Hacker News Reader

NGRhodeson Flipper One – we need your help

Which would scope creep anyway to a box of knives.

NGRhodeson UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub

Thank you for sharing. I work in a central RSE team and have raised this topic to the team, with a view of bringing attention to this issue and better educating our researchers (as part of our training offerings and documentation).

NGRhodeson Ubuntu 26.04

I pick the software best for my uses and then look at which desktop supports that software and workflows around them the best. Not always clear/clean selections possible in my situation - I've a jumble of GUI designs and frameworks used, so I favour a more agnostic desktop.

NGRhodeson They See Your Photos

I uploaded a picture with poor lighting and wearing dark cloths. Got almost everything wrong... .... Reading, coding, martial arts, substance abuse, illegal hacking, violent thoughts

NGRhodeson The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

This exact dynamic exists in the UK too.

Lifelong and degenerative conditions.

They have full access to bank accounts, revoked driving license, direct line to my consultants.

Every form filled, every document provided.

They still call to ask if my genes have fixed themselves.

Not sure what verbal confirmation they're expecting - "no, I made it all up"?

Edit: exact words were "Do you continue to have <REDACTED>" where <REDACTED> is a genetic disease.

Edit edit: I feel sorry for those having to follow these scripts.

NGRhodeson What came after the 486?

I remember the torment of trying to choose between a P90 or a Cyrix133 and compatible motherboards at similar price combinations.

NGRhodeson I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

One thing people underestimate is how brittle digital identity actually is in the UK.

There isnt a single identity. Theres a loose federation of databases (banks, CRAs, telecoms, electoral roll, etc.).

There are multiple operational definitions of "name": legal name, common name, known-as name, card name, account display name. None is universally canonical. Theres no statutory hierarchy that forces institutions to agree on precedence.

In the absence of a mandatory national ID, identification relies on matching across name, date of birth, and address history, which are inconsistently collected. Fuzziness is necessary for coverage, but it introduces brittleness. If a variant isnt explicitly linked as an alias, automated online checks can fail because the matching rules dont explore every permutation.

Even within a single dataset the problem doesnt disappear. Large systems such as the NHS have documented identification errors involving patients with identical names, twins at the same address, or demographic overlaps. Unique identifiers help, but operational workflows still depend on humans entering and reconciling imperfect data.

https://digital.nhs.uk/services/personal-demographics-servic...

NGRhodeson US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

i used to work, 15 years ago, on a (permissive, not covert) monitoring service for a UK national public service, the NHS spine core. We used switches to mirror ports and capture traffic in promisciouse mode on a few dozen servers split across a few datacentres that all the traffic went througg. We had certs installed to decode https. We could get enough hardware to do this step easily, but fast enough storage was an issue, we had 1 petabyte of usable storage across all sitesn that could hold a few days of content. We aimed to get this data filtered and forwarded into our central Splunk (seperate storage) and also into our bespoke dashboards within 60s. We often lagged...

NGRhodeson The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

I had a very different experience with my last MRI. I had brain slices (temporal lobe Epilepsy) and my head buzzed/vibrated and could not relax.

NGRhodeson HSBC blocks its app due to F-Droid-installed Bitwarden

Bitwarden is installed via F-Droid from the official Bitwarden repository and is a build provided directly from Bitwarden. F-Droid does not provide a build of Bitwarden.

NGRhodeson The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All

"I have nothing to hide" only makes sense if privacy and disclosure are treated as a binary. In reality, both exist on a spectrum: privacy is controlled disclosure, shaped by what is shared, with whom, at what level of detail, and under what power asymmetry.

Large surveillance systems inevitably build baselines. They don't just detect crimes; they detect patterns and anomalies relative to whatever becomes "normal".

The problem with "nothing to hide" is that it defaults to maximal disclosure. Data is persistent, aggregatable, and reinterpretable as norms and regimes change. The data doesn't.

This isn't purely individual. Your disclosures can expose others through contact graphs and inference, regardless of intent. And it doesn't matter whether the collector is the state or a company; aggregation and reuse work the same way.

NGRhodeson VS Code deactivates IntelliCode in favor of the paid Copilot

It is not possible to install proprietary Microsoft extensions using the official VSCodium builds without additional, non-default configuration.

NGRhodeson The Free Republic of Verdis

Verdis, officially the Free Republic of Verdis (Croatian: Slobodna Republika Verdis) (Serbian Cyrillic: Слободна Република Вердис) is a sovereign state located between Croatia and Serbia along the Danube river. On some maps, especially local maps, this land is known as Pocket-3.

The border meets Croatia by land and meets Serbia at the centerline of the Danube as shown on the maps of this page.

The parcel of land appeared due to an existing border dispute between Croatia and Serbia. The area had not been claimed by Croatia, Serbia, or any other state, which left the land unclaimed (terra nullius) since the Croatian War of Independence until it was proclaimed as the Free Republic of Verdis on 30 May 2019 by Daniel Jackson and his administration.

NGRhodeson Was This 18,000-Year-Old Siberian Puppy a Dog or a Wolf? (2019)

The thousands of years of selection in the Arctic shaped Huskies, not the old wolf/husky interbreeding, which only left small but distinct genetic markers. Those came from an ancient Arctic wolf that split off around the same time as the ancestors of dogs and modern wolves, which is why they still show up so clearly today.

