Hacker News Reader

lapinoton Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

Thanks for lecturing me about the web. As is pretty evident in this subthread, there are definitely people here on hn that seem to be overly sensitive to self-proclaimed policing. Once again one last time: my response was calling the parent hyperbolic and actually imprecise. I couldn't have provoked this kind of reaction had i wanted to. TIL

> the rest of the faux-intelligentsia strive to find new things they can be outraged about.

Just wow. Which would be who exactly in this subthread? The amount of fact reversal to get to this conclusion is quite amazing.

lapinoton Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

Wth are you talking about? My comment had nothing to do with trigger warning or any kind of sensitiveness, which you seem quite eager to hit on. I guess i'm not used to this kind of americanization of the debate and i must've said something very wrong to say without realizing. Point is the phrase is completely excessive in this context, we're talking about exchanging text messages. Yes aim and gtalk was funny but there is some romanticizing about "the old web".

lapinoton Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

Couldn't you have said "compartmentalized", or "dominated by hostile silos" or anything else that doesn't involve comparison of the state of online chatting with wars that have killed humans? I agree things were nice with adium.

lapinoton Magical Fibonacci Formulae

This article is about the cute generating function trick. Not exactly sure why you're showcasing the usual recursive fibonacci in haskell.

lapinoton A Critique on “A Critique on the OpenPGP Updates”

There have been some tensions between some sequoia-pgp devs and Koch (which are mentioned in tfa). So it might also be some of them. I don't know anything first hand tho.

lapinoton Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

Your argument is a straw-man. You're conflating taking inspiration from something and adopting it verbatim (your first two examples are particularly hilarious in this regard). Also i've yet to find a compelling argument defending that western capitalism is a necessity for high-tech (you second two examples). In particular schools, academia and software are fields where not commercial-centric relationships are thriving and deemed superior by a fair share of practitioners.

lapinoton Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta

The good old "we have always been that way". If perhaps hard to imagine for you, there are tons of social structures where wealth cannot be used to purchase power (ie where currency buys you some stuff but not labor from other humans). See the recent book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything. Very much a perspective changing book.

lapinoton Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says

Indeed, just like committing homicide and having a baby cancels out.

lapinoton The IMF is slowly pushing for digital currencies to replace cash

This! This is so infuriating. Now i guess most major city have some poorly secured db that contains all the time/place points where every user of mass transit has checked in/out. I'm not exactly sure what is the strong push for this, is it lobbying by vendors to get access to this data? In any case most of the time it's marketed as somehow "green" (because you understand, replacing paper with microelectronics is really the way to go).

lapinoton CacheWarp: A new software fault attack on AMD SEV-ES and SEV-SNP

More than defeatist, its relativist. Minimizing the trusted computing base is an important tool for higher security guarantees. It's obvious that whatever the size of your TCB, a bug is a bug. In any case, i believe TDR's rant was specifically about x86 and not about virtualization or any kind of low level isolation per se.

lapinoton Beg Bounties (2021)

> Occasionally it works for people in developing countries is, in my opinion, a terrible argument for allowing such behavior.

I think the point GP was raising isn't that it's ok, but that it's part of a wider problem and isn't just happening because people are stupid. It makes sense for them because of how the world economy is currently set up. Saying "hey will you just stop please" won't change that fact. Exactly the same thing is true for spam.

lapinoton OCaml: a Rust developer's first impressions

> In fact, the standard library encourages Seq instead over List.

Uhu? Never heard about Seq before! Seems to have been introduced in 4.07 which was released 5 years ago, which is basically yesterday in terms of stdlib api. Set and Map, sure, but Seq? Lists are ubiquitous and they are indeed a central data structure in ocaml code. For anybody also wondering, Seq is a datatype for iterators (ie thunked lists).

lapinoton What if we replace guns and bullets with bows and arrows? (2022)

I'd be curious about data supporting this claim. Browsing through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disaster... seems to suggest otherwise, but its also not relative to population.

lapinoton What if we replace guns and bullets with bows and arrows? (2022)

> an impractical contrarian outsider

I guess you didn't read much of lowtechmag, which is definitely just about the opposite of "impractical", being much centered on actual experimentation, detailed technical analysis etc. But then again "of course people on HN" would get offended by such slightly technocritical pov.

