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edarchis

363 karma · joined September 18, 2017

Born in the 70s, started coding in the 80s, Linux early adopter, FOSDEM, now doing Python and devopsec.
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edarchis··on YouTube No Translation
<edit> as pointed out by @addandsubtract, I misunderstood the extension, it's about audio translation, not just titles. Sorry about that. </edit>

If you're using DeArrow, there is an option to disable those translations.

DeArrow is from the same team as SponsorBlock, it removes the clickbait thumbnails and titles with more descriptive ones. It makes the experience sooo much better. https://dearrow.ajay.app/

edarchis··on New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles
I'm pretty sure that they future queen of Belgium, studying at Harvard, will be exempted for this. It will be used when DHS, ICE or any "officer" wants something against you.
edarchis··on Ask HN: Do people actually pay for small web tools?
A former colleague makes it an interview question. He asks the recruiter what the procedure is if he wants to buy a product or use a service under $100/year. If the bureaucracy is overwhelming, it's a major red flag.

When I was working at Cisco, the general rule was to get manager approval and just go for it. Of course, these days, there are security concerns but for most cases, it's not a problem.

In a different company, it was sooo hard to get anything that they refused to buy JetBrains IntelliJ and forced us to use Eclipse. Most of us ended up buying it ourselves.

edarchis··on Don't guess my language
I've had this argument with a Google Developer.

He told me that for efficiency, they had different stages in the content rendering and that the main page structure didn't have your user information yet. That's rubbish IMHO because the accept language header should be readily available in that phase.

edarchis··on Meta Battles an 'Epidemic of Scams' as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook
They're not battling, they're profiting from it.

We all reported an obvious scam and been told "sorry, this doesn't break our standards of community, we know you're not happy but don't give a damn".

edarchis··on War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
My brother is a wifi expert at a hw manufacturer. He once had a case where the customer had issues setting the transmit power to like 100 times the legal limit. They happened to be an offshore drilling platform and had an exemption for the transmission power as their antenna was basically on a buoy on the ocean. He had to convince the developer to fix that very specific bug.
edarchis··on Internationalization-puzzles: Daily programming puzzles just like Advent of Code
Starts with I18N in SMS. There should be a trigger warning on those. SMS is dreadful in itself. In an international setting, it's a nightmare. But once people wonder why they costs exploded since they changed their welcome message with an accented character...
edarchis··on Instagram tests Reels pause feature as TikTok remains in limbo
Pause and rewind have been features since the phonograph. Vinyl and tapes could do it. Youtube did it (yet somehow they botched it for YT Shorts). Tiktok did it. Now Instagram feels like they invented something...
edarchis··on Public Access OpenVMS System
VMS had asynchronous programming to its core. Most system calls could be performed synchronously or async. You just had to give the async call a flag that would indicate when the response was ready. So you could read a file or connect to the network, continue execution and when you actually needed the answer, just sys$wait(flag). Or have callback functions. It worked extremely well as some else mentioned, 64Mb of RAM was enough to handle 200 interactive users with RDB (database IMO far superior to Oracle that was acquired by them and promptly buried)
edarchis··on We're bringing Pebble back
The amount of us who clicked no is amazing. I loved my Pebble Time but I'm going to give money to yet another Kickstarter and have it be killed shortly after.
edarchis··on Mastercard DNS error went unnoticed for years
Damn, OVH broke the TLS. I migrated it to my server and it's not properly served with a valid TLS. I'll let it run for a few days before publishing the details and insisting at their security contact point. Thanks
edarchis··on Mastercard DNS error went unnoticed for years
Update: they responded to my disclosure with a canned response "there was not enough information to answer your question, please go through our contact form again". I guess that's an invitation to publish.

So here is the primer: the Belgian National Lottery used to be e-lotto.be. They decided to change (in French) to loterie-nationale.be. You might notice that in Belgium lotto has 2 T, same for "lottery" in English while the organization is "Loterie Nationale" with 1 T. They didn't register lotterie-nationale.be. I suggested it to them, got ignored. So I did it. If you go there now, you'll get a banner informing you about your mistake. I have a couple of victims every day, a lot more on Friday 13 etc.

There was a recent scandal that our former Finance Minister is accused of money laundering 800,000€ through that platform, so it's not a small website.

edarchis··on Mastercard DNS error went unnoticed for years
It's not a bank or payment provider per se but still processing a large amount of money. I sent them a new notification. I hope that they won't take too much time to respond.
edarchis··on Mastercard DNS error went unnoticed for years
It's funny because I own such a domain. A large financial institution in my country changed its main domain name to something that had a very clear potential for a typo.

I informed them, was ignored and just registered the domain myself. I'm showing a large banner and added GDPR friendly analytics (Vince, I like its simplicity and efficiency). I'm getting a couple of victims every day.

Maybe this is a sign to get in touch again with them and if they ignore me, just publish it.

edarchis··on Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide
The fact that Altria (ex Philip Morris), a tobacco brand, made it to this list is telling IMO. There is no way that the cigarette packaging produces that much identifiable plastic trash.

My guess would be that in some countries, the stores provide disposable plastic bags with any purchase and that these bags include ads for tobacco brands. This study would associate the brand with the generation of trash while the trash should rather be associated with the store.

