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fdw

212 karma · joined January 10, 2017

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fdw··on US Supreme Court Just Blew Up EU-US Data Transfers
> Where are the dozens of European tech winners? Seriously. They have the best education system in the world, strong social safety nets, cheap healthcare, and great lifestyles. Why have they not created innovative technologies that turn into worldbeating companies?

Maybe that is because there are US companies competing in the same space that are not held to the same regulations because of treaties like this one. It's hard to build a competitor to AWS, not just technically (although it very much is), but also business-wise - who would choose the unproven startup if you can go with the accepted best practise? By forcing US companies to equal footing, you give European startups more of chance. (Which is a Chinese playbook, too.)

fdw··on U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office
The episode was based on the book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang (Amazon: China's Quest to Engineer the Future)

Very interesting read, with a lot more depth and details to this short (but accurate) summary.

fdw··on Show HN: Trayce – Burp Suite for developers
IANAL, but GPL3 is compatible with selling the software (see Linux distros). However, it forces you to open up the complete source code and it allows the users to fork and recompile it as they see fit (but they must also open up their changes if they distribute it).
fdw··on Show HN: Trayce – Burp Suite for developers
I'm a bit confused about the license: On the purchase page (https://get.trayce.dev/) you state that "a license must be purchased for continued use". But if I look into the GitHub repos (https://github.com/evanrolfe/trayce_agent and https://github.com/evanrolfe/trayce_gui), the license is GPL 3? So why do I need to purchase a license?
fdw··on Tao on “blue team” vs. “red team” LLMs
No, defense in depth is a best practice because you assume that each layer can fall. It is more practical to have many layers that are very secure than to have one layer that has to be perfectly secure.
fdw··on Tao on “blue team” vs. “red team” LLMs
They say this about sports, which is (usually) a zero-sum game: If I'm attacking, no matter how badly, my opponent cannot attack at all. Therefore, it is preferable to be attacking.

In cyber security, there is no reason the opponent cannot attack as well. So, my red team is attacking is not a reason that I do not need defense, because my opponent can also attack.

fdw··on I made a history timeline to learn what events happened around the same time
Thanks, that's also a very impressive visualization. Slightly too much and confusing, but amazing nonetheless. Thanks for sharing!

I'll also have a look around your repo. And maybe I know feel inspired to put some more work into mine - thanks for the kind words.

fdw··on I made a history timeline to learn what events happened around the same time
Very nice, thanks for sharing! Is the source available somewhere? Do you want contributions?

I've once built something similar for myself (still at https://github.com/fdw/timelines/), but not half as polished as yours. I like yours better ;)

fdw··on The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs
> or how neurodivergent is really is from much more common extroverted people.

Do you mean to say that neurodivergence is more common among extroverted people? If so, do you have sources for that? I have not yet heard of any relation between extra- (or intraversion) and neurodiversity.

fdw··on The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs
I'm understanding your statement to mean that caring about something because of itself, without external motivation (like validation or money), is neurodivergent. So neurotypical would be to only care about something if you profit from you caring about it? Is that reading correct?

If so, I have to disagree vehemently. That is not my experience at all and feels extremely homo economicus and - to be honest - depressing. I want to care about things I like and that bring me joy, even if no-one pays me for that or validates my choice.

fdw··on Libyear
I've tried out some of the libraries, and it looks like they do calculate the difference between the installed version and the last (stable) release. If a dependency hasn't seen a release in ten years, those ten years don't count against the dependency drift. This is exactly what I would want.

However, they only check openly accessible (i.e. OSS) dependencies. If one of those hasn't seen a release in ten years, I would look for an alternative.

fdw··on Bitwarden is down with blank screen under Linux OpenSuse
Yes, but it is quite uncomfortable to use, requiring you to get a session key and storing it somewhere. Instead, I've had good experiences with [rbw]. Maybe that would also be interesting for GP.

I've used to rbw for a rofi (and rofi-like frontend): https://github.com/fdw/rofi-rbw/

[rbw]: https://github.com/doy/rbw/

fdw··on Google/IAC/Expedia (2019)
But isn't that the very problem?

The market for these loss-leading services is skewed because Google subsidizes their free offerings so that they improve their ads branch. Because it is hard to compete with a free (actually money-losing) service, it is very hard for competitors to spring up. And thus the whole thing is anti-competitive.

If they were separate companies and had to compete on their own merit, not subsidized by the ads division, they'd have to ask for money too. Then, competitors actually have a chance to offer something better. And through that, the reach of the ads business is limited unless they start to work with the competing services. This opens up the market for other ad markets, too.

And then we are a step closer to the free market that is efficient and good for consumers.

fdw··on Using extra Firefox profiles to make my life better
I've written my own tiny Python script for this, that launches the right executable based on the URL. It works really well for my situation with two different Firefox profiles.

Maybe it works for others, too.

Link: https://github.com/fdw/brooser

fdw··on Ask HN: How do you do backups for personal/home server?
I do backups to a local, external HD (that I need to manually plug and unplug, unfortunately), and to Backblaze. Depending on the importance of the data, it's being pushed daily to B2 and weekly to HD, or more seldom, or only to HD.

