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DerekBickerton

3,225 karma · joined July 9, 2021

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DerekBickerton··on Tutorials on Color Science
Not wrong. HN linked to the 'canonical' link. You can see it in the source of the page I submitted:

    <link rel="canonical" href="https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.1/examples/headers/">
Here's the link:

https://horizon-lab.org/colorvis/

DerekBickerton··on Ask HN: Social Network for a Specific Country?
Maybe not an app, but I would suggest some PHP forum software. You can quickly spin these up on most hosting sites. Scaling it could be a problem, and you may need to sustain and grow the platform with donations, or just force users to pay a set amount each month to use it. I was going to suggest AD-supported income, but I never liked that model, and most users just block ADs anyway.
DerekBickerton··on Ask HN: What OS Design/Architecture Would piss Off NSO the Most?
> My question is what kind of Operating System Design should be employed to make it as difficult as possible for companies like NSO to find useful exploits in smartphone/computers?

It would piss them off if the malware 'thought' it got root, but it didn't. This would be a decoy environment full of plausible looking (non-sensitive) information, and the malware reports to the C2 with a bunch of benign data.

How to achieve this is the killer question though.

DerekBickerton··on Vitalik Buterin reveals X account hack was caused by SIM-swap attack
> Tim Beiko strongly recommended removing phone numbers from X

I haven't checked, but it is possible to unlink a phone number from X? I always thought it was some anti-spam measure to have a number tied to an account.

DerekBickerton··on A fun daily newsletter on emerging tech
> we will inspire the masses to accelerate and erase doomer mentality.

We're not all 'doomers'. Some of us are excited for new tech and evangelize it, promote it, and are tech maximalists at heart.

DerekBickerton··on Aks HN: Why is the color orange such a special color?
https://psychologycolor.com/orange/

https://www.colorpsychology.org/orange/

https://www.verywellmind.com/the-color-psychology-of-orange-...

DerekBickerton··on Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?
Mullvad

iVPN

ProtonVPN

DerekBickerton··on The Populist Advantage
> The Snowden revelations of a few years later did not have as great of an impact as I would have wished

Saying Snowden's either a pariah or a hero is a very political stance either way, and I don't want to spout politics here on HN (That's not what HN is for, although political rants still slip through the cracks on HN).

That said, the leaks did leave some aftermath[0]. All the tinfoilers, pre-Snowden had their suspicions confirmed in real, tangible ways. Yeah we knew abut ECHELON[1] but the Snowden leaks were far more substantial IMHO, and leaked at a time when The Internet was really starting to ramp up (in terms of all the services/tooling now available, and social media making leaps and bounds).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

DerekBickerton··on The Populist Advantage
> one of my younger colleagues at the International Monetary Fund found it hard to get a good job in academia, despite holding a PhD from MIT’s prestigious economics department, probably because her work showed that trade liberalization had slowed the rate of poverty reduction in rural India. While theoretical papers showing that freer trade could have such adverse effects were acceptable, studies that demonstrated the phenomenon empirically were met with skepticism.

You don't automatically get a 'good job' because you've earned certain credentials. IMHO PhDs and other credentials are a dice roll and you could potentially work very hard on your studies for nothing. This is why people research their chosen profession before studying so that, at least, it wasn't all in vain, and even then, the job market could be swayed against you when you've completed your studies.

People also need to look out for credentialism where people are overqualified for positions, or that PhDs etc are not even needed. Sometimes a simple aptitude test can filter out people who will lose you money when you've employed them.

DerekBickerton··on RFC 9446 Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations
Saying he's either a pariah or a hero is a very political stance either way, and I don't want to spout politics here on HN (That's not what HN is for, although political rants still slip through the cracks on HN).

That said, the leaks did leave some aftermath[0]. All the tinfoilers, pre-Snowden had their suspicions confirmed in real, tangible ways. Yeah we knew abut ECHELON[1] but the Snowden leaks were far more substantial IMHO, and leaked at a time when The Internet was really starting to ramp up (in terms of all the services/tooling now available, and social media making leaps and bounds).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

DerekBickerton··on Beyond introvert vs. extrovert
> Introverts, extroverts... ambiverts??

I consider myself an ambivert, swinging between introvert and extrovert all the time. The thing is: you are going to have to attend social events often against your will if you're introvert-leaning (weddings, funerals, christenings, bar mitzvahs, etc).

What I've learned over the years is the more you know how the world works, the less you want to be engaged in it (Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Military, Big Anything). It's all so tiresome.

One of the things all mature adults need to learn ASAP is how to retain good friendships over time. It's a whole art-form. Anyone that can give me a 'belly laugh' and I can retain friendship over more than five years is worth keeping.

DerekBickerton··on Betterfox: User.js to harden Firefox and optimize privacy, security, and speed
> disables search from URL bar

Set keyword searches to true:

    user_pref("keyword.enabled", true);
That way it uses your default search engine when searching from the address bar.
DerekBickerton··on I booted Linux 293k times in 21 hours
Before clicking I thought someone kept note of how many times Linux booted in regard to their computing habits, and not testing software. I know for me I boot roughly 3 times a day into different machines, do my work, shutdown, then rinse & repeat.

Then you have those types who put their machine into hibernate/sleep with 100+ Chrome tabs open and never do a full boot ritual. Boggles my mind that people do that.

