Hacker News Reader

0xmohiton Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

This is what analysts and institutional investors appearing on TV have been doing.

0xmohiton Site.js: Small Web construction set

For the rationale behind building site.js, refer to the post "What is the Small Web?" [0] by Aral Balkan.

[0] https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

0xmohiton Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing

This reminds of a somewhat recent instance:

AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

[0] https://twitter.com/tim_nolet/status/1317061818574082050

0xmohiton Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump

> Facebook "indefinitely" blocking Trump's account is meaningless theater.

> The Stop The Steal hashtag is still active. Stop The Steal events are "currently happening" ras we speak. And there are Stop The Steal groups with thousands of members you can join right now.

https://mobile.twitter.com/broderick/status/1347228893124702...

0xmohiton Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump

Zuck chooses to do it when it is certain that Trump is going and won't be of much use going forward. This is just a sham unless Facebook ensures that the platform doesn't provide space to those indulging in malicious propaganda.

0xmohiton Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

I need the "Never used WhatsApp; can't switch" option.

0xmohiton GitHub blocks entire company because one employee was in Iran

GitHub might start blocking countries doing any trade with Iran in order to comply with "laws".

0xmohiton AWS Cognito is having issues and health dashboards are still green

Almost 9 years have passed by and nothing has changed. The dashboards continue to remain green.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707590

0xmohiton GitHub Certifications (Beta)

4) Which is the best editor for writing code? (a) VS Code (b) VS (c) Notepad (d) Wordpad

0xmohiton Reading too much political news is bad for your well-being

Much of it isn't "news". It is mostly propaganda.

Quoting Garry Kasparov: "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

0xmohiton AWS forked my project and launched it as its own service

The OP posted "Show HN: Headless Recorder" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24577642> 22 days ago. Amazon forked and released it as a service. They are efficient.

0xmohiton Bash Error Handling

Specifying PS4 when using the -x flag can be even more helpful while debugging. The variable PS4 denotes the value is the prompt printed before the command line is echoed when the -x option is set and defaults to : followed by space.

A number of useful debugging tips are listed at <https://wiki.bash-hackers.org/scripting/debuggingtips>.

0xmohiton France: Thousands of protesters wrongly punished under draconian laws

Unfortunate that Amnesty wouldn't be able to produce a similar report [0] about India [1] now.

Protestors in India are being charged under UAPA [2]. In 2019, the act was amended allowing the government to designate an individual as a terrorist without trial.

[0] Amnesty International India Halts Its Work On Upholding Human Rights In India Due To Reprisal From Government Of India - https://amnesty.org.in/news-update/amnesty-international-ind...

[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1314054705455144962.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Activities_(Preventio...

0xmohiton Faith in government declines when mobile internet arrives

> A new study finds that incumbent parties lose votes after their citizens get online.

It appears that the study doesn't factor in cases where the governments indulge in mass propaganda. Mobile internet helps disseminate information at scale instantly, and people usually don't tend to ascertain authenticity of information.

Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter also do little do prevent spreading misinformation. If a government is "committed" to spreading misinformation, mobile internet makes it much easier to have a much wider reach that would be easily possible otherwise.

0xmohiton Show HN: Fion – A new tool to track your spending, without a budget

> If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

“You are not the product being sold, you are the livestock being farmed.”

0xmohiton Modi government to set up app store alternative to Google Play, Apple App Store

It might be because of the following:

"Narendra Modi ‘wants state apps installed’ on new phones"

Source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/narendra-modi-wants-state...

> India is said to be considering a plan to make it mandatory for almost all new mobile phones to have government software pre-installed, raising the prospect of the state being able to closely monitor citizens.

0xmohiton Amnesty International India Halts Its Work in India Due to Government Reprisal

Worth noting is the fact that the government is charging protestors and dissenters under sedition and UAPA [0].

> In July 2019,the ambit of UAPA was expanded. It was amended allowing the government to designate an individual as a terrorist without trial.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Activities_(Preventio...

0xmohiton GitHub CLI 1.0

Wonder if this would lead to the end of hub <https://hub.github.com>.

0xmohiton India orders coronavirus tracing app for all workers

India was always a surveillance state in the making, thanks to Aadhaar.

The Indian government is now utilizing the crisis to fast-pace the process. Not only are they planning to make the contact tracing app registration on new phones mandatory, they're also planning to bring the app to feature phones.

Source: Aarogya Setu coming on feature phones; to cover the entire country https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/aarogya-s...

0xmohiton India orders coronavirus tracing app for all workers

"Never waste a crisis."

0xmohiton India orders coronavirus tracing app for all workers

Yes, that is the plan.

> Registering on Aarogya Setu will be mandatory for all new smartphones before they can be set up and used, government sources told News18 earlier today. According to officials with knowledge of the matter, the government of India is making it mandatory for all new smartphones to be sold in India post lifting of the lockdown to not just have the app as a pre-installed service, but also ensure that individuals register on it and set it up, before beginning to use their new smartphones.

https://www.news18.com/news/tech/aarogya-setu-registration-w...

0xmohiton India orders coronavirus tracing app for all workers

The government of India is making it mandatory for all new smartphones to be sold in India post lifting of the lockdown to not just have the app as a pre-installed service, but also ensure that individuals register on it and set it up, before beginning to use their new smartphones.

Source: Aarogya Setu Registration Will be Mandatory to Setup New Phone: Govt Sources

https://www.news18.com/news/tech/aarogya-setu-registration-w...

0xmohiton Companies that buy data derived from scraping the contents of email

Also relevant:

Google Admits: Third-Party Apps Can Still Access Your Gmail Data

https://fossbytes.com/google-admits-third-party-apps-can-sti...

0xmohiton Authoritarian nations are turning the internet into a weapon

It's been 150 days that internet has been blocked in Kashmir by the Indian government.

The Indian government routinely blocks internet in various parts of the country. They recently even blocked it in the national capital, Delhi.

0xmohiton Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

Plan to read again:

- How Democracies Die https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Democracies_Die

- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Third...

0xmohiton I Ditched Google for DuckDuckGo

Ironical that this wired piece attempts device recognition and has 26 cross-site trackers (as reported by Brave [0]).

[0] https://brave.com/

0xmohiton Indiana manipulated report on Amazon worker’s death, investigation says

Another Amazon horror story:

https://qz.com/482080/dear-jeff-bezos-i-wish-you-had-asked-f...

0xmohiton Flan Scan: Lightweight Network Vulnerability Scanner

Flan Scan is a thin wrapper around Nmap that converts this popular open source tool into a vulnerability scanner with the added benefit of easy deployment.

0xmohiton From Underwear to Cars, India’s Economy Is Fraying

Obligatory reading:

The IMF Confirms That ‘Trickle-Down’ Economics Is, Indeed, a Joke

https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed...

0xmohiton Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?

Came across this long back: 2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2.

Maybe Bezos read this recently and decided to use large values of 24 to compute number of hours in a month.