NGRhodeson Was This 18,000-Year-Old Siberian Puppy a Dog or a Wolf? (2019)

Yes, all breeds are the same distance from the original dog/wolf split, but Huskies (northern snow dogs) are different because their lineage picked up extra genes from ancient Arctic wolves like the 35k-year-old Taimyr wolf. They also show direct continuity with ~9000 year old sled dogs from Zhokhov Island, while most modern breeds only go back a few hundred years. Add in thousands of years of breeding in isolation for Arctic work, and the functional traits that were developed over that long timespan left Huskies with more distinct genes than most other breeds.

NGRhodeson Was This 18,000-Year-Old Siberian Puppy a Dog or a Wolf? (2019)

Dogor turned out to be a wolf, not a descendant of the ancient wolf line that dogs evolved from - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogor

As a Siberian Husky owner, I find the breed’s history fascinating. Some of the theories raised in relation to Dogor, like dogs deriving from more than one wolf population, are actually true for the Siberian Husky through ancient admixture. It is one of the few breeds with clear genetic links back to Arctic wolf populations, which is why it sits closer to the early proto-dog split than nearly all modern breeds.

Dogor is not part of that lineage, but his genome supports the idea that domestication was not a single clean event. For Huskies, that complexity shows up in their temperament and working drive, much closer to their wolf ancestors than most dogs today.

NGRhodeson Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

I look forward to trying:

Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance. Stop. Move in. Stop. Pull out, track right. Stop. Center and Pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and Pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute. Go right. Stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Gimme a hard copy right there.

NGRhodeson Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years?

Also access to work: https://www.gov.uk/access-to-work.

NGRhodeson No adblocker detected

I don't even think YouTube is anywhere near the worst advert offender. My local newspaper website is stuffed full of adverts. Between a large picture, article heading and advert, you often don't see a signle line of new content above the fold on a 1080p screen.

I do not regularly visit such sites. I do unblock websites that I return to often.

NGRhodeson Apptainer: Application Containers for Linux

Scale of data we see on our HPC, it is way better performance per £/$ to use Lustre mounted over fast network. Would spend far too much time shifting data otherwise. Local storage should be used for tmp and scratch purposes.

NGRhodeson VSCodium – open-source Binaries of VSCode

  Microsoft’s vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.

  The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.

NGRhodeson Duck.ai just got a big upgrade: GPT-4o mini can now access the web

  Looking up sports scores? Curious about the latest tech news? Wondering what’s going on with that new restaurant you heard about? GPT-4o mini can now access the web, so you can get up-to-date answers directly in Duck.ai. As always, the same strong privacy protections apply: chats are anonymized via proxying, never used for AI model training, and no login required. All for free.
  
  GPT-4o mini on Duck.ai will only search the web automatically when it determines it needs to for an accurate response. But if you'd like to pull in current web information yourself — or want to double-check a response — you can click the globe icon at any time next to an answer.

NGRhodeson A letter to open-source maintainers

Some people treat all open source projects as products that they use, when many are labours of love and charity, sometimes pet projects that have become useful to [many] others. They expect product support at a business level like all the other software they use. They see the project's website as a place to get support for their product, not a place to contribute.

NGRhodeson We all took the DVD boom era for granted

I have donated hundreds to charity purchasing my used DVDs from charity shops.

NGRhodeson Grab built its own map in Southeast Asia, and is now going after Google

Nice to read they are significantly contributing back to OpenStreetMap.

NGRhodeson How to Train Yourself to Go to Sleep Earlier

I'm surprised the article did not mention speaking to a doctor about the possibility of underlying medical conditions (physical/mental health/neurological), if all suggestions fail.

NGRhodeson Ubuntu Hoping to Remove Qt 5 Before Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

I suspect that means waiting for Debian to do it.

NGRhodeson Show HN: Shimmer – ADHD-adapted body doubling

Shimmer, body doubling - inspired by the film Annihilation ?

NGRhodeson Who are AMD, Intel's new manycore monster CPUs for?

As a fresh example, we (a University) have just this month had delivered about 9000 cores (and about 80 GPUs) of machines, these are being added to our existing 6000 cores (approx 5 year old) machines. This is a modest HPC system.

NGRhodeson Microsoft Rolling Out New Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" Features for 2024

Finally decided that there are too many papercuts with WSL2. As new features and enhancements are introduced, new bugs appear at a similar rate.

This is not just me, but colleagues in the team using a mixture of personal and corporate devices encounter a similar stream of bugs. just enough to frustrate as we use WSL2 for our own work and support users.

I've yet to decide if to use VBox or go back to a Linux desktop (100% of my non admin work is Linux based, 100% of my admin work can be done through the browser).

Recently encountered issues in our team:

  - New experimental disk space reclaim feature caused WSL2 machine AND NTFS corruption. I've provided logs and others have confirmed.
  - 2 weeks ago installed docker desktop to help support a user. WSL2 will no longer (usually between 1 and 2GB) release memory or allow WSL2 to shutdown after shutdown of Docker Desktop.    
  - We still get various networking glitches with the new and old networking modes, routing and DNS issues when connected/disconnecting from VPN, IPV6, docker network access, accessing localhost web servers
  - A WSUS update deployed in April breaking WSL2 until WSL2 manually shutdown and  updated.   
  - A WSUS update requiring a restart breaking WSL2 until machine restarted.

Note everyone in the team encounters a different subset of the issues.