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bengalister

305 karma · joined October 27, 2013

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bengalister··on Finance worker pays out $25M after video call call with deepfake CFO
In France there had been cases of employees wiring money convinced that they were talking to their CEO/CFO/lawyers over the phone. Many cases were due to a Franco-Israeli gang arrested in 2022/2023 that managed to make at least 38M Euros out of it. They impersonated CEOs without the help of deepfake AI. See https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/fran...
bengalister··on Remembering Bob Lee
I remember him from a tech video on theserverside.com, I thinkg it was on guice and dependency injection back in the 2005-2010 period. He was all smiles, energetic and inspiring. Sad news.
bengalister··on Hexatrek: The long distance thru hike in France
True but you see very different landscapes in these 3000kms and probably more diverse than in the 24000km of the Canadian trail.

Also if you like history you probably can visit some castles from different centuries along the way.

But it is true that on the French trail you cannot experience real wilderness where you encounter no humans for days and fear to do a bad encounter with wildlife.

The only wildlife that you'd probably see are ibex/chamois, beavers, vultures/eagles in the mountains, and if you are lucky wild boars, foxes, squirrels, deers, snakes and extremely lucky wolves in the Alps and bears in the Pyrenees.

bengalister··on Hexatrek: The long distance thru hike in France
The trail lacks a segment on the Mediterranean coast.

It could extended by going down to Menton on the Mediterranean from the Ecrins National Park via the Queyras and Mercantour national parks, but it is quite a detour.

bengalister··on Iceland long term visa for remote workers
The limit to 6 months is pretty disappointing. Also the 1,000,000 ISK monthly salary for workers in the Schengen area is pretty restrictive, except for Switzerland, Norway, not that many people earn that level of salary.
bengalister··on Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?
I built a web SPA "crypto" calculator that performed basic and generic tasks such as symmetric ciphering with block padding, hashing with different algorithms at the same time, pkcs7 messages ciphering/deciphering, and utilities like base64 to hex to ascii, etc encoding/decoding, etc.

I did at the time Angular was hot and I wanted to learn it. Also because it made my life easier at my job. I developed it fully at home outside office hours (I did not work remotely at that time), published it on github and deployed it on a personal public VM, and I told one or two direct colleagues about it.

A few months later, some people in the company who I did not know started using it (from the public site, not running it locally) and then later even manual validation plans or troubleshooting guides referred to it (its url).

I noticed through the server logs that it was used from many different countries, it was barely active but still got between 2 to 5 visits per day. And from the location I knew that it was very likely people from my company (no zscaler at that time).

One day I wanted to upgrade the VM and also cut down old sites that I maintained. So I shut down the website. A few days later I received a complaint in my company from 2 guys asking me to put it back on. I had to explain them that no way, I would not put it back on, it was a personal project fully developed outside business hour on my personal laptop, hosted on a personal VM that I paid for, etc.

This could have got me fired maybe, even though the cryptographic functions were really generic, I could have been accused to have stolen company time or whatever. The company was really not the kind to give 20% of our time to work on personal ideas.

bengalister··on Framework is now available in Australia
I managed to have the same battery life if not better than on Windows 11.

I own a 3 years old Dell XPS 13, i7 16GB of RAM and run it on the latest Fedora (arch btw before). It is a personal laptop, I mainly use it to browse the web and occasionally work on personal projects (Python,Typescript,Rust), mostly on neovim, vscode otherwise.

For power management, I use TLP instead and also disabled power-profiles-daemon (I don´t know autocpufreq).

The key point especially for my usage was to enable as much as possible video hardware acceleration for every app especially the browser (firefox for me). Archwiki is your friend for that. Also for intel graphics you should make sure that the graphics micro controller is used (Guc) for media decoding. It is also well explained on the intel graphics Archwiki page (guc/huc firemare loading).

bengalister··on The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal
Truly agree.

