Hacker News Reader

akovaskion Web.dev by Google

Perhaps your browser is being directed to a page not owned by google. I don't get an SSL warning in Chrome or Firefox (Windows 10).

From the site: "With actionable guidance and analysis, web.dev helps developers like you learn and apply the web's modern capabilities to your own sites and apps."

It includes a web version of the Lighthouse website measurement tool. It also has guides for various web dev topics.

The topics can be browsed normally, but I think most users will discover topics by the measurement tool showing the user guides to improve their website.

akovaskion A Blue Pill Is Stopping HIV, World-First Study Shows

This is misleading to the point that I would consider this lying to the audience. It's just wrong to convey the data in this way. The note below the graph does not make this OK.

If anybody is interested in the actual data, I think the data is pulled from "NSW HIV Surveillance Data Reports": https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/endinghiv/Pages/tools-and-data...

akovaskion A visualization of the prime factors of the first million integers

The last image in the post, which is in section 1.3.2.2, has an image formed from random numbers. For some definition of random. I imagine you would get different results by choosing how the randomness is applied.

akovaskion Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

Agreed (not necessarily on the alpha male bit), I don't see how they can claim a causal link with just survey data. Correlation, sure, but even that's questionable with self-reported data.

akovaskion Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]

However, it is a lot more intuitive compared to gdb: Click the green arrow. Click the line you want to set a breakpoint on. See where you stopped in the same editor that you wrote the code in. Hover your mouse over variables to see their values, visually explore class and array variables. Dig down into functions that are about to be called, before you actually call them.

akovaskion US diplomats mysteriously go deaf, Cuba suspected of using sonic weapons

Wow, I've never noticed before that my phone charger makes noise when my phone is fully charged, huh. (Thankfully I can only hear it if my ear is within 1 foot of the charger.)

akovaskion Show HN: tttfi – Middleware for IFTTT

Not OP, but from googling around, it seems like that there are many stocks which offer stockholder discounts/rewards. For example, it appears that stockholders of BRK.B can get an 8% discount on Geico insurance.

akovaskion Programming with a love of the implicit

I'm not familiar with RoR, but that explicit version is hard to read. However, I think the problem with implicitness is that when it becomes wide-spread, nobody can read the code with ease (i.e. everyone made their own implicit code, and it comes together poorly). I see nothing wrong with a little bit of magic, especially if it is something you use often.

Side note: the author has a short paragraph about "simple/easy" and "complicated/hard" products, which doesn't ring true with me. I would think most people would say their software product is "complicated, but easy to use".

akovaskion How to explain zero-knowledge protocols to your children (1998) [pdf]

> Mick wants only the one reporter to be convinced that Mick knows how to pass the wall.

I can see how this could provide a justification, but this is not implied in the story at all.

akovaskion How to explain zero-knowledge protocols to your children (1998) [pdf]

Why wouldn't you just record Mick going in one direction and coming out the other? I had to reread it to understand that they weren't doing that. (I get that that is how this ties things together, but from a story perspective it feels like a weird move to me.)

edit: Or is there an implication that Mick may have also faked it?

akovaskion What Happens When You Send a Zero-Day to a Bank?

Right, most public computers I've seen would be trivial to bug with a key logger. Though with 2fa, I suppose it wouldn't be quite as bad (but then again, those using public computers might not be using 2fa).

akovaskion Burger King TV Ad Asks, Hoping Google Home Devices Answer

> What happens next time FBI decides it wants google (et. all) to leave its device "always awake" on some person of interest ?

Do you not own a smartphone that could conceivably be compromised in the same way?

akovaskion NunuStudio: a browser-based IDE for 3D and VR applications

I believe they meant "runs directly on the browser without the need for additional plugins by using WebGL and WebVR".

akovaskion Nintendo Switch review: pure potential

Ah, I didn't even think about the height of the thing. That is curious.

akovaskion Nintendo Switch review: pure potential

Surely they made it bulky so that it doesn't fall over.

akovaskion The world's deepest ocean trenches are packed with pollution

Just for reference, what is the size of your family and what we the sizes of the garbage bags?

akovaskion Show HN: How to write a tiny compiler

Why don't you compile to a language that you know already or that is easy to understand, and then compile that? (Ex. C, Java, C#, C++, go)

akovaskion Whiteboard sticker for your laptop

You could also use the front-facing camera on a phone as a mirror in a pinch.

akovaskion How Antarctic bases went from wooden huts to sci-fi chic

Are the building stilts for some kind of insulation from the ice or for some other reason?

akovaskion UW engineers achieve Wi-Fi at 10,000 times lower power

As far as I can tell, it seems to work the same way that passive RFID tags work. Pretty neat, I guess.

akovaskion Who Will Command the Robot Armies?

However, the robots were doomed by their limited intelligence and their fervor to produce additional robots. The robots eventually depleted all available resources, thus making the planet uninhabitable for themselves.

akovaskion Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, with Horrifying Book Curses

  One newsletter he did slay
  but two rose up from where the first one lay
  two, then four, then eight and more
  A mere human cannot defeat this beast
  "Unsubscribe" he set the auto-reply
  but thousands, no millions, no billions, no trillions
  of newsletters filled up his dying inbox
  Perhaps the first one wasn't so bad?

akovaskion Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter [pdf]

There are plenty of digestible summaries of the ACA online[0]. I think it has some things that are very beneficial to the American population, like (trying) to raise Medicaid and offering subsidies for those just above the Medicaid cut-off. Also barring insurers from providing coverage for those with pre-existing conditions[1] and barring lifetime limits.

Not saying the ACA is flawless, but I'm not confident that Trump and the GOP are going to improve the situation in the long-term. ("cutting the red tape at the FDA" might help a bit, though) It's still not clear exactly what actions they will take.

[0]http://kff.org/health-reform/fact-sheet/summary-of-the-affor... [1]http://kff.org/health-reform/fact-sheet/obamacare-and-you-if...

akovaskion Show HN: Accelerating SHA256 by 100x in Golang on ARM

Judging from the source code[1] in the author's repository, it is the latter. (what I see is: perform 96 instructions, then subtract 64 from the message length, and repeat until the message length is 0)

Intel seems to be the same way [2](2013) - i.e. looping over multiple instructions per 64 byte block.

[1] https://github.com/minio/sha256-simd/blob/master/sha256block... [2] https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sha-extensio...

akovaskion New Cities

NYC has a population density of 10,831 people/km^2.

San Francisco has a population density of 7,124 people/km^2.

I'm not sure what point you were trying to make, but I don't think anybody really wants to plan the rural areas of the US in the image of Hong Kong.

akovaskion The Japanese Iced Coffee Method (2012)

The font on the site is the same size as the font on hacker news (on my computer, Windows 10, chrome 51).

akovaskion The New World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness

Is there an explanation for the large hotspot to the Northwest of Bismarck, ND?

akovaskion Physics Makes Aging Inevitable, Not Biology

The obvious solution is to replace all the water in your body with something else.

akovaskion The Advantage of Abundant Thinking

I would also recommend sleeping for the sleep deprived (I don't even meditate), but I just wanted a clarification on the idea that GGP couldn't find 15 minutes in a day to do something.

akovaskion The Advantage of Abundant Thinking

I don't really understand how your baby makes it difficult to take 15 minutes to meditate, because I would imagine you were sleeping in increments longer than 15 minutes. So why is this? Is the baby waking up when you wake up?