Hacker News Reader

favourableon Dementia Risk May Fall as Younger Generations Have Larger Brains

You can ward off dementia with coffee intake or lion's mane supplements

favourableon Tell HN: Biggest self-driving challenge is not technology

> Until we have the same rigor in self-driving

I think automated robotic self-driving will always need a human-in-the-loop as ironic as that sounds, but for 99.9% of an automated journey, the extra 0.1% needs to be offloaded to humans, for rare edge-cases where the self-driving vehicle has no training data for. For example, random events like road maintenance, wild animals crossing the road, natural events like snow storms, etc.

The people working on this 0.1% metric want to further reduce this percentage and get all the automation to 100%, but you will need humans at some stage. Nature is too random and chaotic for it all to be modeled in a computer system.

favourableon Ask HN: LXD vs. Libvirt vs. Boxes vs. VirtualBox for dev work: which is easier?

I found using Virtualbox has a performance penalty when loading sites in a VM. It seems VM browsers just aren't as snappy as bare-metal versions. If you can live with that, then fine, but I prefer to do development on a bare-metal install.

favourableon Ask HN: In-game purchases: addiction or harmless entertainment?

> that paying money to play might be just a re-invention of the 80's coin-operated arcades

I agree. Game companies don't create games for free, and if they do, then they're siphoning off personal data and selling it to the highest bidder to support themselves. The business model should be clear: if you're getting a game for free, developers need to state how they make money for transparency purposes.

favourableon Ask HN: Has anyone else lost access to Instagram?

Yeah they covet those three letter 'OG' usernames. To be safe, turn on 2FA.

favourableon Tell HN: Ai.com redirects to Google Gemini now

Short domains change many hands over the years. Only the companies with deep pockets can afford them, us lowly plebs can't afford them.

favourableon Tell HN: A job is more important than you might think

The shared secret is that fraternizing with colleagues after work is forbidden but people do it anyway.

favourableon FDA says marijuana has a legitimate medicinal purpose

I assume it's legal where you live? Because where I live, you get dragged through the courts and get a criminal record for even small amounts. Also since it's illegal, you have to have contacts in the criminal underworld, and fund criminal enterprises. Not to mention you don't know the quality of what you're getting. It could be laced with contaminants or simply low quality crap. If it's legal where you live, relish that and see it as an enormous privilege.

favourableon What the UK Government gets wrong about QR codes

URL shorteners are mostly used to cloak affiliate links. I'm a Commission Junction affiliate and they deliberately have long complicated URLs like drkqmpo5o9qew9sz.com/?affid=54321 and they rotate these often to get past 'blocker' technology. In terms of the ethics of that: there's nothing wrong with sharing a sale of something you're passionate about. It happens quite a lot.

favourableon Ask HN: What are you vendor lock-in war stories?

VMware. I used a pirate copy of VMWare about a decade ago, and they detected it was pirated and I was forced to cough up some coins, lest my VMs all became useless, and I had some important VMs which were mission critical to my startup. I have since switched to QEMU though. The migration was painless enough.

favourableon My Concerns about the TikTok Divestiture Bill as a Software Developer

> First, this bill isn’t actually aiming to ban TikTok. It really wants to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to someone else who is not controlled by China

Is the US chinaphobic or something? Because they have a good relationship in terms of trade. I'm always reminded of the irony of 'Boycott China' T-Shirts being manufactured in China. As long as the US is the buyer, there's no beef.

favourableon Crypto 'mixer' convicted of money laundering on Bitcoin Fog

> and included links to a clearnet website for BITCOIN FOG (www.bitcoinfog.com), the Tor onion site (http://foggeddriztrcar2.onion), and a Twitter feed for updates on the site (www.twitter.com/#!/@Bitcoinfog)

This is how many illegal services get decloaked. They have a clearnet domain, but ironically a darknet .onion too which is what they should just have, not a clearnet domain (if what you're doing is illegal or operates in a legal grey area). I am aware it's possible to get a clearnet domain anonymously with services like NJALLA[0], but you have to take extra special care, pay with crypto, do everything over Tor, use XMPP w/OTR etc

[0] https://njal.la/

favourableon Network Tunneling with QEMU

That's the one. I got them mixed up. Link for it is here: https://archive.org/details/MicroXP-0.82

favourableon Ask HN: Are You Investing in Crypto

What happened to the thing crypto is for: buying stuff with crypto? Cashing out to fiat means you still have to further invest that money to gain suitable assets which will generate passive income, also known as 'putting your money to work for you'. Unless you blow it all down the pub and squander it on luxury goods and don't invest it.

favourableon Ask HN: Authy Desktop users, what are you switching to?

