Hacker News Reader

alphabet9000on Add dark mode to your sites, or at least let the browsers do it for you

I gave up trying to use dark themes in the browser due to the 'white flash' bug in chrome thats happened on and off for years.

here's a bug report about the issue from 2008 [0] and video of it happening from 2020 [1]. it's intolerable with dark theme stuff.

[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=311

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5sRlVwvQDE

alphabet9000on SproutLife – Evolving version of Conway’s Game of Life

It can be very rewarding to jump right into a new creative project (e.g. cellular automata, drawing, etc) without any knowledge of what's already been done before. When you approach a something from a clean state perspective, you won't have any references of what's what, and all of your discoveries will be the result of your own creative experimentation. If at some point you feel like you've reached a limit to discovering things, you will naturally become curious about what other people have done -- to see what else is out there that you didn't find on your own. Only then do you see the sort of stuff that's already out there, and it's way more exciting, because you appreciate it how difficult it was for others to reach unfamiliar states you didn't reach on your own.

That same bewilderment might not happen if you read about all the amazing things that already exist before you even get started. If you read or see too much of what's already been done first, you might just end up feeling starting from scratch is boring, because it isn't as interesting as the more advanced stuff other people had already done.

alphabet9000on If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)

I remember seeing this page back in the day and always thought it was really funny how it describes itself as being 'A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system' - you scroll over a bit and it points to "1 Pixel" for scale - but the "pixel" it points to is actually two pixels [0].

[0] https://i.jollo.org/MZosAzpl.png

alphabet9000on Covid Vaccine Websites Violate Disability Laws, Create Inequity for the Blind

interesting, i didn't know that - thanks. My comment about the site requiring javascript stems from my thinking how needlessly complicated the entire site seemed in general, beyond accessibility.

Last year, I would try and open the Louisiana department of health website to look at covid statistics, and it would require about 70MB to load a small little box that displayed some numbers. The popular ArcGIS covid dashboard by Johns Hopkins was the same situation - a single page app that took tens of megabytes to load and was very slow - to the point where it would crash on my computer. It's made me think that specifically for issues of public health and public safety, a priority should be placed on making sure those websites load quickly and run smoothly.

Edit - I misspoke when I said it needed 70MB to load - it was 9+ MB of data transferred, 70+ MB resources. Here's a video I saved of the page loading from last year [0]

[0] http://telnet.asia/arcgisla.mp4

alphabet9000on Covid Vaccine Websites Violate Disability Laws, Create Inequity for the Blind

The vaccines.gov website's Vaccine Finder requires javascript to run. It could have been served using HTML and a <form>.

alphabet9000on Renoise – A DAW with a tracker-like interface

still legend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGK-EzEa45U

alphabet9000on SNES – Super Mario World Widescreen

As a technical novelty, it is interesting, but I personally don't like the spirit of such a project. I opened up a demo video of the gameplay, and started to 'see' things in the distance that wouldn't normally be seen - things that are meant to be hidden at first, and then 'stumbled' into as you advance a little bit, adding to the sense of mystery and adventure.

alphabet9000on After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'

yes, it is really nice. personally, i hope "the web" will experience a renaissance over the next couple of years - with sites becoming as minimal as possible - like this text-only NPR page, where the only thing that matters is 'the content', without any distractions (social media buttons, "5 min. read", etc). All client-side SPA javascript libraries will be abandoned in favor of serving pure raw HTML (preferably with zero javascript and as little, if any, css as possible). my dream is to find people that have 'bloated' websites and to be hired to convert their pages into pages that look like they were made by hand in notepad.

alphabet9000on Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

I'm just curious -- are there any other commonly used HTTP headers that include the characters "()" at the end?

alphabet9000on Practical Reed-Solomon for Programmers

i used a reed solomon library recently in a project that encodes and decodes binary data stored in a video channel. i added it to compensate for compression/noise introduced in the re-encoding process on third party sites like youtube. here's an example of what it looks like: [0]

[0] https://cicada.jollo.org/xg/sp.mp4

alphabet9000on Ask HN: Why does archive.is track who reads submitted content via DNS

yeah, nice find, you're right - it is there - (although uBlock Origin seems to have blocked it from successfully connecting). it's weird that that is there in the first place, as they would already have the IP info in their HTTP server logs if they wanted to keep track of IPs, right?

alphabet9000on Freenode has blocked all IRCCloud users

Unfortunately, the privacy model of an IRC private channel is only as private as the privacy precautions taken by members of the private channel.

