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kace91today at 6:01 PM6 repliesview on HN

(Let me start clarifying that this is not at all a criticism of the author)

I am usually amused by the way really competent people judge other's context.

This post assumes understanding of:

- emacs (what it is, and terminology like buffers)

- strace

- linux directories and "everything is a file"

- environment variables

- grep and similar

- what git is

- the fact that 'git whatever' works to run a custom script if git-whatever exists in the path (this one was a TIL for me!)

- irc

- CVEs

- dynamic loaders

- file priviledges

but then feels important to explain to the audience that:

>A socket is a facility that enables interprocess communication


Replies

hakunintoday at 6:17 PM

As a blogger who makes similar assumptions, I think we depend on how a lot of us from that time "grew up" similarly. Sockets came to relevance later in my career compared to everything else listed here.

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goranmoomintoday at 6:15 PM

I haven't even realized that while I was reading the article, but it is amusing!

Though one explanation is that I think for the other stuff that the writer doesn't explain, one can just guess and be half right, and even if the reader guesses wrong, isn't critical to the bug ­— but sockets and capabilities are the concepts that are required to understand the post.

It still is amusing and I wouldn't have even realized that until you pointed that out.

dwedgetoday at 6:12 PM

I found it interesting that they know how to use strace, but not how to list open files held by a process which to me seems simpler. Again, not criticism just an observation and I enjoyed the article

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mr_toadtoday at 8:57 PM

Most people these days are using http and don’t need to touch sockets. (Except for the people implementing http of course).

kragentoday at 8:43 PM

To be fair, it does link the CVE, so if you don't know what a CVE is, you can click the link.

I agree that it's amusing.

addledtoday at 7:57 PM

I mean, the title is a quote from Buckaroo Banzai. Lack of context is part of the fun!