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khiqxj

3 karma · joined November 3, 2022

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khiqxj··on How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
the web is a pile of horse shit why is this even news. the best part is how all the SJW apple tesla cloud smart tech yuppies in tech dont care about how 99% of the world who cant afford to buy a new machine every year have an experience on their product worse in every way than dial up as they force every formerly paper transaction onto web. just opening firefox with blank home page can take deciseconds and even minutes. even opening a new blank tab is unresponsive and lags up the UI. on anything but mid-high range desktop hardware.

how does this even have 200 upvotes? i cant count more than 1 or 2 websites that doesnt have infinite bloat for useless nonsense like the cookie popup social media whatever 10 meme frameworks and 100 js libs injected into the page. HNers just read "bad stuff bad", respond "yup" like a zombie, and continue doing bad stuff

khiqxj··on Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates
Here's what needs to happen:

The tech industry is not ready for pervasive internet enabled devices that have microphones, cameras, or control heavy machinery. It all needs to be taken out. Aside from the threat to human life (due to malfunctioning vehicle software), we're heading straight for a dystopia where you can get arrested for walking down the street and committing a thought crime because every house will have cameras facing the street hooked into some company like Amazon that will simply be commandeered by the government to "fight crime because if you aren't giving us access to your camera you aren't against crime".

I don't know what legal movements this needs, it has to be something that doesn't backfire. The obvious thing to do is just ban Amazon from selling products like Ring, and remove software and radio communication from home appliances and vehicles. Software in a television shouldn't be legal. It has environmental consequences too not just privacy (which right now is a problem since every TV just scans what your watching and reports back to the company.

khiqxj··on Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
you cant sue someone for writing down what error messages that product can produce. you cant sue someone for reverse engineering their product (it has to have been done for an actual purpose like cracking or copying). you also cant sue someone for so happening to take teh shortcut of reverse engineering to obtain what they could have got just from using the product.
khiqxj··on Doing laundry on campus without a phone
1. stop putting software in things 2. especially dont put webshit in things 3. especially dont put smartphone shit in things

really, i'm not trying to sound rude, theres no other way to put it, you deserve it. its unfortunate that people value "politeness" over reason. this is the hard truth that people in this bubble have not been able to face for 20 years now. the web is an abomination which was never created for anything other than corporate interests and serving magazines. of course it's practically inoperable. same exact story for smartphones, it was created by some scum web company to carry out the old trope of making a software ecosystem where shitty devs that cant make their own software come to and said scummy company gets to rule over. none of this implies any good or even reasonably working software

also laundry is a trivial task, it was only hard before washing machines. also this is one example of where technology actually made our lives better but all kinds of idiots like environmentalists and corpos are trying to ruin it.

khiqxj··on Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
> I miss this kind of playfulness in computing.

it's still right here every day when Firefox says "gah this tab crashed".

khiqxj··on Austral Programming Language
why are these new languages always built to solve problems in windows or unix or whatever

and the main problem in those os are that there are 21 languages and thats before you even start talking about build systems, config files, and query languages and serialization. how would adding a new language to fix memory leaks make anything better? i see much worse problems here like you still have to build an sql query out of a string. the whole rust having this was just to make c people more comfortable to using a post 90s language (i.e memory safe)

khiqxj··on The death of the line of death
there absolutely never was a "line of death". one of the major problems with web and OS isolation has always been that they could never make up their mind where to draw the line. i never even knew they have nomenclature for this until now (only closest concept i heard of was secure attention key).

> security indicators in the URL bar are misunderstood.

it really amazes me how for 10 years we had java applets that can just show an obscure message to the user about "something something signing" and if they press okay they can execute arbitrary code as design (because they consented to running unsigned code which implies that the code can run on your computer with full privileges, and the only way youd know this is if you read about java sandboxing internals for a few hours), and security experts cant find out why the user cant figure out how to be secure. the reason is what people keep saying: everything is broken. all these bullshit HTTPS symbols in the URL bar dont help either, nor does "oh noes self signed blah blah".

> New web platform features have introduced new modalities for displaying web content. For example, the Payment Handler API introduced a new type of embedded browser window for completing payment flows.

which were absolutely never legit. you should never trust a website that wants you to log in to your bank which shows a bank page ostensibly being served by your bank in their own window. its unfortunate that web devs (predictably) took the path of least resistance but thats how it is. everything is broken.

khiqxj··on Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
no, i never used such a product.