Someone could run a ZNC bouncer on their own server, and have it connect to Freenode. Then, they could connect to their own bouncer using the IRCCloud web client - effectively gaining access to Freenode via IRCCloud, and Freenode would never 'know' IRCCloud is 'listening' in on the channel.

alphabet9000on Bandcamp's app is no longer listed on Google Play

good catch

alphabet9000on Bandcamp's app is no longer listed on Google Play

A quick twitter search shows that the App was removed as early as June 9. [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/search?q=bandcamp%20app&src=typed_query&...

alphabet9000on Bandcamp's app is no longer listed on Google Play

that link points to 'Bandcamp for Artists and Labels' (com.bandcamp.artistapp) which is different than 'Bandcamp' (com.bandcamp.android) [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201015192746/https://play.goog...

alphabet9000on Notepad++ drops Bing after “tank man” censorship

Not the first time this has happened and attributed to an "error"

2014: Bing has been filtering out both English and Chinese language search results for politically-sensitive terms such as "Dalai Lama" and "Tiananmen" [0]

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-denies-accusations-o...

alphabet9000on It’s Time to Ditch Chrome

Not mentioned in the article is the 'ungoogled Chromium' project, which can be downloaded here [0] or compiled from here [1]

[0] https://chromium.woolyss.com (look for the ungoogled tag)

[1] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

alphabet9000on Show HN: I made a webapp to help people create flag designs for fun

nice, enjoyed making one

https://flag.rachel.systems/#Wy0xLCJFQkVERUEiLCJCNUI3MjYiLCI...

alphabet9000on Show HN: Rustpad, a self-hosted online collaborative text editor

nice, is there any way to disable the auto-suggest dropdown box when you're typing?

alphabet9000on YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

this is a great idea.. i wonder how rapidly youtube cracks down on IPs being used across 1 cookie in a short period of time

alphabet9000on YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

maybe one solution might be to create a new youtube account in an incognito browser, and then just use the cookie from that brand new account indefinitely for youtube-dl purposes. that way, the cookie you're using in youtube-dl wouldnt be 'tied' to your real account.

alphabet9000on YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

As someone else mentioned in the comments, the "get cookies.txt" [0] extension works to circumvent the age restricted measure and i have been using it with success for weeks now.

get the extension, export the cookies.txt file to a folder, then run youtube-dl in that folder with:

youtube-dl --cookies cookies.txt https://youtu.be/id

it works as of right this minute [1] and in my experience that cookie continues to work even if you log out of your account in the browser and log back in etc

i'm trying to imagine a way to have a more permanent solution, maybe if youtube-dl provided some kind of login prompt type thing to enter some your credentials to virtually log in, although i imagine that would start to be another cat and mouse game of it working and then not working.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-cookiestxt/bga...

[1] https://i.jollo.org/ytdl.gif

alphabet9000on Rethinking the computer ‘desktop’ as a concept

I personally like and appreciate how messy and chaotic the desktop computing experience is. My computer is super disorganized, practically every file is some variation of ooisajfisajfasjfdaosijfdaoisdjfaoisfdjasdfoijsafd.jpg. But when I need to go find something, it's fun, because I get to shuffle through all my files and see everything, and that experience is like perpetually a fun reminder of all the stuff I've collected on my computer. If it was easier to find things instantly every time, I'd never go looking at all the stuff scattered around everywhere, like someone who has a bunch of old pictures they have in their attic and never see again.

alphabet9000on 'I lost millions through cryptocurrency addiction'

It's a specific kind of gambling addiction, in the same way saying someone has a 'heroin addiction' could have just been described as a 'drug addiction'. If you say someone has a gambling addiction, the mental picture is probably someone going to a casino to gamble. A 'cryptocurrency addiction' changes the mental picture to someone sitting in front of their computer watching numbers go up and down. The word refines the mental image for someone else.

