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devy

10,656 karma · joined March 11, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/yewang; my proof: https://keybase.io/yewang/sigs/oqeIeIArRK13MRWPHemV_vmPEn1K4qClxSFpwQsTB5U ]

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Opinions and views expressed here are my own.

submissionscomments
devy··on Veles – A tool for binary analysis (2018)
Yep. There is banner in the repo reads:

   This repository has been archived by the owner on Sep 29, 2020. It is now read-only.
devy··on Conduit: Simple, fast and reliable chat server powered by Matrix
Has anyone implemented Conduit with other backend services via the Matrix API?

https://spec.matrix.org/latest/

Any reason why it's not a good idea to integration the API with server side (aka E2E or distributed drawbacks?)

devy··on Oregon finally legalizes pumping your own gas
After this, New Jersey (NJ) is the only state in the USA that still have laws to prohibit self pumping gasoline/diesel.
devy··on Xerox scanners randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013)
Is this a Xerox specific issue or industry wide problem? The author suspected that this is not an OCR issue What about out scanners? HP, Epson, Cannon, Ricoh, etc?
devy··on Toyota: Car location data and videos of 2M customers exposed for ten years
This sounds like there should be a massive class action lawsuit against Toyota.
devy··on Why does a plastic-wrapped turkey sandwich cost $15 at the NYC airport?
In my anecdotal experience Indianapolis International Airport (IND) is the best in terms of reasonable food pricing / affordability as well as comfortability in waiting area / seats and newness of the facility.

https://www.insideindianabusiness.com/articles/indy-airport-...

Even though IND doesn't nearly have the traffic like 3 NYC airports, it's still 24/7 airport and the self-served Farm Fridge food kiosk was super great in terms of prepackaged meals and pricing (half of the selections were under $10 - I flew to IND last month.) The Soda machine also charges $2 / bottle of Coca-Cola like other non-airport retailers instead of price gauging.

devy··on Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
I am talking about mobile phones. Unfortunately Microsoft exited Windows phone business. So what are you talking about gold standard?
devy··on Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
I don't see a 3-year security update as an irony. In fact, I see that as a great gesture for the budget price point android phone has a 3-year software warranty. Nokia probably have done research on this pricing segment to know that the averaging budget android device lifecycle is about 2.x years and guarantee a 3 year security update to make the device more worthy, comparing to other brands at this price point. By the way, NO ONE offer unlimited years of security updates, even Apple iPhone as the gold standard only provide security updates up to 6-7 years but Apple charges at least 2 times of the price.
devy··on Show HN: Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately
About 10 years ago when I was working with American Express for a Payment Gateway project, all the internal bank too vendor communications were these encrypted emails with a self-contained HTML file that has the content encrypted inside of them, similar like Portable Secret. Sadly I don't recall the proprietary vendor's name or the name of the technology. Pretty sure I've received similar self-embedded HTML from Chase as well.
devy··on Westinghouse sees a tech disrupter in its eVinci microreactor
In 1960, there was a meltdown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaGdJdXnagQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_TR-2

devy··on What's so hard about PDF text extraction?
Yes, I saw the other submission and post this (as I read it a few months back).

It's a hard enough domain area that warrants a startup to solve the pain point.

devy··on PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools (2021)
Amazing share on the tooling side of thing for PDF processing.

More on PDF and why it's hard to do analysis [1]. TL;DR

     "PDF was never really designed as a data input format, 
      but rather, it was designed as an output format 
      giving fine grained control over the resulting document."
By the way, the PDF 1.4 (most widely used version) specification is over 1000 pages![2] To make it even harder, not everybody follow the spec :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146364

[2] https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...

devy··on After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
OP Carlos Fenollosa mentioned this:

> Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. > You just cannot create another first-class node of this network. > Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.

It's unfortunately true. However, the reason that how we end up like this is more nuanced than just the big players trying to power grab (perhaps) but rather because of the rise of spam/scams/phishing/malware. All big players like Google (Gmail), Microsoft(Outlook/Live.com/Hotmail), Yahoo!, Apple (iCloud) are suffering from those threats, wasted bandwidth and compute on spam detection heuristic AI.

There are industry consortiums like Spamhause and commercial entities like Barracuda to maintain blacklist/whitelist to restrict access of major MTA network interconnect to fight off spams/malwares/phishing/malware delivery from botnets and individuals. And it helps, at the mean time, it consolidated the control of who can send outbound emails.

We are seeing this trend repeatedly in other communication channels like phone calls (due to robocalls, VoIP numbers are being blacklisted by all major players' services) or Text messaging (due to spam texts, major U.S. wireless carriers band together established Campaign Registry to control who can mass send outbound text messages. This is also known as 10DLC registration).

I think the vulnerabilities of previous communication protocols (email, VoIP, SMS/MMS) lie in the fact those protocols are designed with security in mind. Modern community protocols like Push Notification has been designed with security in mind, which make it less susceptible to abuse and spamming. That's probably the way go forward.

devy··on The Global Cost of Corrosion
Sounds like a startup idea/thesis?
devy··on Glassdoor not so anonymous
Nothing on the Internet these days (especially on review sites) are anonymous any more. Putting opinions on the internet is a risky business if untrue, there are legal consequences. Fun fact: I had received cease or decease letters from the lawyers representing a business that I left negative reviews on Yelp many years ago.

As long as your reviews are true and factual based, they don't have much of a case against you (libel or defamation), with exceptions of course like Depp v. Heard which wasn't trialed in the court of Virginia but really trialed in the court of public opinions and lots of lawyers thought Depp would loose.