> Want a password manager? It's a SaaS now.

i have never had this problem because i implemented it myself in a few hours of work

khiqxj··on Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
> Generally speaking, I'm happy to pay a subscription because this way I get a steady stream of all the updates, and it's much more likely the company has a sustainable business model.

software was (marginally) better before than now. congratulations, you fell for their trick

khiqxj··on IRS accidentally releases taxpayers’ private data again
this could be solved by not requiring collection of citizens' private info at gunpoint. but im sure all the idiots who reacted to snowden by building half working "solutions" with "please donate" buttons will not get this.
khiqxj··on Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
before HN, i just used to post something and google would magically index it and a ton of people would pour in suddenly one day.
khiqxj··on As winter approaches, here's a story about why hardware is hard
the field of engineering exists so that these types of problems are known by nature of what subfield you are working in so that you can use your expertise at the time of design to avoid such problems. COTS (TM) isnt a scapegoat either. dont buy bad components. electronics and mechanics are hundreds of years old. you should have seniors in your company that know which vendors are reliable. if you are a startup, you still should have attended a university that explained the meta to you. im sure most software engineers who think they can just use some random lib written by some geek and inherit the bugs from it will disagree
khiqxj··on A self-updating list of the most current useragents
literally this. user agents are an obsolete feature (i considered it obsolete around 10-15 years ago) and whenever a new protocol includes it you already know its made by backseat networking "engineers". all user agents do is break more shit because people think they're smart or clever for modulating their machine behavior based on them (blocking, working around broken standards, etc)

"there exists a use case that wouldn't be possible to implement without user agents" is not an argument. it's not philosophically valid. its dead obvious that you do not consider the whole picture if you make this argument. why does that 0.1% use case matter? especially given that it's not officially supported. especially given that for the last 10 years, the likes of google have shoved everything _straight_ into the web specs when they started considering it an official supported use case? if you are doing something that's not an official supported use case, why do we need to have hacks to support it? obviously the least ecologically harmful solution is for your use case to not be supported. of course we are talking web here, where scope creep is infinite and the protocols do nothing well instead of one thing well.

this is the very problem with the web, that "it doesnt have a concrete use case maaaaan", "ill just add and take what i want as i go", "the web is just the web maaaan you need to think on my wavelength to get it". these people embedded in web actually unironically just make shit up as they go along. they literally operate on an oscillating wave where today feature set 1 is good, tomorrow feature set 2 is good, and the day after, (what is essentially) feature set 1 is good. arguing to have a user agent string is the same idea. this is in strict contrast to a well designed product that actually solves a specific problem, like Standard ML, or a good SQL implementation (disregarding the specification conundrum) or JSON or VGA or TCP.

khiqxj··on Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode’s code quality
> single letter variables

i hate when people put descriptive names on variables that dont need it. when im tired i end up reading the name over and over as if it has meaning (it doesnt), and subconsciously ponder the meaning for up to a minute before snapping out of it.

they actually dont even serve a purpose. its because we are reading code in text form that they are needed. conceptually, most variables are just something flowing out of one function to the next which would be easily repesented by lines in a diagram or many other ways that dont use names. you're meant to only give names to the rare case where it would truly make the code more understandable. this shit doesnt: thingManagerProxyGenerator = createThingManagerProxyGenerator()

khiqxj··on Research reveals ways lead and cadmium in chocolate may be reduced
you get enough copper (to meet national recommendations) just by eating anything, no need to seek it out.

what i want to know is how to correctly interpret all these studies that claim some food substantially increases health outlooks.

while those are spam websites (buy this, buy that, amazonamazonamazonamazonamazon), its still possible for them to be correct

khiqxj··on Research reveals ways lead and cadmium in chocolate may be reduced
well chocolate is high in calories and much more so when you buy a product that adds a bunch of sugar. this is relevant because people who eat a lot of chocolate have bad health but still probably dont have any lead problems aside from subtle, low dose related ones, which will be hard to distinguish from having unhealthy calory intake
khiqxj··on Research reveals ways lead and cadmium in chocolate may be reduced
if you take the product they tested with the highest lead concentration (2.4µg per serving), and ate 10 servings, you would have 1/20th of the harmful concentration of lead, according to my calculations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34018344
khiqxj··on Research reveals ways lead and cadmium in chocolate may be reduced
initially this article read as a scam (lobbying corpo "non profit" that claims to care about health and enviro but just creates a worse net effect by wasting resources) and a bit of research concludes:

CDC says [1]:

> Until 2012, children were identified as having a blood lead “level of concern” if the test result was 10 or more micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL) of lead in blood.

the lobbying corpo's very own charts [2] show no lead concentration higher than 2.4µg per serving in any tested product. if you ate a serving of chocolate that contains 2.4µg of lead, you would have no more than 2.4µg/dL of lead, which is lower than the CDC's previously stated harmful level. if the lead was diluted through all the blood in your body (~5L = 50dL), your blood level of lead would be 2.4µg/50dL = 0.048µg/dL, far below the CDC's previously stated harmful level of 10µg/dL. with 10 servings, at which point you will have other issues, you will have 0.48µg/dL, still 1/20th of the harmful level.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/data/blood-lead-reference-valu...