But, I think it's normal to be skeptical though of new invented terms in general, since it can be used as propaganda to create fear or stigma about some very specific thing someone has an agenda of getting rid of. Cynical take: maybe someone trying to introduce the word cryptocurrency addiction has an interest in seeing the price go down, e.g. they're shorting it, etc. In the same way someone else might not want there to be stigma about crypto currencies, because they own some and want to see the price go up!

alphabet9000on Using fake reviews to find dangerous extensions

I have a chrome extension with about 30k users and have always felt like the chrome web store feels sketchy and frankly dangerous. Particularly when dealing with extensions that offer highly desired features on hugely popular sites, e.g. 'download all images off a user's Instagram'. It's ripe for abuse, especially luring in hundreds of thousands of users when the extension is 'fine' then switching over to something not fine.

There are two things that I think would be beneficial: allowing users to easily disable the extension from automatically updating, and allow users to be able to see the source code of the extension directly in the chrome web store. I hope they already have some kind of internal monitoring system for their reviews to set off an internal alert if someone says 'malware' etc and to investigate further.

alphabet9000on The media's lab leak fiasco

It's interesting looking at the timeline before Western media picked it up -- in the very early stages, chatter online referencing a leak, (or there was something released deliberately) seemed to be fear of it being a SARS 'biological weapon'. there was overlap with the newly emerging health crisis and the Hong Kong protests, which seems to have fueled that speculation. A good analysis of that time period was done by the Atlantic Council [0]

I have also been archiving different web findings pertaining to all forms of 'leak' speculation in the form of a timeline [1]

[0] https://atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Weapo...

[1] https://news.coffee/wuhan_lab_snippets

alphabet9000on Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?

https://tommoody.us

particularly nice category: https://www.tommoody.us/archives/category/computers-r-stupid...

alphabet9000on Adjustable recipe

http://jollo.org/archive/doir/htmlfreetoo/

alphabet9000on More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

here is a collection of news articles and headlines since early 2020 that reference the 'lab leak' theory in some way.

https://news.coffee/wuhan_lab_snippets

alphabet9000on The app that lets you pay to control another person's life

wow a success, $5 received via NewNew HN Comment Plugin by Venmo, thanks to D.K. for paying to control me.

i started to wonder about the app after reading reviews for it and the reviews not matching up with the description of 'NewNew'. it seems like people have had it on their phone for years when it went by the name 'Suprize!'. it used to be some kind of free giveaway game app, promoted by musical artists on their instagram, but switched late last year to NewNew. as other commenters (who downloaded it to see what it was about) have said, people that already have a following are the only ones that can be 'controlled'.

there's a contrast between the way the app is exemplified in the article, vs the landing page in the iOS store. the BBC article uses contrived controlling behaviors example such as 'voting for an artist to paint a painting in a certain color' while the iOS app store shows a more realistic example of voting whether a girl should 'leave him' or 'msg him' - this fits in nicely with present day culture. but it immediately makes you wonder whats next; there's no reason for the antics to just stop there... cranking up unethical behavior is where something like this will really shine and become wildly successful. it even hints at what's to come in the form of voting on 'pranks' in a screenshot of users on the app, one of which is asking whether 'he should fill vinnies room with packing peanuts?' [0].

i can see an even more successful path forward for newnew if they eventually remove the limitation of only allowing beautiful or popular people from being controlled, to literally anyone who is willing to live stream something extreme and immoral (yet legal!!!) for a fee. bid on a random person with nothing to lose willing to go up to someone else and perform a 'prank' (use your imagination) -- stuff that people with a reputation on the line might not be willing to do. as other commenters have also pointed out, that seems like where this kind of thing is headed inevitably.

these thoughts were paid for by D.K. sorry there isnt more i spent too long enjoying reading the very entertaining reviews [1] for when the app was still called Surprize

[0] https://i.imgur.com/eoXSZ7v.jpeg

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/newnew/id1327683895#see-all/re...