolla because Europe and Asia love the things, and while those two markets are only 30% of the size of the U.S. in terms of sales per year that's still big enough to justify keeping it around. Especially as the Civic now has no competition except the Corolla in the U.S. since Ford, GM, Stellantis, Nissan, Hyundai, Geely, and Tata all abandoned hatchbacks, coupes, and sedans. It's all down to loopholes and perverse incentives betraying the buying public once again.

i call bollocks. the Honda Fit sold like hotcakes and the Civic and Corolla continue to be ubiquitous .

margins and market incentives aren't there for small vehicles. same reason that things like clothes are bifurcated into either bottom-barrel fast-fashion or $1000 button ups.


This is also true for garbage collected languages, JavaScript in my case, but it requires a custom profiler and a bit more digging while asking better questions.

You'll have a more direct path towards better performance if the questions you're asking are closer to "how does a CPU work", and further away from "what hoops do I have to jump through in 2026 to avoid optimization bailouts after V8's latest round of changes"

My super large SPA loads in 150ms on localhost. Yes, if it were just a static blog I might get it down to about 60ms.

The problem isn’t the size of the code. It’s the unnecessary framework complexity. Suggesting this to a corporate JavaScript developer, though, is like throwing acid on your own face as they whine about how impossible it is to do their jobs.


> My super large SPA loads in 150ms on localhost.

Which is great if people only use it from localhost.


Across a network it’s still only 300ms.

Which means the difference between your APS and a static website is "loads reasonably fast" vs "loads instantly".

Sure, but that misses the point. My big SPA is faster without React and likely faster than a blog that appears to be static text generated from React. Yes, it would be much faster if it were just a few paragraphs of static text, but then it would not display any of the content that it is supposed to display, such as an a remote command shell interface or resource utilization graphs.

That is reasonable but not clear to me.

The point being made further up the thread was that people are using SPAs for static text.


Yes and no. Bill Gates is correct in that the incentive structure is wrong, but the perverse incentive structure predates LLMs.

The primary business of software is hiring/firing. Labor acquisition and recruitment is its own multibillion dollar industry, even just in software. For most large businesses this is the primary focus with regards to software development, not product creation.

With that said AI will be disruptive, but the results will be mixed. Yes, it’s bad that many people will lose their jobs once AI gets better about software authoring. However, many of these people would not be there in the first place if software employment required licensing or other forms of professional credentials to ensure minimal competence.

There still remains no vision that AI will replace the actual software engineers, the people who plan application architectures and measure things with numbers. On the other hand if all you do is juggle framework templates to put web content on screen AI is probably already better than people at that job.


Why? That looks like a mess. Proxies existed before http, so why not just proxy traffic between your various physical servers to manage load? It’s literally a poor man’s load balancer. It how Travelocity worked way back in the day.

Why are we still so reliant on HTTP? HTTP came out in 1990 (36 years ago) and the most common version of HTTP still in use, 1.1 (RFC2616), came out in 1999 (27 years ago)?

Yes, I know HTTP 2 and 3 and SSE are attempts to make it faster and more parallel, but its still slow. Its slow because its unidirectional with a full round trip and by default its a new socket per each message. Yes, I know the real reason HTTP became and remains popular is because its sessionless... in theory. Still, there are better options available. You can do so much more with a full duplex channel.


We don't need new versions of http or SMTP because they're already simple and great and they're dumb protocols so there's not much you could ever add

If you want something else you can take your pick based on need from dozens of other options


HTTP 1 is full of parser differential vulnerabilities, which 2 fixes. That is probably its biggest flaw.

SMTP is too chatty - it uses too many round trips for efficient transfer across the internet. It can take several seconds just to get to the point of sending the email data. It also duplicates information between the SMTP envelope and the email body which creates vulnerabilities when they don't match.

For APIs that don't have to work in a browser I suggest JSON lines over TCP, or over TLS.


Most header parsing bugs that affect HTTP1.1 can also affect 2+3. Not in the same style but there are quite a few overlapping ones.

Header parsing, sure. But message framing bugs are much more likely with HTTP/1.1.

Only when 2/3 translates to 1, as in request smuggling attacks at a reverse proxy.

