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Tumblr is not NSFW content friendly, which is a slippery slope. I don't want my edgy meme taken down or censored, I would much rather run my own server that I control and having it not subject to arbitrary value judgements about what I post.

DerekBickertonon Mastering DOM manipulation with vanilla JavaScript

For syntactic DOM manipulation sugar I use Cash[0]

[0] https://kenwheeler.github.io/cash/

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: What should I do with my leftover bandwidth?

You could be a CDN (Content Delivery Network) and act as a point-of-presence (PoP) for the country you're in. Mirror Linux distro ISOs, offer the ability for netizens to download offline versions of Wikipedia which are over ~50GB sans images.

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: What are the best services for sending texts to real numbers?

There's a list of some services here besides Twilio: https://www.producthunt.com/search?q=SMS

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: What are the best services for sending texts to real numbers?

SMS is a dated technology and I despise services that use SMS, especially for OTP / PINs used to sign in. SIM cards can be 'swapped' by bad actors all too easily. I understand you want to stop abuse, but there's other ways to do this like CAPTCHAs or putting your site on Cloudflare and filtering out rogue/malicious IPs like VPNs/Tor, or doing things like rate-limiting.

DerekBickertonon The .ing top-level domain

I've reached generic TLD fatigue. There's a new one each week. I regularly buy domains with OVH since they have a wide array of TLDs at a good price[0]. Over the years I let many of them expire because either 1) I let my dreams die, or 2) I couldn't afford to renew it. Mostly it's because I let my dreams die, not financial shortcomings though.

[0] https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/domains/tld/

DerekBickertonon The .ing top-level domain

Awesome https://who.is/whois/dat.ing

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: How do you build your personal brand on Twitter?

A cold start is the hardest part. It's important to discern what part of your content is noise or genuinely helpful, but if it falls on deaf ears, that gets annoying, and I know your pain. It's not enough just to 'engage' and follow interesting people, there's a whole art to Twitter that I won't discuss here, as its too lengthy (and I haven't had my coffee).

DerekBickertonon Russia Blocks 167 VPNs, Steps Up OpenVPN and WireGuard Disruption

> In addition to driving out non-compliant VPN providers and using regular means to block domains and IP addresses

How do they get the point-of-presence VPN IPs? Does Russia go to the OpenVPN/Wireguard page of VPN services and download each country config file and build a naughty list of VPN IPs?

DerekBickertonon The costs of microservices (2020)

Separation of Concerns as a Service

DerekBickertonon The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

Their lists feature is a massively undervalued feature. Pretty certain if lists was deprecated I would disband Twitter.

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: Please advice How do I crawl out of ADHD hellhole?

> my peers from college are senior software engineers, my relatives are all in high places in big companies

Comparison is the thief of joy. I re-frame any FOMO (Fear of missing out) as JOMO (Joy of missing out).

The only person I compare myself to, is the person I was yesterday. (Have I improved?).

DerekBickertonon It seems Gen Z is just fine with parents knowing where they are all the time

Also a company that could get breached and the whereabouts of all the children surveilled is public knowledge.

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: I've never had a consistent handle. How did you maintain your nym?

> Am I just terrible at opsec

I divide my digital life into two realms. Pre-Snowden and Post-Snowden. Pre-Snowden I did not know about opsec or how valuable it was. Post Snowden I am more careful and regularly spin up new handles so that I do not have a single repository with all my info on there. There are types who prefer to use the same handle everywhere but overlook the risks of doing that.

DerekBickertonon Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

And all this privacy tooling is a bandaid solution to the problem of privacy in the digital realm. It addresses problems after the fact rather than addressing the underlying symptom which is dragnet surveillance, surveillance capitalism, and people farming / i.e using people as a datapoint to power an AD engine.

DerekBickertonon In the search for alien life, should we be looking for artificial intelligence?

I think advanced alien life exists in different dimensions we can't access yet. The 3D plane is boring for them, so they live on higher dimensions, unseen.

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: How to monitor Darkweb if credentials of our SaaS product are leaked?

If you have the time, you could download a few breach corpuses and do a manual search for creds. There's even a few clearnet breach forums that don't exclusively operate on the darkweb.

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: Is it just me or has the Gmail spam filter stopped working?

I treat my spam folder as my 'second inbox'. We even get services asking users to 'check your spam folder if you didn't get our message'.

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: Do you consider HN Social Media?

> Social Media sites curate what people see based on their personality profile

Depends on whether you use the algorithmic feeds or not. I have to mentally resist the temptation to browse Twitter's 'For You' section, and I would much rather use their lists feature, where I can browse what actually interests me instead of reading what the Kardashians are up to now, or some gore-fest about the Russo-Ukraine war in my feed.

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: Is this backup solution fine?

I find most of my photos to be cruft, and take time to delete photos that are no longer relevant, or have lost their initial value. I don't take many photos, I'm talking about memes and interesting things I found online. Over time these build up if you don't take the time to delete most of them. Then when I reach ~1000 photos in my camera roll, I just put them in cold storage on Amazon Glacier and forget about them.

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: Best way to find dupe photos and vids?

https://fixthephoto.com/best-duplicate-video-finder.html

https://duplicate-media-finder.kdo-rg.com/

DerekBickertonon Mercenary mayhem: A technical analysis of Intellexa's PREDATOR spyware

> block their IoC domains

And IoC raw IPs. Although that could break the web as IPV4 addresses change hands all the time, so you could overblock.

DerekBickertonon Psychedelics open your brain. You might not like what falls in

> The experience was quite pleasurable until she started to recall memories of her emotionally abusive father, who had an alcohol addiction. In the weeks following her psilocybin exposure, she had vivid and painful recollections of her childhood, which precipitated an acute depression.

This is what psychedelics can do, they can resurface painful memories and trauma. It's up to the person to (soberly) address this with counseling. I try to see this as a positive thing. If people bottle up trauma it could ruin their whole life since it's never dealt with or addressed.

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: Is there a technology you loved but had to abandon?

> The JS ecosystem is a hack on top of a hack

Created in 10 days by Eich!

https://thenewstack.io/brendan-eich-on-creating-javascript-i...

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: Content vs. Design: What Matters More?

There's design, and then there's aesthetics, and there's a good balance of both. Too much focus on aesthetics and we get garish monstrosities.

DerekBickertonon UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

I hope other countries don't copy the UK. With the Internet we have choice of jurisdiction and can happily avoid any cryptography projects operating out of the UK. I don't care if WhatsApp will become wiretapped in the UK. My beloved Matrix operates out of there, that's what concerns me.

And I have to use WhatsApp because of its network effect (all my friends and family are on it). I have tried recruiting them on to Signal and Matrix, but the mental fatigue for them of doing that; means I have only have three friends on Signal, and ~100s stuck on shitty WhatsApp.

Hopefully the more tech savvy friends of mine will ditch WhatsApp and choose Signal. And I'm not saying Signal doesn't have its issues (meatspace identity tied to your number etc) but it's far superior to WhatsApp which collects too much metadata like, it knows your contacts, when you talk to them, IP and other metadata.

Does anyone else have this issue of recruiting friends and family onto more privacy-respecting messenger apps?

DerekBickertonon Ask HN: Is it possible that ChatGPT is not creative at all

Glad you brought up "everything is a remix". As an artist, I have learned to remix, but at least put my own spin on it so it's not a complete rip. Then I can live with myself and I'm not some plagiarist.

DerekBickertonon Apple Launches New 6TB and 12TB iCloud+ Plans

That's a lot of photos and videos pushed to their services.