Hacker News Reader

drivebycommenton Chrome now tracks users and shares a “topic” list with advertisers

Agreed. I think he crossed the line way beyond being skeptical about Google, and into partisan politics level biased reporting against Google. E.g. his coverage of passkey was so bad - misleading half truths and outright incorrect claims - that made a subsequent article on the passkey by another Ars reporter look completely opposite from what he wrote.

drivebycommenton Blocked by Cloudflare

So are you declaring nobody should be in that business of bot protection then?

drivebycommenton Java’s floating-point hurts everyone everywhere (1998) [pdf]

So, what do you think is the fix / "correct" / "right" ?

drivebycommenton Microsoft comes under blistering criticism for “grossly irresponsible” security

You think having consumer credit card numbers in the database somehow is a big enough motivation to keep better security. You may want to consider overwhelming evidences of various consumer facing companies - Target, Home Depot, Heartland Payment System, etc - who had gross and basic breach of the credit card numbers.

drivebycommenton 100 years of Le Corbusier: what does he mean to today’s architects?

The lesson for me, as a software engineer / software architect, is that a dogmatic architecture can be inspiring, possibly showing possibilities beyond just simply grounded practical approaches can't easily, but also can be impractical and terrible. Believing that one has complete information and the complete control over everything is hubris. But big thinking can inspire also.

drivebycommenton The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

I haven't been keeping as close an eye on this for the past few years, and apparently I am partially incorrect on this because my knowledge is not complete.

ITP 2.3 update a few years ago broke this feature, so on browsers with ITP - basically Safari and Firefox and Chrome on iOS - Google was essentially forced to change the UI, so that website owners implementing this feature now have the choice of either always displaying the unconditional dialog button like your screenshot, or not displaying at all on such browsers. Predictably, Google chose the default to be to display, and I would assume most website would not turn it off.

https://developers.google.com/identity/gsi/web/guides/itp seems to be their doc on this.

So both you and my original comment are conditionally correct. It works as I described on browsers without ITP 2.3, namely Chrome (except on iOS) and Edge (IIRC). On Safari and Firefox, it sounds like it would work as you described - I haven't tested this on those platforms yet myself but no reason not to trust the doc here.

drivebycommenton Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

https://zerodium.com/program.html

Zerodium pays more for Android zero click FCP(full chain with persistence) than on iOS zero click FCP. Most other categories Android and iOS exploits pay the same.

drivebycommenton The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

The automatic "sign in with Google" prompt only shows up if you're already signed-in. So if you're not signed-in, it doesn't (and can't) display - because there's no logged-in session, there's no existing user.

In case you're misunderstanding what we're discussing here - the feature in question is https://developers.google.com/identity/gsi/web/guides/offeri... .

If you use extensions like Privacy Badger or other ads/tracking blocking extensions, it blocks that by default so you may not have seen this on the web, though if you use certain apps on mobile, you may still have seen it.

drivebycommenton The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)

Turn it off at https://myaccount.google.com/connections/settings

drivebycommenton Soviet Union sold titanium to US believing they needed it for pizza ovens

This is about obtaining the titanium atoms - i.e. raw ore, not alloy.

Even if it were about alloy, it wouldn't have matter that much what alloy Soviet provided, as long as it contained enough fraction of titanium in it that US could refine. US wouldn't have bought it if it didn't contain enough titanium, thus this comment is nonsensical.

drivebycommenton Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout

Irrational because there's no path and clear leverage that helps them get to the purported end-goal. It is more like a tantrum than a strategic calculated response, which makes it more irrational than rational.

drivebycommenton Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout

Unsurprising at all. The lack or the reduction of 3rd part app and API access does not affect the vast majority of reddit users who use the official website and the official app. The vocal minority is unlikely to convince the majority users to boycott. The moderators who choose to keep any subreddit private extended period of time is effectively choosing to slowly kill off their subreddit, after which a replacement subreddit is likely to just spring forward and replace. I think this whole saga is emotional and irrational response.

drivebycommenton Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

This comment is irrelevant to the discussion of the AEB, since, AEB doesn't prevent anyone else from working on eliminating drunk and impaired driving. If anything, AEB would help mitigate some of the impact from the drunk and impaired driving.

drivebycommenton Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

> why is it legal in the US to ride a motorcycle without a crash helmet.

This depends on the state:

https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/calculator/factshee...

> As of 2021, 18 states and the District of Columbia had universal motorcycle helmet laws, 29 states had laws requiring helmets for certain riders, and three states did not have any motorcycle helmet laws.

drivebycommenton Globalization is evolving, but does not seem to be reversing

> Today, these governments literally import voters and distribute them throughout their country to prop up their political parties in contested areas because natural citizens don't vote for the looting and demolitions of their own societies.

