Hacker News Reader

__HYdeon An update on last week's customer shutdown incident

Yes, DO have stated that how they viewed credits was a mistake and that they will be addressing it.

__HYdeon The avocado is an evolutionary anachronism

Thanks for sharing this. That article is very interesting. I only thought about the fact that squirrels were a native species and didn't consider the fact that cities are not "natural".

__HYdeon Global recession fears grow as factory activity shrinks

> I saw like 10+ people deciding to switch from "superphones" down to mid-range models

Mid-range phones now cost as much as previous "superphones". The iPhone launched at $499($615 after inflation) and the latest iPhone XS launched at $999.

__HYdeon The avocado is an evolutionary anachronism

In what sense did humans import squirrels to the bay area?

__HYdeon Password expiration is dead, long live passwords

The primary benefit of Diceware over a "random" string of characters is that it is easy to remember and truly random. With a password manager you don't need to remember the password and it will be generated truly randomly. A string of 11 random alphanumeric charatcers has more entropy than a 5 word diceware passphrase with the added benefit that it is less to type if you need to do so manually. But diceware can be a good idea for creating the master password for your password manager and if you do that you should probably use a 10 word passphrase rather than 5.

__HYdeon Google/Oracle’s $9B Copyright Case Could Be Headed for the Supreme Court

In that it is GPL+Link Exception licensed. The copyright still belongs to Oracle. See this[0] example:

> This code is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only

[0] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk6/jdk6/jdk/file/tip/src/share/...

__HYdeon Deposit of rare-earth minerals off Japan could supply world for centuries (2018)

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/31/258687278/a-be...

> Simon didn't see the growing population as a catastrophic problem. He explained that we are not like any other species. We have an economy and markets. So, according to Simon, if the world demands more oil, the price of oil will go up, and there will be an incentive to find more, or find an alternative.

> Simon proposed that they bet on what would happen to the price of five metals — copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten — over a decade.

> And the logic was that these metals were essential for all kinds of stuff — electronics, cars, buildings. So, if Ehrlich was right, more people on the planet would mean we would start running out of stuff, and the price of these things should go up.

> Those next 10 years, from 1980 to 1990, crept by. The world population grew by 800 million people. Then it was 1990. And they tallied it up. Simon, the economist, decisively won. Prices for the five metals went down by an average of 50 percent.

> One of the reasons the prices dropped was just what Simon said. The catastrophe Ehrlich was predicting just did not happen. People invented substitutes, like companies switching from aluminum to plastic for packaging.

__HYdeon CIA’s Latest Layer: An Onion Site

> ciadotgov4sjw...

cia.gov for Social Justice Warriors. Pretty sure he was just making a joke and only the first 9 characters were actually being tried for.

__HYdeon A map of the US where city names are replaced by most Wikipedia’ed resident

Probably because his residence is listed as "Bel Air, Los Angeles, California" on his Wikipedia page.

__HYdeon Switch from Chrome to Firefox

There are forks such as ungoogled-chromium but why would you use them when you could just use Firefox?

__HYdeon Chrome extension manifest v3 proposal: comment from uBlock Origin author

uBO definitely seems like it would have bad search engine discoverability.

__HYdeon Response to false statements on surveillance made by Martin Steiger

> can be compelled to release it

Yes, but the point that they are contending is whether they _voluntarily_ provide this data.

__HYdeon Response to false statements on surveillance made by Martin Steiger

Which statement in their transparency report corroborates it?

__HYdeon Response to false statements on surveillance made by Martin Steiger

They have done several things including:

- enabled IP logging against a specific user account

- disabled an account and rendered assistance

- comply with the data request, to the extent that it is possible, given our cryptography.

The unknowns are what assistance they render and what extent is possible for them to comply with data requests. They have complied with requests without court orders in cases when they believed a court order was inevitable. They have also delayed reporting incidents at the request of authorities in order to not endanger victims.

https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/

__HYdeon Waterfox Browser

If you add www[0] to the beginning of the org website it redirects you to the net website[1].

The downloads on both sites are hosted on the same site but they do point to different versions[2][3].