Technology-wise, I've been on restic for some years now, because of its support for cloud backends. (Otherwise, Borg is a fine tool, too.) Until last week, I've used crestic, but I just migrated to resticprofile, as that can do web hooks and pre-/post-commands, which I intend to use for SQL server dumps.

restic: https://github.com/restic/restic/ crestic: https://github.com/nils-werner/crestic resticprofile: https://github.com/creativeprojects/resticprofile/

fdw··on Ask HN: What's on your home server?
In the end, paperless also stores the original pdfs in a directory. You get some more goodies from it, like automatic OCR and a web interface, but your baselines is also included.
fdw··on Effectivealtruism.org purchased a £15M estate for its headquarters in 2021
Would care to explain why "Altriusm is a sickness"? Caring about other people seems to be a good thing to me, so I'd like to hear your take.
fdw··on You Can Forget About Crypto Now
Isn't this what journalism should be about, though, to journal the news neutrally? I'd be more worried about a bias if someone only writes for one side of an issue, but now it's also bad if both sides can be happy with an author's work?
fdw··on Duplicati: Free backup software to store encrypted backups online
I've had a good experience with [crestic](https://github.com/nils-werner/crestic), even though it seems a lot smaller and simpler than autorestic. But I really like how the same backup can be configured for different backends. Autorestic's seemed more complicated in comparison.
fdw··on Ask HN: Biographies of Companies or Things?
That looks really interesting, thank you very much!
fdw··on Apple tells employees to work at the office three times per week starting Sept
I'm not sure what you mean to achieve by this comment. Do you want to imply that working remotely is the same as "remote vacations", and so people are hypocrits for only wanting one of these but not the other?

But if you are serious about your question, please look at the context of each of these: Vacations are often defined by being in a different place. Working, however, is defined through achieving some result - for IT work, there is no necessary, physical "location" attribute. And if they have different relationships to a physical location, it isn't fair to compare them as if they did.

fdw··on Littr – Link aggregator inspired by Reddit and HN using ActivityPub federation
That's an interesting idea. This would probably curb bad behavior, when you get reprimanded from several folks who have an actual stake in it.

But - and sorry if I'm overly negative here - I see other issues: First, you wouldn't want to dilute the stakes too much. If my bad behavior is a very small problem for 100 people, they probably don't care too much and nor do I. The more pressing problem might be that growth is now really heard. The easiest way is if someone takes 100% responsibility, but then you only get very similar people and no new ideas. Or you need several people inviting the same person, so your community cannot grow exponentially (I think).

This might be a good approach if you strive for homogeneity and accept small growth.

fdw··on Littr – Link aggregator inspired by Reddit and HN using ActivityPub federation
Disclaimer: I couldn't visit the site, so all I have to go on is your quote.

It's definitely interesting, but my gut reaction is that it is a bad idea. If you invited somebody, that means (a) you know them somehow and (b) you want them to participate in the community. Unless you have a stronger bond with the community and are willing to risk your relationship with the invitee for it, moderation will be quite lax, I fear.

On the other hand, having the inviter sanctioned if the invitee misbehaves is also an interesting concept. The behavior in the community will probably be better, but people will be very cautious to invite someone, possibly starving the community.

fdw··on What are your most used self-hosted applications?
Thanks!

I already have it running, I just had no idea it could do that. Guess I know what I'll do on the weekend :)

fdw··on What are your most used self-hosted applications?
Could you please go into more detail regarding "a full little identity provider and authenticating proxy"? Does nginx-proxy-manager do something like SSO?
fdw··on Show HN: I made a community sourced fitness routine database
Thank you (and also the responders, u/Afton and u/jnosCo) for your help!

While I have certainly a lot to learn on that topic, I feel like I haven't failed completely - of course all kinds of exercises come around again, and I'm increasing difficulty/number of sets. So there's room for optimization, but it's not a bad start, I think.

Thanks again :)

fdw··on Show HN: I made a community sourced fitness routine database
> You don't need more routines. You need the routine you'll do 50 or 100 times. Honest question from someone with just anecdotes and no data: Is it preferable to do the same routine regularly over different routines (equally often)? Last year, a friend sent me a link to https://darebee.com/ where I've been choosing different routines almost every time (or a program, which consists of different routines for each day). This seems to me more effective for me, but maybe it's just more motivation to do different things.
fdw··on Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?
I missed an emoji picker for Linux. I couldn't find anything that was not integrated into Gnome/KDE or maintained. So I set out to write one myself, just a simple Python script with rofi. I uploaded it to Github, because maybe someone else also wanted that. That was several years ago, and now [rofimoji] can do all UTF-8 characters (and custom ones), works on Wayland and is packaged for some distros. I'm so happy how my tiny project turned out and how many people helped with PRs and issues.

[rofimoji]: https://github.com/fdw/rofimoji

Professionally, I (and the whole team) lost track of our deployed artifacts, as we're not on a release schedule but also not really on continuous deployment. Mainly, we released when someone noticed that a release has been running stably on staging for a while. We also needed a way to ensure our configurations were correct and to track API versions. So I started hacking together a small React app (new for me at the time) to collect and display all that information. It had a good welcome in our team, and so a colleague and I improved it a lot, added an actual backend and, for example, integrated it into our CI so that you can now see which commits happened since the last deployment and deploy through it, with just two clicks. We also automated a lot of our previously manual checks for larger deployments. It's become the main tool for that stuff, even for our not-so-technical PO.

fdw··on Unsettling capital letters
I think an important part is that ascenders and descenders are in approximately the same position as before.
fdw··on Stargazers Map
Thanks, this is neat. I love to see where the people are that liked my software so much they starred it. Makes it a bit more real that they're actual people and that all the time I spent on it is worth it.

So far, I've been using https://thepirat000.github.io/StargazersMap/index.html so far, which has a more... basic interface, but also seems a bit more detailed with usernames.

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