Hacker News Reader

0xmohiton Ask HN: Is it true that Google search prioritizes websites with Google Ads?

Does https://ads.google.com/intl/en_us/home/campaigns/search-ads/ answer your question?

0xmohiton Proton Mail discloses user data leading to arrest in Spain

    This case is particularly noteworthy because it involves a series of
    requests across different jurisdictions and companies, highlighting the
    complex interplay between technology firms, user privacy, and law
    enforcement.  The requests were made under the guise of anti-terrorism
    laws, despite the primary activities of the Democratic Tsunami involving
    protests and roadblocks, which raises questions about the proportionality
    and justification of such measures.

0xmohiton Infosys leaked FullAdminAccess AWS keys on PyPI for over a year

The Indian government has, over the years, awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to Infosys for projects like the Goods and Service Tax portal, Income Tax portal. In all these cases, the implementations are slow and super buggy. Deadlines to deliver are routinely missed. In an ideal world, these companies should not be allowed to exist.

0xmohiton Infosys leaked FullAdminAccess AWS keys on PyPI for over a year

This is hardly surprising. Most of them would be completely clueless about the code they've "written".

0xmohiton Tesla Is Recalling 40k Cars in Its 17th Recall of the Year

Interesting thread about Tesla and Elon:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1590111416014409728.html

0xmohiton Meta lays off 11,000 people

It seems to do an awful job.

Input:

"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."

Results in:

"When Covid first launched, the world was moving quickly online, and the e-commerce boom caused an astronomical increase in revenue."

0xmohiton Meta lays off 11,000 people

Everybody used the same AI to write the memo.

0xmohiton Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

I particularly like the fact that you can control floats much better than in LaTex/pdfTeX, but I agree that the community is smaller.

It appears that there is no development in ConTeXt for a while now. I haven't checked it, but it seems that they are working on LuaMetaTeX.

http://www.pragma-ade.com/luametatex-1.htm

0xmohiton Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

Does anyone use ConTeXt these days?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt

0xmohiton Software I’m thankful for (2021)

Nobody seems to have mentioned pandoc [0].

[0] https://pandoc.org/

0xmohiton Glassdoor not so anonymous

> Glassdoor has systematically taken down negative reviews for companies for years.

For a fee, of course :)

0xmohiton Uber broke laws, duped police and built lobbying operation, leak reveals

How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide (2017)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

0xmohiton Tell HN: Razorpay a YC company shared donor data under a Section 91 order

> If the ruler is the law, then there is no rule of law.

I thought that it was obvious :)

0xmohiton Tell HN: Razorpay a YC company shared donor data under a Section 91 order

Not quite. Just that the ruler is the law.

0xmohiton Tell HN: Razorpay a YC company shared donor data under a Section 91 order

In UP, India, a Muslim restaurant owner was arrested because the non-veg food he wrapped with old newspapers had photos of Hindu gods and goddesses.

https://thewire.in/rights/up-man-arrested-for-wrapping-chick...

0xmohiton SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

Musk believes in "free speech". So he decided to set them "free".

0xmohiton Nearly a third of TV ads play to empty rooms

The TV places an order if you're paying attention.

0xmohiton Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?

.. more registration, and more active users.

No wonder there are frequent emails from Twitter with the subject "... don't be shy" and "... we miss you".

0xmohiton Why is the Zoom app listening on my microphone when not in a meeting?

Reminds one of "Google Chrome Listening In To Your Room Shows The Importance Of Privacy Defense In Depth" [0].

[0] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/google-chrome-lis...

0xmohiton AWS us-east-1 outage

No wonder IMDB <https://www.imdb.com/> is down (returning 503). Sad that Amazon engineers don't implement what they teach their customers -- designing fault-tolerant and highly available systems.

0xmohiton Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

This appears to be by design. People have been demanding a budget capping service [0] for a decade now. AWS would continue to bill for compromised accounts [1]. AWS "free" offerings can cost a lot more than you think [2].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3356987

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20045615

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22988647

0xmohiton India’s second wave of Covid-19 feels nothing like its first

This sums it up:

India’s devastating second wave was fuelled by a series of crowded events, including mass rallies addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi [0].

> Fuelling the catastrophe was a series of crowded events, like mass rallies by politicians such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, religious holidays and pilgrimages on the Ganges river.

> As governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ministers, including Modi, touted victory over the virus, people relaxed their vigilance and stopped wearing masks and maintaining social distancing.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/4/29/indias-deadly-vi...

0xmohiton Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

Seems pretty likely that the model underestimates the causalities.

https://twitter.com/ARUNSHARMAJI/status/1385439504136237067

https://twitter.com/ahmermkhan/status/1386614534748590083

https://twitter.com/NicolaCareem/status/1386357371652526082

0xmohiton Twitter is blocking tweets that criticize the Indian government

The government believes that hiding data is the answer to the problem.

> “It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.” [0]

A related comment [1] on censorship in India.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavi...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928462

0xmohiton Twitter takes down tweets criticising handling of pandemic at government request

Censorship in India isn't new. The usual modus operandi is to shutdown the internet. 4G mobile services were banned in Kashmir for 550 days [0]. The objective is largely to control the dissemination of news.

The government had recently amended laws to govern social media giants including Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter [1]. These laws were introduced during the protests against the farm laws when government had requested Twitter to take down a number of accounts:

> The new rules come on the heels of a tense standoff between Twitter and the Indian government. Twitter reinstated several accounts that the government had ordered it to take down for using what it called "incendiary and baseless" hashtags related to farmers protesting against new agricultural reforms. The platform ultimately took down hundreds of accounts and partially restricted others, but drew a line by refusing to block accounts of journalists, activists and politicians.

The public policy directory at Facebook had opposed applying the company’s hate-speech rules to a politician from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party who had in posts called Muslims traitors [2].

> The WSJ article said Das had told staff that applying hate-speech rules to politicians close to Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “would damage the company’s business prospects in the country.”

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/india-restores-4...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/25/tech/india-twitter-facebo...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-india-exclusive-...

0xmohiton Show HN: DeepHN – Full-text search of 30M Hacker News posts and linked webpages

Curious to know how does it differ from HN Search [1]? HN Search API documentation [2].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/api

0xmohiton Louvre makes its entire collection available online

Not sure what it'd do to the NFT market, but it has crashed their servers for sure.

> Server error. Continue to search the Louvre collections

0xmohiton Hospitals lift curtain on prices, reveals giant swings for hips, knees and more

The mess is by design.