HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Dumbdo

194 karma · joined December 18, 2017

submissionscomments
Dumbdo··on Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement
This reads like it's straight from the comment section of a Facebook post and is low quality even for HN's recent discussion culture.
Dumbdo··on Meta prohibited from using personal data for advertisement
I'll bait, even though this is quite obvious a low-effort comment without any basis. If you would have read the article, you could have noted the following:

> Max Schrems: "The penalty will go to Ireland - the State that has taken Meta's side and delayed enforcement for more than four years. This case will likely be appealed by Meta, leading to more costs for noyb."

So: No, the money does not go to the ominous "EU leadership", but rather to Ireland, the country which already profits from being a tax and law heaven for Meta and other companies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven

Dumbdo··on Bosch opens German chip plant
But BSH is a direct child company of Bosch, you can even get those products for a discount as a (automotive) Bosch employee. Most Bosch divisions are separate child companies.

It's just that BSH is very small part of Bosch compared to the automotive parts of Bosch.

Dumbdo··on Bosch opens German chip plant
> Not being a public company means nobody cares about quarterly results.

And this is why I like Bosch so much (as an employee for a very similar amount of time). The working climate in most places is relaxed compared to most competitors and there's less focus on looking great in random metrics every quarter, which makes actually doing your work easier.

> The downside is that Bosch cannot get big cash infusions quickly. In case of a pandemic, this is an additional risk. Worked out though.

Yep, it actually worked out much better than anticipated. They were able to generate a free cash flow of 5 billion Euro. AFAIK that was mainly because Bosch has a very good reputation of being financially stable. (Here is the source in corporate speech https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/bosch-stays-on...)

Btw, I remember your nickname from your lobsters post about software architecture. Pretty cool to see fellow Boschlers active here or on lobsters!

Dumbdo··on Fastly Outage
> Or outages are so rare that it’s not worth the trouble?

This, I can't remember the last Fastly outage in this dimension, so the time spent on setting up a secondary server serving your assets is probably not really worth it for small-medium companies. Although i'd think otherwise for a company like Shopify.

Dumbdo··on Send: A Fork of Mozilla's Firefox Send
There's also https://github.com/schollz/croc which is a very simple P2P CLI transfer tool.
Dumbdo··on LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online
That's definitely not true. Most hidden service use some darknet-specific captchas nowadays. Just open the next best darknet market or simply forum and you'll see what I mean.
Dumbdo··on EU preparing legal case against AstraZeneca over vaccine shortfalls
> for health reasons

I can relate to that, which is also a reason why I now _try_ to consume weekly newspapers (like the linked "Die Zeit") instead of the daily/hourly short-lived news. In my experience the latter tend to report more about "drama" and focus more on negative things, exactly like you said.

I also saw your remark in the other chain:

> I was referring more to the discourse, which seems to be about heightening nationalistic sentiments by pitting governments against each other fighting over a small stockpile

And that also makes sense. I'd say that's something especially prominent nowadays due to Brexit. The amount of news highlighting the failures of the EU certainly got an uptick in the UK and so did the news portraying UK's vaccine import as "egoistic" in the German media. There are certainly more shades to that, but it's pretty obvious from the newspapers as well that the EU and UK are just frustrated with each other currently.

Dumbdo··on EU preparing legal case against AstraZeneca over vaccine shortfalls
From my personal experience (at least the German) media focuses on that as well. I read a lot of articles on how the companies are working to scale the output up. One good and recent example is this article (paywalled) https://www.zeit.de/2021/15/biontech-werk-marburg-corona-imp...
Dumbdo··on EU preparing legal case against AstraZeneca over vaccine shortfalls
Where do you get that from? There's a huge effort to scale up the production up, which you can see by the weekly increasing output for example of Biontech [0]. Discussing one thing doesn't exclude taking care of another.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-bionte...

Dumbdo··on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
In the follow up chain it was stated that some of their patches made it to stable: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH%2F8jcoC1ffuksrf@kroah.c...

Can someone who's more invested into kernel devel find them and analyze their impact? That sounds pretty interesting to me.

