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atbentley

41 karma · joined December 15, 2016

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atbentley··on Show HN: A New, Clean Geolocation API
Not knowing what a VPN doesn't exclude you from using one. Many workplaces use VPNs and it's likely that public internet access points (such as libraries, lounges, restaurants and cafes) could be using VPNs too.

Wikipedia says that Indonesia has an internet penetration rate of 50%. It might be reasonable to assume that a low penetration rate means that a significant amount of the internet access is happening in a work place rather than in a residential place. If a significant amount of access is happening at a work place it might also be reasonable to assume that a lot of that access is happening over a VPN.

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

atbentley··on The FastMail Security Mindset
Their privacy page has some notes on this

> We do not participate in, or co-operate with, any kind of blanket surveillance or monitoring. (We also point out that Australia does not have any equivalent to the US National Security Letter, so we cannot be forced to do something without being allowed to disclose it.)

So while they cannot harvest data and then share it in bulk, they can access data in individual cases and share it with law enforcement.

https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html

atbentley··on Someone Created a Tor Hidden Service to Phish My Tor Hidden Service
The original comment said .biz when they may have ment .bit
atbentley··on Hewlett Packard Enterprise Is Said to Plan About 5k Job Cuts
99 percent invisible has a podcast discussing this issue with a designer who takes the opposite position. A main point is that a simple, reproducible logo is ideal.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/negative-space-logo-de...

atbentley··on [dead]
Value is only realised by completed features, so a developer that can deliver completed, value producing features by themselves is a good thing. Teams should aim to have compositions of experts in single fields with developers who know enough in all fields. This way features can be owned by a single developer, pairing when needed.
atbentley··on Cheap Beijing Flights With a Dangerous Catch
Australia is an island so it has a fairly unique biodiversity. For international flights bringing in fruits is a concern since it can introduce pests that don't otherwise exist in Australia.

Australia is also a very large island, and the biodiversity of the east coast is very different to that of the west coast, so the same concerns apply. If you drive along the highways between states you'll see signs telling you to dispose of your fruit.

http://www.interstatequarantine.org.au/

atbentley··on Rust: Not So Great For Codec Implementing
Check out ipfs station if you use chrome.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-station/kckhg...

atbentley··on Google is releasing 20M bacteria-infected mosquitoes in Fresno
Mosquito surpression is an ongoing effort. For now it is free, but it will transition to a subscription service at some point.
atbentley··on Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
> According to the report, Instagram Stories has more than 200 million users per day, with that number being measured by people updating their story or watching a friend's.

I wonder what the number would be if those who only watched stories were excluded. Its also worth considering that Instagram delivers some of their announcements as stories and whether or not people viewing those also count towards the active user number.

atbentley··on Airlines Phasing Out Screens Because Passengers Are All on Your Devices
Emirates have tourism advertising as well as, funnily enough, advertising for the entertainment system your using right at that moment.
atbentley··on Airlines Phasing Out Screens Because Passengers Are All on Your Devices
Anecdotal, I know, but I was on a flight a few months ago where the wire for the hand held controller for the entertainment system had gotten so hot it burnt my hand. I'm not sure how far away the autoignition temperature of cotton is from the burn-my-hand-temperature, but I suppose it's possible that if it was cotton on that wire as opposed to my skin it may have caught fire. And while the wire delivering that content was non critical and probably on a seperate power network to the main systems of the plane, a fire on a plane is a fire on a plane regardless of which system caused it.
atbentley··on The web sucks if you have a slow connection
Ah, I was unaware that there could be multiple IPs on an A record, thanks for that. If I'm understanding this right though, the extra IPs would just be for redundancy and resilience and cannot be relied for geographic routing? In this case ebay.com redirects to www.ebay.com.
atbentley··on The web sucks if you have a slow connection
> if we just look at the three top 35 sites tested in this post, two send uncompressed javascript over the wire, two redirect the bare domain to the www subdomain, and two send a lot of extraneous information by not compressing images

So uncompressed javascript and images are bad, but I thought apex domain to www subdomain redirection was an optimisation as the apex domain can often only point to a single server but the subdomain can point to a range of geographically well distributed CDNs. So rather than going to North America for every request, the browser only needs to do it once than the rest can come from a regional CDN. Am i misunderstanding something, does this also break down on a slow connection?

atbentley··on Supreme Court Should Block Printer Company’s Ploy to Undermine Consumer Rights
Waterloo is pretty good in encouraging their students to pursue and monetise their ideas. They quite fancy being able to brand themselves as a university preferred by accelerators and incubators.
atbentley··on Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
Yes, I tend to do something along those lines when I don't want to be tracked. To the original point, it's an annoying extra step to have to do but not unreasonable enough to stop using the site, I'm simply answering your question on why someone might find it annoying.
atbentley··on Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine
I get annoyed by it too, because sometimes I want to read an article but don't necessarily want fb to continue serving those articles to me. I don't really know what happens inside the Facebook machine, but I imagine clicking a link indicates you are interested in a topic. Sometimes I just want to read trash.
atbentley··on Ask HN: What web framework do you use? Why did you choose it?
I have recently switched from flask + psycopg to sanic + asyncpg for my http APIs. I'm pretty happy with the results and the transition was pretty smooth, it only took a day each to switch out each and go from fully synchronis to fully asynchronous.
atbentley··on Blue Ocean
Possibly, however large enterprises might lock CI/CD down and manage it centrally. In those cases they're likely running Jenkins and Blue Ocean looks a breath of fresh air for the folk in those sorts of situations.
atbentley··on Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue
Self driving cars won't make financial sense in a lot of regions.

The driver plus bring your own vehicle model is a mostly operational cost model where the cost slides based on region, which makes it perfect for rolling out on a global scale.

The self driving taxi service model has a significant capital cost associated with it and that cost won't slide much based on region. It would take far too long to see meaningful returns on self driving taxis in India for example.

atbentley··on Ask HN: Cheap options for simple landing page?
What do the various static site hosts offer in terms of analytics?

I can always add in some javascript analytics, but with the prevalence of ad-blockers and tracker-blockers it would be nice to have to some analytics coming from server logs to help create a complete picture.