There are also countries like France which only imported cheap and poor labor. France never tried or even discouraged rich people to settle in the country with punitive taxes (compared to our neighbors and other western world countries). For instance London has (or had) rich Russians/Indians/Pakistani investors who made London their residence, not the case for Paris, foreign real estate owners don't take French permanent residency.

And nowadays, we are left with some politicians who promote economic immigration even when there is no need or deny any form of control on illegal immigration mostly to import voters.

bengalister··on Unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub
I used to manage my dotfiles with stow (xstow actually) and do some simple links. Now I run an Ansible playbook that creates links or copy depending on the files and also install tools on different OSes.

The big benefit is that it can be organized in a modular way with roles and tags, and sensitives files (like my gpg keys...) can be encrypted with the vault.

bengalister··on Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?
I was interested to buy the 14Z90Q since it ticked most of the boxes for me: lightweight, good battery life, TB4 ports, 12th gen cpu, not crazy expensive RAM upgrade, etc.

The only downside on the specs was the screen brightness only 350 nits for the latest model.

Also I read some negative comments on Amazon about CPU throttling that seems to be more aggressive than for other laptops. I don't have more information at which temperature throttling starts and to which frequency it goes, so it might be a false alarm but I would be interested to read owners comments.

bengalister··on Using the same Arch Linux installation for a decade
I ran Archlinux with LTS kernel on my home laptop for 1.5 years and I stopped because of instabilities. The last issue that I had was the update to pipewire, my bluetooth headset stopped working after suspend. I got fed up of tweaking configuration to make it work. I could have reverted to pulseaudio.

But to be honest, the only major issue was an issue with pam login. I could not log in anymore after an update, had to search on the internet to find a workaround that consisted in updating a pamd.conf file in single user mode boot. Many breaking updates were Gnome related...

Switched back to Windows 10 then 11 for a year, tried WSL2 and found it unstable (some random crashes and tmux freezes), and slow sometimes.

Now on Fedora for a few months since I am a Gnome user, I am surprised there are quite frequent kernel updates also. I am little bit less worried that an update will break something, but i'll slowly move away from the bleeding edge.

bengalister··on Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
Well notifications to subscribe to AppleTV, digitalize a payment card into Apple Pay and another notification for the Apple watch.
bengalister··on Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
I really don't understand the hype for the iphone.

I own a oneplus 8t on Android 12, I particularly like the 120Hz display and the very fast charging (65w). When my battery is almost dead I can get to 30% in just a few minutes. Android 12 has been a big improvement, it is really snappy and good looking (Android 11 was already good). I bought the phone 550Euros, and during the last black friday it was sold for 350Euros. The camera is ok makes decent enough photos.

I tried last week-end my mum's iphone 13 and was really disappointed. She was not aware of faceid so I set it up with her, and the forced swipe up after unlocking the phone is annoying. On my phone, the fingerprint scanner is almost instantaneous and I get directly to the last opened application.

Also I saw that the phone gets constant ads for Apple products (we disabled notifications): Apple pay, Apple watch, Apple TV, etc. really annoying.

For me the main selling points for the iphone are the good camera and apple ecosystem integration. But the latter means that you are stuck with Apple hefty prices.

bengalister··on Rossiya – Special Flight Squadron Flight RSD88 from St Petersburg to Washington
We can still see:

* a private jet flying from Munich(UPEM008) to Moscow

* a commercial flight leaving Moscow to Berlin (Bulgarian Air LZBRU)

* a private jet flying over Lithuania from Moscow (4XCUZ)

and

* a RAF aircraft (RRR7240) patrolling over Poland close to the Ukrainian border

* An Istanbul to Minsk flight (Belavia 2784) flying east over Georgia, then far east from Volgograd then west to Minsk

bengalister··on A pentester gets root - step by step example
You probably know it but you don't need to copy and paste in you terminal, you can use pipes. ssh myuser@myip "cat > myfile" < myfile

and use tar to stdout, untar from stdin to transfer directories. It can even be compressed while archiving or at ssh level.

or rsync over ssh.

bengalister··on Ask HN: Who has moved from the U.S. to Europe?
I am French living in south of France but I would not recommend France mainly for 1 reason: (the lack of) safety.

I lived a few years in Canada so I can compare to North America.

France is not what tiktok videos about US expat living in Paris show you. You probably know about French strikes, bureaucracy, rude people etc. But also France turned into a violent country in the last 2 decades, and is the worst in western Europe. No city is safe. The health system is cheap, but not really good and it is very hard outside Paris to get an appointment to see a dermatologist, ophthalmologist, any specialized doctor. And if you opt for Paris, housing is of low quality, very expensive, cramped and very hard to find a rental.

The only benefits: cheap wine/cheese and plenty of vacation.

IMHO, Netherlands, Danemark, Sweden/Norway/Finland, Germany (especially Munich), Austria, Switzerland are better options. And if the low wages are not a problem, Portugal, Czech Republic could be nice.

bengalister··on Show HN: Clone your voice and speak a foreign language
I am French and I did try it, recording my voice in English (I have a thick French accent to English speaking ears, ok for French ones). And the result back in French was kind of good even it did sound almost like me with a slight American English accent.
bengalister··on From macOS to Arch Linux
You mean install docker in the WSL2 installed distribution directly ?

I run a Ubuntu 20.04 WSL2 vm. It does not seem very easy to install it directly in the vm, for instance there is no systemd. There is the reddit post about it and most recommend to install docker desktop.

bengalister··on From macOS to Arch Linux
After almost 2 years running Arch I switched back to Windows last summer on my home laptop (Dell XPS 13 9380).

The pipewire update needed by pulseaudio effects broke the sound output to my bluetooth headset. Also at the same time a Gnome update made my desktop environment unstable. I did not want to spend time on freezing dependencies, reverting some of them etc. Got tired at the time of these occasional maintenance operations, and not optimal hardware support. To be honest most of the update issues were related to Gnome major updates. I think an update only broke once my system, I could not login (pam configuration upgrade issue). I was running the LTS kernel.

I think I had better battery life on Linux thought. It must have improved with Firefox/Chromium hardware acceleration.

Arch is still my preferred distro for a dev machine thought.

Back to Windows, I just updated to W11 today, I very much like the changes in the UI. Also the ability to run some Linux GUI apps without starting a X server, exporting the DISPLAY, etc directly from the a WLS2 vm is nice.

Even thought I think I'll keep my development environment in a VM (arch) mainly because of docker. I found docker for desktop on Windows really too slow. Security wise I also prefer that, I install too many tools that I don't trust. The drawback of using a VM is of course performance but that is not that an issue for the kind of dev/work I do (NodeJs/Typescript/Vue/Python/Cloudformation/Terraform). Also sometimes I have an idea or something I'd like to test quickly and I don't want to start the VM and I just give up.

I'll probably stick to that 1 or 2 years, when I'll think about replacing my laptop. If I had to today, I'll probably go for a Macbook air m1.

bengalister··on Israel tries to limit fallout from the Pegasus spyware scandal
The point is that Libya or even Tunisia is much closer than Sicilia (>200km away).
bengalister··on Israel tries to limit fallout from the Pegasus spyware scandal
France is not the 5th richest nation, it is 7th ordered by GDP.
bengalister··on Israel tries to limit fallout from the Pegasus spyware scandal
Wrong and exaggerated on so many levels. What you are saying is caricature of the left extremist way of thinking.

No the yellow vest movement was nothing but peaceful, quite violent actually, throwing cobbles or molotov cocktails at police forces, using forklifts to force their way or destroy public properties, burning banks, setting cars on fire, etc. They were even allowed to demonstrate every week for at least 2 years. They caused the death of at least 10 people mostly through traffic crash by blocking highways.

Also they are really not representative of the French people but they wanted to impose their ideas, not democratic at all, much like what happened in the Capitol.

The Aquarius is one of these supposedly humanitarian boats that pickup immigrants just 50km off the Libyan coasts, just where the international waters start. They basically behave like traffic smugglers and encourage people to try the crossing to Sicily.

Steve was not killed by the police.

bengalister··on Neural Network Enabled Filmmaking
The "A few good men" movie sequence is not really good. First I cannot understand Jack Nicholson's answer and could not rely on the lips movements to get it. It is supposed to be the "you can't handle the truth" translation, but I miss the verb "vous ne ... pas la vérité". Also the lips and mouth position to pronounce "la vérité" are not realistic, Jack seems to add a syllable at the very end.
bengalister··on Java Is Underhyped
I have done 10+ years of Java development and 1 year of Python. And I disagree, Java packaging is better. You can package all your dependencies in a fat jar like Spring boot does and you only need to run it with java -jar lib.jar and you are good to go.

Dependency management is a mess in the Python world and my number 1 complaint. You have pip, pipenv, poetry, anaconda, to manage your 3rd parties. And if you want to avoid conflicts and have consistent runtime you need to create a virtual environment to install these libraries and redownload everything.

Otherwise libraries are installed user or system wide, in a directory that depends on the Python version that you use but they are not versioned there.

With Maven you don´t have the issue. Your 3rd parties are downloaded in a global cache directory (the Maven repo) and are all versioned. For the delivery you can either provide them all and have the runner set the CLASSPATH or have them packaged into a single jar.

bengalister··on Java Is Underhyped
I agree mostly. Some good use cases for Java:

- cryptography: It has a wide range support of symmetric/asymmetric algorithms from legacy to modern ones.

- XML and SOAP with Web Service Security in particular.

- Modeling large business concepts because of static typing, Objects inheritance and polymorphism, no memory management while still being performant. I would not use Python for that but other languages can compete C#, Scala, Kotlin, maybe Typescript.

bengalister··on LG is getting out of the mobile phone business
Most "tech" youtube reviewers often say that an Android customization is good because it is minimalist and is close to stock Android. It is often praised also because it adds only a few features that stock Android doesn´t have. But over the years these missing features have often been integrated.
bengalister··on Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop
I have been running Linux (Arch) with Gnome on a Dell XPS 13 9380 for the past 2 years and I did not face major issues.

My first major complaint is the lack of fingerprint reader driver. It simply does not work.

My desktop environment is Gnome on Wayland.

The support of multiple monitors with different pixel densities is also problematic. You can set fractional scaling but the rendering was really blurry. So now I have a script that runs when I connect an external monitor that just changes text scaling in Gnome (usually when connected on an external monitor I don´t use the laptop screen).

Other than that I have better battery life than on Windows 10 even if video hardware acceleration is less efficient than on Windows (firefox is the only browser supporting it). And for server side development which I occasionally do on my personal laptop, I vastly prefer Linux over Mac or Windows (even with WSL2).

bengalister··on How many lines of code is Candy Japan? (2016)
This reminds me of a competitor "candysan.com". It is owned by a Japanese woman and her French husband who happens to be a youtuber. And the website is currently down because the servers burnt with the OVH Strasburg datacenter.

He made some non-technical videos talking about it. Apparently there was no backup and was considering moving part of the site to Shopify (stripe is used for payment).

The youtube channels are Ici Japon Corp. and icijapon but it is only in French.

bengalister··on Tmux lets you select and copy text with your keyboard
I realized that the mouse selection automatic copy is due to the tmux yank plugin.
bengalister··on Tmux lets you select and copy text with your keyboard
I use the vi mode for tmux and my shell (zsh). I configured tmux and neovim to copy into the system clipboard (not for the shell, I did not search to be honest)

Thus to copy I use the y (yield) key, with optional selection keys like iw (in word), t<char> (to <char> included), f<char>( to <char> not included), etc.

But my mouse selection copy works differently between vim and tmux. In vim, when I select text with the mouse I have to press y to copy it. In tmux it is copied without pressing any key. So there is improvement here because often the paste fails after selecting text in vim because I forgot to press the y key.

tmux is what made drop tiling window managers after I realized I was only using tiling in a terminal. (I use Gnome on Linux.)

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