Both pages link to the same BuyMeACoffee page[4].

The GitHub repository has a link to the net[5].

But the GitHub profile of the developer links the the org[6].

Very old versions[7] and the current version[8] of the wikipedia page list the org as the official website.

The org seems to have been the site for the project since as early as 2012 according to the wayback[9].

However the net doesn't seem to have been associated with the project (or anything) before 2019[10].

The most recent crawls of the org got 301 redirected to the net[11].

[0] https://www.waterfoxproject.org

[1] https://www.waterfox.net/

[2] https://storage-waterfox.netdna-ssl.com/releases/linux64/ins...

[3] https://storage-waterfox.netdna-ssl.com/releases/linux64/ins...

[4] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/waterfox

[5] https://github.com/MrAlex94/Waterfox

[6] https://github.com/MrAlex94

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Waterfox&oldid=59...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Waterfox&oldid=89...

[9] http://web.archive.org/web/20120117003924/http://waterfoxpro...

[10] http://web.archive.org/web/20190418195027/https://www.waterf...

[11] http://web.archive.org/web/20190527072632/https://waterfoxpr...

__HYdeon Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain

> Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society

This has not been true historically. Standard Oil was not "bad for society".

__HYdeon If the number of children is not growing, why is the population still increasing

> I don't think there is a hard limit on number of people.

Humans through our metabolic process generate waste heat and Earth can only radiate so much so that does put a hard cap, albeit one much higher than people generally image, but a cap nonetheless. If we assume only the heat generated by our metabolic process that puts the limit over 250 trillion[0] but if we account for energy for food and industrial purposes that puts the limit closer to 10 trillion[1].

[0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19441/what...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAJeYe-abUA

__HYdeon Adventures with ffmpeg and color ranges

http://archive.fo/K5Fpv

> .IS domain will likely stop working soon[0]

[0] https://blog.archive.today/

__HYdeon Police in Canada Are Tracking People’s ‘Negative’ Behavior in a ‘Risk’ Database

The job of the police is to enforce laws. Whether this helps you is ancillary.

__HYdeon Hotelling’s Game, or Why Gas Stations Have Competitors Nearby (2008)

How often do gas stations move locations?

__HYdeon World Population Growth

We don't need to do that. Earth could support a population of a trillion humans so a few 10s of billions is of little concern.

__HYdeon Google faces first investigation by its European lead authority over GDPR

Use PaleMoon, Basilisk, or IceCat.

__HYdeon Can we all stop using Medium now?

What if they host their own shit on a VPS but the hosting provider bans them. What if their domain name gets revoked by the registrar?

__HYdeon Japan plans to create 10B 14-digit phone numbers with 5G era approaching

If you count Chinese who are using Pinyin that jumps to being a majority using latin.

__HYdeon Fast Compilers for Fast Programs

You could try compiling with and without `-gcflags '-N -l'`

`-N` disables optimization and `-l` disables in-lining.

I also found this[0] page which lists some optimizations done by the compiler.

[0] https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CompilerOptimizations

edit: You can see what the compiler emits as assembly code with `-gcflags '-S'` so you can compare the optimized vs unoptimized assembly.

__HYdeon Microsoft is going to ship a full Linux kernel in Windows 10

NT can not run Linux binaries. That is why Microsoft are now shipping a full Linux kernel for WSL 2. WSL 1 translated Linux syscalls to NT in the same way that WINE does in the reverse.

__HYdeon What's new in Ubuntu 19.04

Just one data point but compare the RAM usages in this comparison: http://archive.fo/eB8If

__HYdeon B.C. introduces law to require cars, trucks sold by 2040 be zero emission

Hasty and radical changes will certainly lead to even more harm.

__HYdeon Ford CEO says the company 'overestimated' self-driving cars

"Survey: Self-Driving Cars Need to Reduce Traffic Deaths by at Least 75% to Stay on the Roads"

https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/international/2018/06/01/...

__HYdeon VPN – Very Precarious Narrative

These past few months I have noticed several popular posts dissuading people from using VPNs. What do these people have to gain from people _not_ using VPNs?