Another exception to the high bar of winning libel/defamation case is Bollea v. Gawker - which Peter Thiel has enough deep pocket to literally bankrupted Gawker media.

Otherwise, stay truth state facts in reviews, you should be fine for the most scenarios.

devy··on There are no open issues or pull requests on Flask
I had opened issues and MRs with projects that David Lord was a maintainer (since he's been handling lots of Pallet Team's open source projects now). Wasn't very impressive with his "my way or the high way" approach.

Take a look them yourself:

https://github.com/pallets/flask/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Acl...

I am quite disgusted by his self-congratulatory tweet like that, TBH.

Those tickets that the community posts questions and asked for help, he just shut people down.

devy··on Logitech MX Products are incompatible with AirPods
Categorically false.

A high bandwidth data cables (aka wires) does introduce RF noise / EMIs. That's why ferrite bead were invented to reduce the noise.

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

The reason some ethernet cable and audio cables don't have ferrite beads is because they have internal metal mesh EMI shielding. But not all cables have that.

devy··on Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price
> Maybe going direct is the secret plan, but I don’t see how they get there.

Yeah, the dealership and the state level dealership associations aren't going to go out of business without some good fight. Even though I personally don't like the markup to be paid at the dealerships, but they exist for some good reasons: educate the consumers, financing, DMV paperwork and most importantly service your vehicles. EVs need much less service visits but when they do - it's likely harder for DIYers to tinkle with High Voltage battery systems and/or the infotainment firmware diagnostics and updates.

devy··on Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere
> 2. You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change

> ... Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity. If your pay was set using a lower location-based pay tier, you’ll receive an increase in June.

I wonder if an Airbnb employee's pay was set using a higher location-based pay tier, would that be down adjusted, conversely? A single pay tier in U.S. means there are wide pay gaps between San Francisco, California vs. Billings, Montana for the same skill set/job role to be reconciled, correct? It only makes sense to me that they aren't adjusting everyone to the Silicon Valley pay rate in June.

Can someone share lights on how that single pay tier for a country would work?

devy··on Good genes are nice, but joy is better (2017)
This article was published in April 11, 2017.

Please add the year tag to the title.

Professor Scott Galloway also mentioned about this study in his book "The Algebra of Happiness".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMW6xgPgY4s

devy··on BBEdit is 30 years old today
BBEdit is my Mac version of the "Notepad.ext". Been a user for over a decade by now and still love it, albeit after macOS Monterey upgrade it has become significantly slower in app loading time (from a fraction of second to 1-2 seconds sometimes, irregardless of the size of the files that were previous opened of the number of files previously opened, less than 10 usually for me)
devy··on Never hose out a Honda Element
It looks like this is a Honda Element fan site. But I wonder if floor panel rusting is a design flaw, how come the lawyers haven't all jump on the class action suit bandwagon...
devy··on FAANG promo committees are killing Kubernetes: A Short Thread
Brendan Burns, the Kubernetes co-founder who currently works at Microsoft Azure as a Corporate Vice President disagrees the "killing Kubernetes" part.[1][2]

But yes, Big Tech's promo committee's short-sighted interests do NOT align well with multi-vendor sponsored open source projects' the long term prosperity. And it's no secrets that open source contributors are overworked. And it's not only affect K8s, but it affects across the board.[3]

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-burns-487aa590

[2]: https://twitter.com/brendandburns/status/1511841189686771716

[3]: https://twitter.com/kantrn/status/1511791447091003395

devy··on Lumber rally cools with transport snarls easing, buyers balking
Unless it's prefab house(aka modular home), it's gonna take you at least 6 month from the signing the contract of getting a lot to the house fully built. Labor market have been really heating up too - most of the builders are focusing building $1MM+ homes in premium districts definitely not worth their time to build a $300k home when they can build a million dollar home. If you are building the home yourself, good luck it's gonna take longer even if you are not working full time and can build house full time.
devy··on ICANN's rejection of Ukraine's request to sever Russia from the internet [pdf]
> What I would support is not announcing Russian government owned IP blocks outside of the country. It would exclusively punish official Russian government institutions and potentially cause issues for any officials abroad (think VPN connections).

That could be perceived as a posture of war by adversaries. And it's a really bad idea. Have you considered for the innocent Russian people who doesn't agree with the war? What about their daily lives in Russia where they need to get driver's license online to be renewed but couldn't because their DMV website is inaccessible?

Economical / sports / Internet sanctions are double edge sword. There are unintended consequences and unfortunately no way to do it without collateral damages.

devy··on Google Maps now requires WiFi scanning to use navigation
Mapbox, HERE Maps, TomTom, MapQuest etc.
devy··on GoJS 2.2: JavaScript and TypeScript Diagramming library
They have a non-standard source license. I doubt the legal would be excited engineering team to adopt some of these in the codebase.

https://gojs.net/latest/license.html

devy··on Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx
It took a good 5 minutes read of the entire blog post to understand that "Do Svidaniya" is actually "До Свидания" (Russian), meaning "until next time/Goodbye".
devy··on YC’s $500k Standard Deal
The amount of money that's flowing into the VC since the pandemic is insane! [1] Thanks to Fed's unlimited QE, investors can borrow almost free cash from the feds and pour them into the VC funds for investments. Great times to be an entrepreneur! However, this reminds me of the dot com bubble years. When is this going to end? A lot scary to think about the consequences if that were to happen...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29880132

devy··on The leader who's standing up to China
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
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