Edit: This is the patch reverting all commits from that mail domain: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210421130105.1226686-1-gregkh...

Edit 2: Now that the first responses to the reversion are trickling in, some merged patched were indeed discovered to be malicious, like the following. Most of them seem to be fine though or at least non malicious. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/78ac6ee8-8e7c-bd4c-a3a7-5a90c7c...

Dumbdo··on Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. As described in the article, you can avoid this by hiding your "last seen" status.

But why use the "last seen" feature, if WhatsApp also has an "online" indicator? Funnily enough, that one can't be disabled and is visible to everyone! That has been criticized for over 5 years now, with no reaction from whatsapp/FB.

There was even a similar tool back in 2016 which used this "online" indicator instead, called WhatsSpy [0]. It's no longer maintained, but you can see screenshots of it on this old German article [1] or you might be able to find English articles as well.

I don't know of any current tool which does this, but I'd guess there are a few out there, since it's so easy to do and can't be prevented.

[0] https://github.com/jorik041/WhatsSpy-Public

[1] https://www.heise.de/security/meldung/WhatsSpy-Beliebige-Wha...

Dumbdo··on A Statement on Recent Events Between Signal and the Anti-Censorship Community
Do you have a source for that?
Dumbdo··on 20% of requests for Wikimedia Commons are for one image of a flower
And that comment was removed by the author a few minutes ago.
Dumbdo··on Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal
On the other hand Signal is encouraged by people like Edward Snowden (who I assume is paranoid enough about American big corps). The clients are open source and feature a strong E2EE, which is called the Signal protocol and is used by many other clients nowadays because it has such a good reputation. There are lot of efforts to reduce metadata further.

Just dismissing it as "smells funny" is not a valid criticism.

Dumbdo··on System separation in the Continental Europe Synchronous Area on 8 January 2021
> There was no blackout _yet_, but it was very close.

Where do you get that from? None of the sources reported a close blackout, as far as I understood it there was a lot of emergency capacity left. We weren't even in the emergency frequency range, as the other commenter pointed out.

Even the linked article just states that those interventions got more often after shutting down coal+nuclear, but it's not critical, it _only_ costs money to compensate the operators: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redispatch_(Stromnetz)

It's probably much less money than all the nuclear subsidies.

Dumbdo··on Grindr to be fined almost €10M over GDPR complaint
It was founded by Max Schrems, whom some of you might now for his lawsuits against Facebook a few years back, which ended the EU-US Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield data trade agreements.

It's mainly EU-centric which might be the reason why people here haven't heard of it before.

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

Dumbdo··on GitHub Stale Bots – A False Economy
I assume they do that do avoid comments on old issues. If they are already using bots like that they are probably barely able to respond to new issues, so comments on old issues will never be read anyways. By forcing users to open new issues, it increases the chance for replies.

That's at least what I understood from bigger repositories. It's not great and most maintainers are aware of the several shortcomings of that practive, but especially in huge repositories there are so many new (and sometimes low effort) issues daily that some maintainers are simply overwhelmed.

Dumbdo··on Signal AppImage for Linux
> simple way to get something running where I could easily onboard friends/family

He's not talking about himself, he's talking about (non-IT) friends and family. Most of them probably would be barely able to find the register dialog on HN, that's at least what I would say about my non tech-savy friends. A good chunk of them doesn't even have a PC.

For those people, Signal is optimal. Its onboarding and usage is a lot easier than Matrix.

Dumbdo··on Signal AppImage for Linux
Not exactly sure what you are talking about. People are fleeing from Whatsapp because it's owned by Facebook (which has one of the worst privacy reputations), because it's closed source and because facebook can replace your E2EE private key if they want so the E2EE is pretty useless. Facebook could also use the metadata if they want, which is pretty valuable.

Signal on the other hand is a nonprofit run by trusted people like Moxie Marlinspike, it's accessible to casual (non-IT) users as well (unlike XMPP) and it's fully open-source. It also minimizes metadata, like with the Sealed Sender functionality.

Dumbdo··on Signal AppImage for Linux
Because in contrast to Matrix it looks much more accessible to the average user. Not all of my friends are in IT and want to/are able to use matrix.