2. https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcem...

disclaimer: i cant do science or math, maybe i calculated something wrong

khiqxj··on Atom was archived today
now i will never know what purpose this software served
khiqxj··on The hype around esports is fading as investors and sponsors dry up
i think the top e-sports games are terrible: cs (the recoil system is a literally a hack), fortnite (F2p crap[1] and its not really a real game, you can feel the OOP system while you're playing as it takes several round trips for any action other than moving/shooting to happen), pubg (bloated amateur project). then theres valorant which aside from being F2P is largely boring as hell in the same way as overwatch. ive been told that my assumption that LoL is wonky RPG-esque metacrap is correct. only the starcraft games look alright, those are the only big games i havent played yet.

there's very little happening in the world of multiplayer games. the only ones with consistently decent netcode are COD and BF. after their first few flops (like BF2) they finally mastered it. everything else is downhill from there. theres not much you can do to make your game good when it has no substance (at the very least you need a solid implementation, let alone interesting graphics, which Lol, Overwatch, and Valorant lack) other than hype it up.

1. fortnite was acceptable for an alpha quality project in the first few months, then they got skins and the FPS dropped by 3/4 for any causal hardware, and it was all downhill from there

khiqxj··on Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
8chan like every forum ever has dumb moderators who dont know how to do their job / over extend their hand (and the moderation position of web forums seems to attract people with certain mental disorders that make them seek out perceived microinjustices which the definition thereof changes from day to day)

there were a bunch of sites mirroring 8chan to steal content

these were useful because they had both a simpler / lighter / better user interface (aside from images being missing), and posts / threads that were deleted would stay on the mirrors. being able to see deleted posts / threads was highly useful as the moderation on such sites tends to be utterly useless and the output of a random number generator. it was hilarious reading "zigforum" instead of "8chan" in all the posts as the mirror replaced certain words to thinly veil their operation. they even had a reply button that didnt seem to work or was just fake.

tl;dr the web is broken and only is good when "abused" by proxy/mirrors

khiqxj··on Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
i cant see your site. the mirror/proxy is useful and doing its job.

Access denied Error code 1020

You do not have access to www.saashub.com.

The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site.

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khiqxj··on Unix's special way of marking login shells goes back to V2 Unix (at least)
true
khiqxj··on What it's like to live in Monaco
so just change the definition of who needs to be taxed what to whatever you want in your country. at the end of the day, the company has the option to actually (not just for show) move wherever to another country if it doesn't like your tax. granted, i dont know how corpo rats think so i cant say whether they would not want to live outside the US or something. this doesnt mean there needs to be a global tax minimum.

when i pay tax personally i am getting scammed (robbed). i dont work for a corpo like 99% of the users here that creates deliberately broken products nor do i get any funding from the government to spend on OLED screens while pretending its to boost the economy

khiqxj··on Unix's special way of marking login shells goes back to V2 Unix (at least)
cool, i remember spending hours trying to understand the section in the bash manpage about profile and login shells, and seeing if it has security implications and also why just the shell behaves bezerk when deciding what bashrc or whatever file to use. turns out i just needed to read some assembly of some obsolete proprietary OS on some architecture ive never used.
khiqxj··on Unix's special way of marking login shells goes back to V2 Unix (at least)
the mode of thinking certainly hasnt changed since hardware improved, however
khiqxj··on Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT
theres no difference. stack overflow has never been better than AI generated code. every answer is just "get the camera like this bro: ((Camera)GetFactoryProvider().CreateThing().GetGlobalThingContext("somestring"))".
khiqxj··on What it's like to live in Monaco
how would police investigate random people for hypothetical crimes they need to make up to justify their job and shoot them when they pull out their wallet if they werent overfunded?
khiqxj··on What it's like to live in Monaco
> somoene in some country im not part of has money and it isnt taxed according to how my country says it should be taxed

> therefore we need global tax minimum agreements

how does this follow? this isnt reddit or 4chan; your particular philosophy isnt assumed to be truth.

khiqxj··on Google combines Maps and Waze teams in restructuring move
aaand whenever someone IRL looks at a webapp that is up to date with the latest UX standards, they immediately see that it is also crap.
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