I'll personally classify this study as unreliable.

edarchis··on Pipe Viewer – A Unix Utility You Should Know About
Yes, moreutils has a lot to offer. vidir to quickly reorganize files and folders (even delete files), chronic to run commands silently... unless they fail, sponge to be able to pipe from a file and back to that file without a temporary one ts to add a timestamp to the ouput ...
edarchis··on MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
That illustrates the difference between anterograde amnesia and dementia. Dementia is a general degradation of the brain that includes memory but you can have amnesia with an otherwise perfectly functional brain. A patient with dementia would never text her kids as in OP's case.

Glad that your wife got over it.

edarchis··on Switching to 5Ghz WiFi made the Raspberry Pi fly again
Cross-compiling ? Aren't M1 and Pi both ARM processors ? I've been building apps for my M1 to run on Pi without any issue. Some optimization options maybe ?
edarchis··on Syncthing: Open-Source Continuous File Sync with Privacy in Mind
I use it on so many platforms and even sometimes in three-way like my Obsidian vault that syncs between my laptop, my phone and my tablet. I barely ever had any conflict. Amazing software.
edarchis··on Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?
Please consider that many of us have been burned before. I've been in business for over 25 years now and I am still supporting several apps built with now forsaken technologies. That includes a web app built with Dart back when Google claimed that its Dart VM would be bundled into every browser.

Now, I like Flutter and I like Kotlin. Jetpack Compose is really nice. But if I am starting an app today and in a year or two, Google decides that developing two competing frameworks is too expensive, they'll discontinue one. If it is the one that I chose, I'll be sooooo bitter.

So yes, right now, they're pushing both and they claim not to have a preference but we need some reassurance that it'll stay that way.

edarchis··on Ask HN: Is Google deliberately breaking Firefox?
uBlock, not much but SponsorBlock is very useful. I am using all of those with YT Premium and I do have issues. I was recently offered their redesign and it made it a lot worse. It's hard to watch a video uninterrupted now. Note that I also chose not to allow DRM videos, so no Netflix on Firefox for me. This might actually influence the codecs used by Youtube and these issues might only appear on "fallback" codecs when you refuse DRM ones.
edarchis··on Judge mulls sanctions over Google's destruction of internal chats
"Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google's revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements."

They didn't ask employees to destroy evidence but to avoid retaining evidence in the first place. Not leaving sensitive information in logs, backups etc is quite reasonable, even if it would have been useful to justice here.

edarchis··on Nestlé adds sugar to infant milk sold in poorer countries, report finds
It's maltodextrin and designed to be digestible by babies. You can buy it in a fine powder marketed as "Caloreen" from Nestlé.

Our pediatrician pushed us to use it in supplement to breast-feeding because the baby was below the expected curve. For what it's worth (not much), our baby that was fed Caloreen has no sugar addiction, quite the contrary.

Knowing our pediatrician, I am 99.9% sure that he didn't have any incentive from Nestlé and was just having the baby interest in mind. I am rather blaming the weight curves that are more designed for bottle-fed babies than breast-fed ones, combined with the human tendency to focus on the indicators rather than what they represent.

edarchis··on Is Tesla more valuable than Toyota?
Agreed. Such a valuation would be different for a Japanese buyer, an American one or one that has a special project or affinity.

A value should be an objective amount and the real amount paid varies depending on what you bring to the table.

edarchis··on Cloning a Laptop over NVMe TCP
> Conclussion

Is that a mix of conclusion and concussion that requires some ibuprofen ?

edarchis··on Adding keyboard shortcuts to a 24 year-old government website with userscripts
Nice work and thanks for sharing, it's a good source of inspiration for similarly antiquated government web sites.
edarchis··on Detect breaches with Canary credit cards
I've been trying to use this technique to alert banks (in Belgium where I live) of online fraud for a while but failed.

We are getting lots of phishing by text, email and hacked IMs. They use a bunch of redirections to get you to "login to your bank" with our security devices. In reality, they'll use MITM it and transfer money to some mules.

If we could have people fill in some canary bank account that would trigger a fraud alert at the banks, we could stop those payments a lot more easily.

The banks don't really seem to care because the payments are signed with the card and PIN of the owner, so they refuse to refund it. No loss to the bank, no action. :(

edarchis··on Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in computer science?
Yggdrasil was seriously badass, first live-CD, overlay filesystem and much more. Details and video of what was my first Linux distrib: https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/yggdrasil-first-live-linux...
edarchis··on The Perl Journal
"A Napster Client Library" "DeCSS" "The 0th annual obfuscated code contest"

Good old times :-)

edarchis··on The madness of reduced medical diagnostics
That's all nice but we used to recommend systematic PSA screening for all males over 50. We later realized that there was a lot of false positives and that the intervention often brought more risks than it cured actual cancers. So it's only recommended for patients with risk factors.

Now, consider the GP who has healthy 50yo, does a PSA anyway and it's positive. The GP could still decide not to act. But the patient is not so likely not to do anything. Or even understand the odds. At that point, if the patient dies, the GP is likely to get sued because he should have acted. Even if over all of his patients, not acting was more efficient. If the GP decides to act, however, regardless of whether the patient survives, he won't be blamed for it. So doctors have a nasty incentive to act.

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