Top all-time · #3075
Owl’s Portfolio
Personal blog · owlfolio.orgprogrammingsystemssecurity
Owl’s Portfolio is a personal blog at owlfolio.org about programming, systems and security. Since 2010, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the GNU Autotools”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Owl's Portfolio, Zack Weinberg's blog, for technical writing on Autotools and Autoconf, including a SWOT analysis of Autotools, plus posts on Tor traffic detection, StegoTorus and browser font and SSL issues.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the GNU Autotools9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-01-26
- I Will File Bugs for You (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-08-15
- I Didn’t Learn Unix by Reading All the Manpages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-14
What Hacker News says?
Don't forget about Zach Weinberg's offer to file bugs: https://www.owlfolio.org/htmletc/i-will-file-bugs-for-you/ (If it's intentional they could WONTFIX The bug)
Comment linking /htmletc/i-will-file-bugs-for-you/
on “Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator”Submitted I Will File Bugs for You (2014) as a story · 146 points
HN discussionYeah, I'm being salty, but at the same gcc is notoriously unapproachable while also struggling to pull in new blood. Considering the long, but sporadic update history [1] of this documentation, I am not optimistic about this effort turning it around. Seems more likely to become yet another one of the out of date or incomplete tutorials lying around [2]. GCC's own contribution docs [3] cop to the fact that most new c…
Comment linking /development/autoconf-swot/
on “Diving into GCC Internals”Submitted Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the GNU Autotools as a story · 86 points
HN discussionThe OP, Zack Weinberg helpfully published his analysis on his own web page¹ and the formatting (different typeface for headings, flowing paragraph text, hypertext links, bullet points) made the analysis much more readable. I think email is fine as the communication medium for software projects – particularly for projects that have been around for as long as Autotools†. For me, the biggest downside is that not all ma…
Comment linking /development/autoconf-swot/
on “Future Plans for Autotools”Submitted Corrected UTF-8 (2022) as a story · 63 points
HN discussionLove the SWOT writeup https://www.owlfolio.org/development/autoconf-swot/ I honestly don't see the need for autotools for AT LEAST a decade now. Except for a steady wall of text to make it look like you were doing some cool hacking work.
Comment linking /development/autoconf-swot/
on “Future Plans for Autotools”Submitted Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the GNU Autotools as a story · 54 points
HN discussionThis is getting interesting. For me on Windows 7 Firefox (both 7.0.1 and the current Beta version), Chrome, Safari and Opera all have this issue while IE9 does not. Which version of Firefox are you running? Edit: Additionally, if I use the so-called "F12 Developer Tools" in IE9 to switch the browser mode to IE8 the font will have the same problem. Edit 2: I found this article http://www.owlfolio.org/htmletc/legibili…
Comment linking /htmletc/legibility-of-embedded-web-fonts/
on “Bootstrapping Design”Submitted Bootstrapping trust in compilers as a story · 50 points
HN discussionMeh, there's a reasonably large amount of research on disguising Tor traffic nowadays. Two recent interesting papers were StegoTorus [1], which conceals Tor traffic via steganography in a way robust to the above statistical analysis, and -- more exotically -- SkypeMorph [2], which obfuscates Tor traffic to mimic Skype traffic. [1] http://www.owlfolio.org/media/2010/05/stegotorus.pdf [2] http://www.cypherpunks.ca/~ia…
Comment linking /media/2010/05/stegotorus.pdf
on “Detecting Tor Communication in Network Traffic”Submitted Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the GNU Autotools as a story · 28 points
HN discussionThere's a proposal for that: https://www.owlfolio.org/development/thread-safe-environment...
Comment linking /development/thread-safe-environment-variable-mutation-working-draft-2022-15/
on “Getaddrinfo() on glibc calls getenv(), oh boy”Submitted Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the GNU Autotools as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> Don't they understand that it is not technically possible? People will just start using VPN. Maybe it is not possible to completly stop it, but they could just implement severe punishments for trying to connect to services like TOR, I2P and VPNs. The traffic is definitely detectable, (here is a project that tries to make it harder to detect TOR traffic http://www.owlfolio.org/media/2010/05/stegotorus-talk/ ). Even…
Comment linking /media/2010/05/stegotorus-talk/
on “Internet censorship in Russia - Lurk no more”Submitted Redesigning Income Tax as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThere's been a relatively comprehensive take-down on autoconf (1), that boils down to: It's an old piece of software, with basically no maintainers, which is fantastically difficult to make any changes to. Not... stable because it "just works"; unchanging because it's so enormously complex to make and coordinate even trivial changes, that it is effectively the peak of the software lifecycle, where something has accu…
Comment linking /development/autoconf-swot/
on “Autoconf and configure features that people find valuable”Submitted I Didn’t Learn Unix by Reading All the Manpages as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Interactive history sniffing and its relatives as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted I Didn’t Learn Unix by Reading All the Manpages as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted I will file bugs for you as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What is Wrong with You Monkeys? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Data Theft with CSS as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the GNU Autotools as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ideas that don't make money as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