Ente Auth https://auth.ente.io/auth

favourableon Russian hackers breached key Microsoft systems

> “some of the company’s source code repositories and internal systems”

Interesting. They only got 'some' which means MS are compartmenting and not putting all their eggs in one basket, one would hope. The best technique of securing intellectual property and business secrets is compartmenting, and although some data gets exfil'd it's not everything. I just hope it doesn't get weaponized for 0days.

favourableon Network Tunneling with QEMU

Slightly related, I remember reading once of malware that uses a virtual machine running TinyXP[0] to obfuscate itself from the host OS. The footprint of TinyXP is tiny compared to the latest versions of Windows and runs on very little RAM, and gets past reverse engineering ploys which aim to unravel what the malware does.

[0] https://archive.org/details/tiny-xp-rev-11

favourableon Le Grand K (2018)

This is how objective fact is made objective: comparison. When I say 'The Eiffel Tower in in Paris, France', this is an undeniable and objective fact. You can't refute it, unless you compare it to another statement: 'The Eiffel Tower is in Berlin, Germany'. It could be. The tower was probably deconstructed and shipped in parts and re-assembled there. The only way to ascertain this counter fact is to go there and prove it, comparing your facts against each other.

favourableon Ask HN: What is your prediction for the world economy in the next 10 years?

> Do you expect recession or growth?

Infinite growth for its own sake is the ideology of the cancer cell, and it's not sustainable either; and all it takes is a solar flare to wipe out all our electronics, satellites, etc bringing us back into the dark ages. Maybe it's what we need. A great reset.

favourableon Reset Your Social Media Annually

> you should reset the profile once it reaches a certain saturation point. This saturation point varies from platform to platform. Often, it doesn't have a quantified metric. Often, it will be a feeling

Yeah it's nice to have a blank slate now and then. I often get the feeling my profiles have had their moment in the sun, and are no longer serving me well. But then I just take a break from the platform, delete all my posts & comments with Redact and start shitposting again.

favourableon Should I feel bad for being a narcissist?

NPD is just a label. Don't let it define you.

favourableon The mystery of the garage

> I explained to her that it could be very valuable someday

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/17/first-gen...

favourableon The mystery of the garage

They're sometimes called 'home labs' too.

favourableon Tell HN: I'm Disillusioned

If your IP is from $BadCountry then MS tars and feathers you, but for the vast majority of users they're not crafting bespoke crimeware to be used in APTs.

favourableon How much is one terabyte of data?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte_Era

> The Zettabyte Era or Zettabyte Zone[1] is a period of human and computer science history that started in the mid-2010s. The precise starting date depends on whether it is defined as when the global IP traffic first exceeded one zettabyte, which happened in 2016, or when the amount of digital data in the world first exceeded a zettabyte, which happened in 2012. A zettabyte is a multiple of the unit byte that measures digital storage, and it is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1021) bytes.

> According to Cisco Systems, an American multinational technology conglomerate, the global IP traffic achieved an estimated 1.2 zettabytes (an average of 96 exabytes (EB) per month) in 2016. Global IP traffic refers to all digital data that passes over an IP network which includes, but is not limited to, the public Internet. The largest contributing factor to the growth of IP traffic comes from video traffic (including online streaming services like Netflix and YouTube).

favourableon Ask HN: What lessons in life do tech people learn too late?

'Listen to your heart, not your head' struck a chord with me lately (mid forties).

favourableon Things we didn't know about ourselves

I think it was Aral Balkan who said we're like cyborgs now with our smartphones. I remember him saying that in a talk, and the idea resonated with me. The key difference is that it's not a chip in our brain, but a device we hold and treat like a pacifier. I think we need a new term for smartphones though. I don't know the stats, but who makes plain telephone calls anymore when we have WhatsApp etc? A smartphone is really just a small tablet that happens to have a baseband (that people rarely use apart from cellular Internet).

favourableon Domain names by a Human as a Service

I use this for domain names: https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/

favourableon Ask HN: Why should I use your service? It's just gonna sunset

Putting on my conspiracy robe, Skiff could have gotten a National Security Letter (NSL), and their encrypted Inbox feature probably pissed off the authorities. Then rather than shut down, they just sold out to Notion. They can't say this of course, because of gag orders, but it's a clever way to exit the market without saying anything.

favourableon Warn HN: Most gTLDs have no price caps

I renew domains 10 years in advance. That way if the price is hiked, the registrar still has to keep the domain renewed, regardless of hikes. 10 years is ICANN's arbitrary limit, and 10 years is a long time on the web. The domain will probably get hiked after that time window, but at least it had its fun in the sun.