Signal is also nonprofit, fully opensource and minimizes metadata to a minimal amount (e.g. [0]), so it might not be as good as Matrix, but it's certainly not as bad as Whatsapp.

[0] https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

Dumbdo··on The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen
I'm sorry, but where did you get that information from? The FAQ only states:

> Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive.

That makes sense, why would you re-encrypt the messages with the end-to-end-key which is individual for each chat, if you could simply use a symmetric encryption for backups?

So the statement

> It is encrypted with a per user key known to WhatsApp.

could still hold true, there's no information contrary to that in the FAQ (but no information indicating another kind of encryption either).

Dumbdo··on Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
Not the OP, but I'd say noisetorch already works pretty good for that use case. Especially with the recent additions of pre-selecting the last device and stuff like that, I really appreciate those minor QOL improvements.

If I compare it to how RTX voice works, it's _slightly_ more complicated to setup (currently no distribution through standard package managers/simply downloading a file and clicking it to start everything) and it doesn't autostart like RTX voice does on windows startup. But jugding from your issues [0] I understand the decision and I'll set it up manually.

It might be an idea to allow for autostart for users who don't care about the CPU impact because their CPUs are big enough or whatever.

Nevertheless, your solution is actually very close to what OP is describing: "install an app and click a button to turn on". So thanks for maintaining, I use it daily!

[0] https://github.com/lawl/NoiseTorch/issues/6

Dumbdo··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2021)
This is such a cool idea and a job offering that feels like it was written by somehow who loves his job. Definitely saving this <3
Dumbdo··on Show HN: Unclack – a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type
For me noisetorch [0] (based on RNNoise [1][2]) works pretty good. I'm using RTX Voice while I'm working on Windows and noisetorch while working on manjaro.

RTX Voice seems to work a bit better, but noisetorch compares really well to it. I have a microphone which has static noise and is not really mechanical decoupled from my table. Both applications are good at cancelling that kind of noise.

Noisetorch is a bit more focused on suppressing noise while you're not talking, which is the use case of the posted article. RTX Voice is better at suppressing noise while talking, which you can hear in Nvidias demos as well.

[0] https://github.com/lawl/NoiseTorch

[1] https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice/

[2] https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/

Dumbdo··on Evidence on Poverty Traps from Rural Bangladesh [pdf]
Interesting strawman. There are a lot of other ways to control inheritance than separating children from their parents.
Dumbdo··on Playing chess is a life lesson in concentration
As someone who is following chess more intensively for over two years now, I wouldn't necessarily say it's just Netflix.

With the pandemic there was a huge influx of new chess players. You can see it in [0], the player count rose over 50% from February to April.

After that chess suddenly got popular on Twitch as well, which I would attribute mostly to GM Hikaru, who played chess together with well known streamers such as xqc. That rise is well visible in June/July [1] in the twitch chess category.

Queen's Gambit was just recently released (end of October). This of course led to chess being even more popular, but I wouldn't attribute all the chess posts to it. I maybe would even go so far and attribute it partly to frequency illusion [2], now that you're watching out more for chess posts I assume.

[0] Games played per month on lichess (open source chess server): https://database.lichess.org/

[1] https://twitchtracker.com/games/743

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Dumbdo··on GNU Octave 6.1.0
A lot of companies in the (German) automobile industry rely heavily on Matlab and its toolboxes, so I'd assume that people like you are wanted there as well.
Dumbdo··on Apache OpenMeetings – Video chat, messaging, white board, doc editing and more
To whomever downvoted this: I'd assume that you misunderstood this comment. How I understood this comment is that there's no easy or defined way to contribute UI/UX improvements. For code improvements it's pretty clear, but the whole issue/PR workflow can't be applied 1:1 to the UI/UX process works from what I've seen. So I'd definitely agree with that sentiment.
Dumbdo··on IoT Unravelled Part 1: It's a Mess but Then There's Home Assistant
Alternatively Homeassistant also offers an integration for Node Red, which feels a bit odd to work with at first but I learned to love it more and more. I never really bothered to learn Homeassistants YAML automation syntax.

https://nodered.org/

Page 1 of 2Next →