Agreed. The issue with all these archaic standards is that they were rolled decades ago back when certain practices were either outright not being employed OR that hardware wasn't fast enough. Ironically, HTTP itself is a literal nightmare to parse (performance wise) on top of having like... ten? distinct vulnerability classes. The world desperately needs new standards.

Just open a TCP socket and send JSON messages. Or if you want a bit more efficiency, fixed-format binary messages, but remember to include a version number.

For custom server implementations, agreed. But the web still depends on HTTP and we sadly need the major infra providers to agree on a new standard otherwise HTTP isn't going anywhere

Web uses web protocols, notweb uses notweb protocols. When I write an XMPP bot it has to speak XMPP, not HTTP. I could write my video game server to use XMPP but why the heck would I do that? If I choose a badly fitting protocol, it's on me.

I think one problem there is that a lot of places block other ports. Was that not why websockets runs on http ports?

Websockets have to be careful not to enable a client-side SSRF by accessing anything you couldn't already access with an tag. They can use any port except the ones that are generally prohibited for browser HTTP requests, such as 25 and 6667.

"by default its a new socket for each message" is misinformation - keepalive is the default since HTTP 1.1 (1999).

Keep alive is not default behavior, so my prior comment was still more correct.

All webservers (apache, nginx, litespeed, caddy) have keep-alive enabled by default. All browsers also support it. Whether it's actually used/negotiated on most connections, I don't know, and if you want to be pedantic you're right that it can't be default by definition since you need the header to use it. But I suspect it actually is used for most connections nowadays.

Multiplexing is the default in HTTP/2 and 3. So you're still wrong.


https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36517829/what-does-multi...

So, for the sake of argument let’s say I am completely wrong, MDN is wrong, all of Stack Overflow is also wrong. Even still HTTP is slow. Slow as shit. Imagine trying to do a MS Teams call with 50+ participants with cameras on. It would be slow as shit for just a one-on-one call. A call with 50+ people would be ridiculously slower and would likely result in a crash from memory exhaustion.

I was also not talking about HTTP2 or 3. I was very clear about that. Reading is hard. HTTP is used in many different contexts outside the browser where 1.1 continues to dominate.

The primary reason developers want to keep HTTP around is familiarity and comfort. HTTP is great when you don’t compare to anything else or do any kind of performance tuning.


Keepalive is literally the default. You have to send an additional header if you don't want to use keepalive.

Novelty. The models still cannot produce new solutions. They are getting really good at solving tough problems but only if the problem is defined specifically enough in advance to warrant a narrow solution. Otherwise these models are good at replacing the people who aren’t good at this either.

I am on the fence. As a long time JavaScript developer I am pretty well aware I will never work again unless I create my own company. I can thus create my own company or basically start over from scratch doing something different.

And, no, I don't blame AI for never working again.

I blame an industry whose first five goals are hiring/firing as opposed to product development. It results in a perverted environment of unprepared pseudo-professional developers that jump ship every 18 months and yet cannot write software of their own, not even a little.

It reminds me of that scene in Idiocracy where the security guard called the hero an idiot for standing in the wrong line, which inadvertently results in a rather straight forward prison escape. At some point more experienced people get tired of being called idiots for not doing things the way a beginner would. Let's be real and just admit most of these people have invented a vast complex engineering culture event though all they really do is assign some events and put text on screen. Why bother using a spoon to eat your breakfast when you can use a giant factory of bulldozers?


Language used has little to do with whether or not you will be employable in the future.

The actual determination is how involved are you in your company's product and business? Are you present in product / strategy / planning meetings? Are you able to contribute, make suggestions, answer questions instantly and accurately about current system architecture and direction? How and why the company should implement or tweak feature X - this way, instead of that way? Do you have a track record of being right?


I use the Typescript compiler to report errors to the shell, but that's it.

Both Bun and Node.js will execute Typescript directly without a compile step. If you are able to write your own front-end bundler then the front-end code also gets the same type stripping from either Bun or Node.js. Since both Bun and Node.js start up my large applications about twice as fast as the Typescript compiler executes I don't see any reason to bother.


This is like saying you only use your car for transportation, but you don't sleep in it anymore because your bed is more comfortable.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | DMCA | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: