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bionoidon IMG_0416

I use Video Background Play Fix [1] (along with uBlock of course). "Firefox for Android can continue playing video even if you switch to another tab or app. However, sites can detect these user actions with the Page Visibility API and the Fullscreen API. This add-on is designed to block events and properties exposed by the APIs."

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play

bionoidon Endurance: Shackleton's lost ship is found in Antarctic

I'm not sure if I picked it up from a documentary or book, but worth noting that the photographer Frank Hurley dived into the ice water and chopped through a wood wall to rescue the glass plate negatives from the sinking ship. I'm not sure what the best source for this is, but it's at least mentioned in [0]

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/shackletonexped/images.html

bionoidon Show HN: No-code alternative to Retool, Appsmith, Internal, etc.

I didn't get past the pricing page to be honest. Podio costs $20/seat for premium, your product costs $48 for pro (with enterprise price not even listed)

bionoidon Tuxedo Stellaris: A Powerful Linux Laptop

> 1080p at 240hz with a fancy graphics card

On manufacturer's website [0], both the 15" and 17" Stellaris are listed with WQHD IPS-Panel (2560 x 1440 pixels) - I was looking at them just a few days ago.. The article lists 1080p as option, but it's not possible to order.

[0] https://www.tuxedocomputers.com

bionoidon Most URLs are syntactically valid JavaScript code

I have seen it a lot of code over the years, sometimes referred to as "shorthand ternary" or the "and-or-trick". In Python and/or do not return a boolean, but one of its input arguments. So I am going to say it is official syntax, but I don't know to what extent it's encouraged

bionoidon Most URLs are syntactically valid JavaScript code

Python also has "shorthand ternary" which uses and/or:

    a = bar and foo # "or None" is implied
    b = bar and foo or baz

It does almost the same but not quite. In the latter example, if foo is falsey, it evaluates to "b = baz":

    b = bar ? (foo ? foo : baz) : baz

bionoidon The four noisy horsemen of Perl hate

I cut my teeth on Perl back in the day, and while I have stopped using it completely by now, I am no hater. But this article does not contain the word "bless", and I wonder why it was left out. If I had to guess, it's not as easy to defend as the nice features.

bionoidon $1 Unistroke Recognizer (2007)

In case anyone is interested, the $N-Protractor algorithm was ported to Python for use in the Kivy framework [0]. Unfortunately it's tied to kivy's clock among other things, but easy to rip it out should you need it in a different context. There is also anexample application that can be used to create gesture templates [1]

[0] https://github.com/kivy/kivy/blob/master/kivy/multistroke.py

[1] https://github.com/kivy/kivy/tree/master/examples/demo/multi...

bionoidon $1 Unistroke Recognizer (2007)

My interpretation is $1 reads as "unistroke"/"singlestroke" while $N = "multistroke"

bionoidon SQLite is not a toy database

The FAQ suggests that NFS is problematic for concurrent access:

> But use caution: this locking mechanism might not work correctly if the database file is kept on an NFS filesystem. This is because fcntl() file locking is broken on many NFS implementations. You should avoid putting SQLite database files on NFS if multiple processes might try to access the file at the same time.

https://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q5

bionoidon WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

The subreddit is /r/Random_Acts_Of_Pizza and still in operation. /r/RandomActsOfPizza was a copycat started with the explicit purpose of bartering nudes for pizza (forbidden in the original). It was later shut down when it turned out it was run by a scammer.

bionoidon GitHub, fuck your name change

"Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment" - it was candidly named, if nothing else.

> Indeed, Goebbels initially opposed the term propaganda, recognizing that in popular usage, both in Germany and abroad, it was associated with lies. Even after the ministry had been in existence for a year, he proposed changing its name to Ministry of Culture and Public Enlightenment, but Hitler vetoed this proposal.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ministry-o...

bionoidon Show HN: Postmodern. – Ephemeral, one-on-one, anonymous conversations

I like the idea and the execution, nice job!

bionoidon I am an 80 column purist

> Nobody's speed-reading code. That doesn't make sense.

Well, I speed-read code all the time.. it's a necessity in my role as independent consultant. Clients have a lot of half-baked/unfinished projects, and I'm called in to get it progressing. Speed-reading enables me to assess the state of the existing code and suggest a way to move forward, without breaking the bank up front.

That said, for me column width is irrelevant for speed-reading. The typical time-killer is lacking separation of concerns and poor naming conventions (God classes, or worse, God files with 20 classes)

bionoidon Yahoo Groups is closing down

There was a lot of issues with the "new" Yahoo Groups web frontend. A feedback system was set up, but virtually all the reports were ignored. They removed it altogether at some point, so you couldn't even see reports or vote counts. It became infuriating to use; at first it was basically useless, the most critical issues were (slowly) fixed. But search and pagination was significantly worse than before, and it truncated all subjects, even if they would fit perfectly fine in view. The post overview literally looked like "Can you ....", "Question about ....", "Processor is ....". Putting on the tinfoil hat, it almost seems like they wanted it to die, leaving this issue unfixed..