DerekBickerton··on Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years
> this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect

Which is why launching any social network is a dice roll. You need that initial momentum to propel it further, or some 'lucky break' to get it popular. Many social networks got popular accidentally, typically because some VIP joined the platform and everyone went to follow the VIP, increasing DAUs / MAUs which is the only metric social media networks care about.

DerekBickerton··on The Dutch government wants automatic permission to target victims of hackers
If they spent the money in the right places, i.e helping people or organizations get back on their feet after a breach, that would be more fruitful. This whole 'we're gonna sit in your computer chasing bad guys' is just shenanigans.
DerekBickerton··on Tell HN: "I don't care about cookies” extension bought by Avast, users jump ship
Links for Consent-O-Matic if anyone wants to take a look:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat... (Firefox)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/consent-o-matic/md... (Chrome)

https://consentomatic.au.dk/ (Official site)

DerekBickerton··on Edward Snowden Leaks: 10 Years Later
> We need companies which inherently aren’t built on surveillance capitalism, like Tor, or Signal, or Mastodon, which in turn have little-to-no data to share with the NSA, GCHQ, FSB, BND, among other agencies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect

DerekBickerton··on The explosive legacy of the hand sanitizer boom
Anecdotal: I wash my hands more now after the Pandemic. Not that I have OCD, but it's been documented that many OCD sufferers had very strict parents who demanded their children washed their hands at every instance, and that passed into adulthood. Maybe I'm a victim of the Pandemic era and continue to wash my hands religiously, often to the extreme?
DerekBickerton··on Ask HN: Best blogs about reverse engineering?
Not a blog, but a good YT channel:

https://www.youtube.com/c/MalwareTechBlog/videos

DerekBickerton··on Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs
Never liked vertical tabs. Horses for courses, personal preference and all that. My muscle memory for normal/horizontal tab layouts is so ingrained in me, that using anything different would take on a huge unlearning.
DerekBickerton··on Ask HN: How can I get the usernames of the top best commenters about LLM?
From: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=askkk

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yourapostasy

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=retskrad

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bogwog

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TheCaptain4815

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sf4lifer

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jerf

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sharemywin

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mnky9800n

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cloudguruab

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=informatimago

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kazunori279

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=washadjeffmad

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=somenameforme

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Decabytes

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cmilton

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=reducesuffering

DerekBickerton··on Ask HN: Is AI potentially far worse than Web3 for the world?
The term AI is often thrown about when the product/service actually has no AI or deep learning / neural nets / Bayesian tech at its core. It's just a bunch of code with if...else statements, not truly 'AI'. We still should leverage those tools, just be careful with the term AI - it's often added to give the service/product some allure or novelty and signal to users that they should try it out.
DerekBickerton··on Ask HN: VSCode, GitHub Copilot – Too easy to leak confidential info?
Secrets like API keys should be added last, when the program is in the very last stages, then you can plug them in. I know, it sucks having to do that, but it's a strategy I've been using for years, and I use leaky things like Copilot too. If you must use API keys with Copilot, make the key related to some disposable staging/test environment, not important code like prod.
DerekBickerton··on We will be shutting down neeva.com
Wanted to try Neeva since they launched, but DuckDuckGo has served me well over the years and I can't really complain about the results. Only on a rare occasion do I need to make a long-tail query where I surmise Google/Neeva will do a better job at results. That's once every ~1000 DDG searches though, and I append a !g command to my query to redirect to The Google in that case.

I will continue to use Kagi[0], keeping in mind that could be shutdown without notice too, so I'll probably end up using it more now.

[0] https://kagi.com/

DerekBickerton··on This Word Does Not Exist
For more of these types of projects check this:

https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/

DerekBickerton··on OpenSnitch in Debian ready for prime time
Glasswire[0] is good too, albeit it's commercial/paid software. It has a good Android app and allows me to block malicious/privacy-invasive outbound connections from various apps.

[0] https://www.glasswire.com/

DerekBickerton··on Ask HN: Most Secure Way to Communicate?
https://chatsecure.org/

> ChatSecure is a free and open source messaging app that features OMEMO encryption and OTR encryption over XMPP. You can connect to your existing Google accounts or create new accounts on public XMPP servers (including via Tor), or even connect to your own server for extra security.

> Unlike other apps that keep you stuck in their walled garden, ChatSecure is fully interoperable with other clients that support OMEMO or OTR and XMPP, such as Conversations (Android), CoyIM (Desktop), and more.

DerekBickerton··on Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
I liken this to a sesame seed bun manufacturer. After some experimentation, they realize that shaving roughly 10 sesame seeds from each bun means they save one cent every 100 buns. They continue to sell the buns at the normal price and consumers are none the wiser: After all, who's going to notice 10 sesame seeds missing?

But the sesame seed bun manufacturer continues the experiment. They continue to remove the seeds, making small savings each time, until eventually: they just start selling buns with no sesame seeds. The bun sells for the same price as the seeded one. But the core value prop has been lost due to greed. Exactly what's happening here at Google.

DerekBickerton··on Click (2016)
Does Brave still show the 'Brave' string in the useragent? In the past it did, meaning it was another data point used to fingerprint.
DerekBickerton··on Click (2016)
Browses in Lynx[0]. Sees nothing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

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