This can be read as a disguised racism and a conspiracy theory, unless you can provide data and evidence. Which governments and how/when/where/how many they "import" voters and get them vote for their policy ?

drivebycommenton Micromouse: The fastest maze-solving competition [video]

> I hope Google Maps can do this. I get frustrated that it keep giving shortest distance with lots of turns.

Google Maps has been doing this for a longest time. They take freeways and signals into account, on top of the real-time traffic. Google Maps will often show multiple route options, some shortest distance, some fastest time, and nowadays "greenest" option (based on the car you picked). If you're not happy with Google Maps' initial pick of the route, you can also try alternate routes once in the navigation.

drivebycommenton Amazon Backs Out of Climate Pledge, Deletes Shipment Zero Initiative Blogpost

Alphabet is also on CDP A list for climate in 2022, and they have the similar commitment for zero carbon by 2030.

I don't see significant enough difference in climate response regarding between Azure and GCP.

drivebycommenton Americans no longer want to move for work

No longer want to, or can not ? Same result, very different causes.

drivebycommenton AI boom could expose investors’ natural stupidity

There is an additional difference beyond the tax advantage. With dividends, the market has more expectation of maintaining similar level of dividends, whereas there's generally and currently no similar expectation on companies doing the share buyback to buy similar amounts quarterly. This allows a bit more flexibility on the company. This extra flexibility may or may not be a good thing, but regardless, it is an additional meaningful difference.

drivebycommenton Average age of a car in the US is more than 13 years

Any statistics to back this up? It would be incredibly difficult to in aggregate increase the average lifespan of cars dramatically and consistently while reducing the long tail of the lifetime. So this claim smells like a negativity bias / rosy retrospection.

drivebycommenton You studied computer science but Big Tech no longer wants you

That isn't true in SV and FAANG either.

drivebycommenton Google Introduces Passkey Authentication

Nothing stops you from registering multiple passkeys, change the password to a long random string and forget about it - then you effectively have passkey only account.

drivebycommenton The Difference Between European and American Butter

If you have been to restaurants during that 25 years, you almost certainly ate food cooked with butter, thus tasted butter.

drivebycommenton 60M Americans have taxes so simple the IRS could do them automatically

A classical ad hominem, attacking the motive fallacy.

drivebycommenton Scientists developed simple way to cook rice that cut calories absorbed by half

You're effectively saying "obese people, why don't you just eat less". This kind of "binary" thinking is actively harmful and toxic, and only demonstrates a complete lack of sympathy and understanding for people suffering from obesity. Obesity is extremely costly, and causes a lot of human suffering. Finding a way to reduce that suffering is unequivocally a good thing. Not that I expect this will be any kind of a panacea (it won't, as obesity is a complex behavioral phenomena).

On a purely utilitarian perspective, you're grossly underestimating how much broad impact obesity is having:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3047996/

Just look at the fuel cost and the environmental cost and explain to me how helping reducing obesity is not a good thing for the environment.

drivebycommenton West is out of touch with rest of world politically, EU-funded study admits

Indeed, that web site is very clearly a propaganda website, full of bullshit. Shame on the submitter.

drivebycommenton A Vulnerability in Implementations of SHA-3, Shake, EdDSA

Nobody with any experience would laugh at mistakes like this. It's only easy in hindsight. Past 30+ years of collective experience in our industry shows that these classes of bugs are nearly impossible to completely stamp out in any language but especially in memory unsafe ones, even with dramatically better compile time and runtime tools that can spot many of these nowadays. During the early days of the internet and the buffer overflow attacks after Morris worm, buffer overflow bugs existed in practically all software. There were times when pretty much any servers connected to the internet could be had relatively easily.

Even with memory safe languages, there are dangers. Humanity just hasn't figured out how to produce completely bug-free code at the scale we need in general, let alone in a memory-unsafe language.

drivebycommenton Against risk-based authentication (or, why I wouldn't trust Google Cloud)

> I hear you on the risk with unsophisticated users who click things.

The evidence says this attitude of "it's other people who get phished and not me" is pure arrogance. Practically all sophisticated security professionals can be phished with sufficiently sophisticated attacks, if the underlying system is using a phishable credential.

drivebycommenton Ask HN: 1M layoffs soon, should gov intervene?

The overall economy has record low unemployment. Tech layoffs are nowhere near 1M. Any direct intervention is likely to produce bad side effects that could be actually worse for everyone. Also, layoffs can be good for the overall economy than avoiding it, after the labor allocation is suboptimal.

https://eig.org/dynamism/

https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2022/the-decline-in-employment...

I fully expect these layoffs will provide necessary labor for the next generation of startups and smaller firms that will drive the future growth, just like dotcom crash did and the financial crisis did.