The (one) group I followed basically disbanded in the year following the "new" launch. I think it's about a year ago they officially closed it down, activity moved to a Facebook group and a subreddit. It's a pity really, I miss the mailing list architecture.

bionoidon Reddit app got 50M downloads by making mobile web experience miserable

I assume that's total, including apps? Or are you saying that between old, mobile web and new, 75% of hits are from new? If so that's quite different from my traffic stats, copying a comment from older thread:

According to my traffic stats (moderating ~400k subscribers), old + mobile web frontends make up about twice the traffic of new frontend. Apps are by far the most popular, about ~3x of all web frontends combined.

bionoidon Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

> The question is whether or not the abuses that might occur as the result of analyzing publicly available information are worse than the harms that might come from not doing so.

How many criminals announce their plans on Twitter in a way that law enforcement can use to prevent a crime? From my perspective, it seems like the potential for crime prevention is small compared to the potential for abuse.

bionoidon XP Paint – A Web-Based Version of Window XP's MS Paint

Nice work! Please add a LICENSE file

bionoidon Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting

> I'm actually amazed that they still bother to maintain this legacy versions.

I do not know a single person that moderates a 100k+ subreddit using the redesign, everyone still seems to be using old + modtools + enhancement suite. Personally, I believe this is the only reason they didn't kill it already.

Edit to add: The new frontend is the default for logged-out users, and it still makes up half of old. If that isn't a failed redesign project, I don't know what is.

bionoidon Python 2 Is Dead

I came across Tauthon [0] a while back, it seems quite active. I have a codebase that has proven difficult to port, so this is the backup plan.. "Tauthon is a backwards-compatible fork of the Python 2.7.18 interpreter with new syntax, builtins, and libraries backported from Python 3.x. [...]"

[0] https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

bionoidon Team Fortress 2 source code has leaked

> very few companies will pay for their source code to be audited, because it's expensive and time-consuming, and most only do it if they're required to.

And even when they do, in my experience, they usually end up buying an expensive automated report that provides little or no real insight.

bionoidon I Want Decentralized Version Control for Structured Data

> So I create a local repo with dolt, and now I want someone else to collaborate on this dataset with me, without using dolthub. How I do this?

The best I could find is utils/remotesrv in the repository [0], which seems to enable collaboration.. but also seems bit basic and it's not clear if https is supported.

[0] https://github.com/liquidata-inc/dolt/tree/master/go/utils/r...

bionoidon Bose QC 35 Firmware 4.5.2 Noise Cancellation Investigation Report

> My battery is still strong. Probably around 10-12 hours of use.

Mum bought new last year because pads were worn, I got her old set - uses a single AAA battery and lasts across the globe and back (~30 hours). Unfortunately she didn't like the new rechargable set, and neither do I..

bionoidon Why Amazon got out of the Apple App Store tax and other developers won’t

Ahem well, random story time, I also used VNC about 10+ years ago. I was visiting a friend, and somehow we ended up wondering how many open VNC servers were still out on the Internet. Fast forward some hours, we had put together a scanner (Perl) that connected to default VNC port and saved the bitmap to disk... and let it loose.

That was amusing; ran it for weeks. There were a few desktops and such, but the majority was camera monitoring systems from shops, kiosks, office buildings, streets and what not, some manufacturer clearly didn't do their due diligence... Found a whole bunch of industrial equipment HMI systems, although we could never figure out what it was, something with hot pipes... Some stuff looked like astronomy, some like fishing, a lot we just had no clue.

I wonder what it would look like if repeated today... ?

bionoidon GitHub for mobile is now available

Well in that case you are using a cloud-based service, it makes sense that you have to authenticate. But I was writing and building C++ code just fine locally, and I could have continued doing that if it wasn't for the dark pattern.

bionoidon GitHub for mobile is now available

> I'm not installing a stupid app so Microsoft can collect data on me.

This is going far off topic, but I am currently consulting with a client that requested using Visual Studio Community Edition [2019] for the project. I was a month into development, when all of a sudden one morning, it was no longer possible to start Visual Studio. Why? Because I had not connected it to my Microsoft account, of course... I wonder how people put up with this..

bionoidon Google Fires Four Workers, Including Staffer Tied to Protest

At least around here, it's very common to keep union activity outside work e-mail, so management can't simply read it all. I would not be surprised if "externally" means "a coworkers private e-mail address".

bionoidon Who is the real Dice Man? The elusive writer behind a cult novel

I had not heard about this, but the title reminded me of a 90s UK travel show based on a similar concept, "The Dice Man" [0]. The host asks strangers for alternatives and throws the dice to decide what to do / where to go

[0] https://diceman.co.uk/