> suggesting that the entire world replace advanced weaponry with stuff that got phased out hundreds of years ago

Exactly what part of the title starting with "What if" did you not understand? This article -- like several other on the website, but for this one it's particularly obvious -- are thought experiment, designed very much to confront people with unusual ideas and hence make the current norm more obvious.

lapinoton WasmFX: Effect Handlers for WebAssembly

This will never happen, "legacy call" of functions manipulating the control stack in weird ways can never be meaningful. OTOH the reverse is not always true but a good system should have it: transparent recasting of pure code as effectful code. In other words, the problem that should be solvable but isn't always is that you should be able to "await" a pure function. Or more generally, transparent subtyping of less effectful code into more effectful. Subtyping isn't easy but it's also not impossible if you think about it early enough during the design.

lapinoton WasmFX: Effect Handlers for WebAssembly

Agreed, except if you're willing to go into weird territory and go fully dual, programming terms and continuations alike (Downen & Ariola's great introduction to mu-mu-tilde language, not the earliest, but one of the most readable on the topic, quite mind blowing imho):

https://pauldownen.com/publications/1907.13227.pdf

lapinoton NewPipe – Lightweight YouTube experience for Android

They don't use official APIs (if you do you need to register a dev account and this sort of thing would most likely be against the TOS), just like yt-dlp they reverse engineer all sorts of apps youtube has (the webpage, the mobile webpage, the TV app, the android app, ...) and thus get all sorts of undocumented APIs to scrap from.

lapinoton NewPipe – Lightweight YouTube experience for Android

What is it with the disdain for mental health, privacy or political mindfulness? Big tech don't feel like paying attention to people even if people use Youtube more than other streaming services combined. Maybe the issue is that big tech got so used to a decade of unlimited high-quality tracking for absolutely free?

lapinoton Spain's efficient high-speed trains have transformed people's lives

Necessary rebuttal: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-...

lapinoton Which Interpreters Are Faster, AST or Bytecode?

Afaik the important difference between "ast walker" and "bytecode vm" is that the former is recursive, that is, it will more or less use the host call-stack as user call-stack, while a bytecode vm manages its own datastructures and is basically a while loop. But you can definitely go from a recursive interpreter to a bytecode vm by doing a CPS transform of your interpreter and defunctionalizing it. See eg https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/888251.888254

lapinoton They can and will ruin everything you love

> a world where the Bandcamp founders would need to sell out in order to have am assured secure life for themselves and offspring.

"need" is a bit twisted, i'm not sure anyone "needs" a million or so. If they really wanted to get out of it and keep it nice they most likely could have set up a non-profit or something, raised some money from the community and probably still get a small rent in some way. Also it's not like the CEO of such a company (smallish but still) is strapped on cash already.

> But they did sell out.

That's it.. There's no excuse and as you said, everyone knew this kind of constant downhill had a very high probability to happen. They definitely took the 90% chance coin-flip to hose the community and get "an actual bit of capital" much of money.

lapinoton Omnivore – free, open source, read-it-later App

https://github.com/omnivore-app/omnivore

lapinoton VeraCrypt: Free open-source disk encryption for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702095

it's probably more than a $10k implication..

lapinoton Everything authenticated by Microsoft is tainted

Yes indeed! When i said it's a pita, i mostly meant that LDAP is a pita (needlessly complex spec with complicated query language and the whole schema extension zoo). openldap is pretty fine as far as it can be.

Personally i'm using lldap, which is a neat no-footgun ldap daemon for small/personal deployments.

lapinoton Everything authenticated by Microsoft is tainted

What's wrong with openldap? I mean, apart from being a pita, i thought it was the widely used central auth directory (behind all sorts of sso frontends).

lapinoton Introducing Proton CAPTCHA, the world’s first censorship-resistant CAPTCHA

I get them too but i guess this means that my locked down browser config (resistfingerprinting, strict ublock policy, privacy badger) is working. Behavioral security checks which are pretty common nowadays mean that either they can fingerprint you into a human they already know, or they will put you behind a captcha..

lapinoton Why Kakoune

> I wonder if the author has ever heard of vis[0]

Yes.

https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Kakoun...

https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki#onboarding

> which imho fulfills far better each one of those premises

Not very motivated for such a harsh critic..

lapinoton Tackling the curse of dimensionality with physics-informed neural networks

To add to the other answers: dimensions also appear in higher-order PDE: you typically go from an nth order 1-dimensional equation (an equation mentioning the n-th derivative of your unknown function) to an n-dimensional 1st order equation. There is a general pattern of adding parameters to have several simple problems instead of one complicated.

lapinoton Tails is a portable OS that protects against surveillance and censorship

Obviously! Assassination or imprisonment could also be considered censorship and tor or tails won't help. There are always edge cases. They are pretty explicit about their threat model and go into great lengths explaining it.

https://tails.net/doc/about/warnings/index.en.html

lapinoton What is wrong with TOML? (2019)

Some do, using s-expr as config files is pretty common in the ocaml ecosystem (ie dune).