Hacker News Reader

lysergiaon An incomplete guide to stealth addresses

> Basic stealth addresses can be implemented fairly quickly today, and could be a significant boost to practical user privacy on Ethereum. They do require some work on the wallet side to support them

So how easy is it realistically? I hope it's not going to un-ergonomic like PGP where novices are sometimes seeing to be pasting their private key into e-mails and sending things in plaintext which should have been ciphertext, or otherwise leaking info.

I imagine you have to be really careful not to mess things up here.

lysergiaon The 88x31 GIF Collection

The 'Best viewed with Internet Explorer'[0] GIF triggers severe nostalgia.

IE was the dominant browser at the time, and these propaganda buttons just reinforced the idea that IE was the only browser you should be using. Still see the odd site saying 'Works best in Chrome' as if Chrome was the new IE.

Personally though, if your site is one of those annoying SPA (Single Page Apps) and doesn't work in Lynx[1], you're doing it wrong IMHO.

Nearly tempted to put a button on my sites saying: 'Best viewed in Lynx'.

[0] https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/bestviewed.gif

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

lysergiaon The FBI Identified a Tor User

I have a Glinet[0] router that has Tor functionality and 'torifies' your connection, so even if there's some JS 0day that executes trying to decloak me, the adversary just gets a Tor IP instead of my home connection IP.

Note: I connect to Tor from my torified Glinet router which is doing Tor-over-Tor which is considered 'dangerous'[1] but I do it anyway.

This might be overkill for most, and I'm not doing anything illegal (I mostly browse clearnet sites instead of hidden services anyways).

[0] https://www.gl-inet.com/

[1] https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/427/is-running-tor-o...

lysergiaon Ask HN: How do you give back?

I donate to Riseup[0], TailsOS[1], and The EFF[2]. They all do great work, and I use their services too, so I'm not just a leecher!

[0] https://riseup.net/en/donate

[1] https://tails.boum.org/donate/

[2] https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-4

lysergiaon Ask HN: What is your goal for 2023?

Revisit old notes and take action on them. Be a bit more adventurous online, try out new services, websites, tools, no-code solutions like Zapier etc

Be more active on Twitter. I know it's a strange place to hang out on now, and my timing is probably wrong, but I want to leverage it and gain some new friends and learn a thing or two.

Stop doomscrolling. I'm a news junkie, and need to stop reading so many gloomy headlines. I want to pay attention to what interests me. I will still glance at world news just to get a feel for where we're at and what's going on, but I will not binge on news like I used to.

lysergiaon NeevaAI

> How is Neeva monetized?

> Neeva is 100% ad-free and never sells or shares members' data with any third party. Neeva's Free Basic membership is completely free and full-featured, allowing members to search both the web and connected personal accounts like Gmail or Dropbox (subject to certain usage limits), set news and shopping preferences, and search from multiple devices.

> To earn money, Neeva offers a Premium membership tier where some members choose to pay a monthly fee and receive best-in-class privacy-protecting tools, as well as other exclusive insider benefits.

https://help.neeva.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500011532921-How-d...

Looks like the $$$ they get from premium subscriptions finances their 'free' offering, but as with all services with this model I am skeptical of anything 'free' since it could be powering their AI and later down the line that will be potentially abused or weaponized.

lysergiaon Ask HN: What are some surprising ways to gain social status?

- Enter politics

- Write a book

- Enter the priesthood

- Say something quotable that hasn't been said before and ensure it lives on after you die

Note: These are from the top of my head and are not guaranteed to work.

lysergiaon Purring is a love language no human can speak

Certified ailurophile[0] here. I've found the gentle hum of purring very soothing, almost like having a hot chocolate on a cold day, or chicken soup. It's very comforting, and I'm lead to believe the specific frequency of the hum is in line with nature and The Universe itself. It has the same frequency of the Omm mantra which is apparently the frequency our bodies emit when we're in full health and homeostasis or in a meditative trance.

[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ailurophile

lysergiaon The money is the message

> Uncertainty does not mean things will get worse. It only means we know less and have less control.

People naturally loath feeling out of control. Sometimes control is an illusion, other times it has a solid foundation and is not a mirage. The trick is to recognize real control and see some value in that. We cod ourselves when control is an illusion.

lysergiaon Ask HN: Is Unicode Designed Badly?

Every computer science problem eventually ends with The Unicode Problem and its various agendas. Personally I avoid Unicode in my editor and use ASCII at all times. If I have to deal with Unicode, I escape it into the relevant ASCII equivalent and normalize things like emojis to ASCII. This avoids various headaches down the line, since Unicode is not cross-compatible across devices and having everything in ASCII is a saner way to approach that.

lysergiaon GitHub Outage

> equivalent of getting a surprise snow day

Not if you self-host Git

lysergiaon Ask HN: Where do you host your CSS files?

How much would you have to pay for Cloudfront if you, say, got multiple blogposts featured on HN's frontpage quite regularly? Presuming you're not serving that many images or other assets?

lysergiaon Tell HN: Twitter has been taken over by one-word tweets

https://m.republicworld.com/technology-news/social-media-new...

https://www.khou.com/article/features/one-word-tweets-twitte...

https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/one-word-trend-takes-over-t...

https://www.msn.com/en-in/sports/cricket/one-word-trend-take...

lysergiaon Ask HN: Is Bootstrap still valid choice?

I wouldn't say it's obsolete. It still lives on, just the hype cycle has dipped to a trough. I prefer 'classless CSS' frameworks though. You just drop a CSS file into a HTML document and everything's already styled without having to write very much code or learn the 'lingo' of Bootstrap to get things done.

lysergiaon How to access Reddit without ads and tracking

Personally I use old.reddit.com with an AD blocker. Surprisingly this article doesn’t mention it

lysergiaon Steve Teixeira, Mozilla’s New Chief Product Officer

Great! Now:

Stop tracking people with telemetry. You don’t need to know how many users you have. People strip FF of telemetry anyways. Look at LibreWolf and learn.

Clean up the FF addons repository. So many addons are plain malware and invading peoples privacy surreptitiously.

Get rid of Pocket. Nobody uses it and it was forced on users.

Stop piggybacking on handouts from Google. There are other ways to source revenue. Make FF donationware if you must. I would happily send you £5.00 per month if it means I and others can continue to use FF.

lysergiaon FamFamFam Silk Icons (2005)

Can’t believe that resource is still up. I recall a post about HN’s first ever front page having these as a submission. Good URLs don’t change.

lysergiaon Ask HN: How do you justify your existence?

I use both free and non-free software all the time. I have a gaming PC with Windows and a laptop with Trisquel on it for my daily driver. Call me a hypocrite if you must but you can get the best of both worlds if you allow for that and aren’t so zealous for ‘the one true way’.

lysergiaon On being tired

Not gonna lie, I get nights where I don’t sleep at all and my mind ‘glows’ with thoughts and the thoughts are intrusive, almost an imposter on my mind. This is a good time to write and take notes. Missing a night’s sleep is detrimental to the next day where all the things that would normally excite me are boring as hell. All I can do is exist during the day and I feel slightly drunk and can’t do anything that requires good dexterity. It’s horrible. Then I make up the sleep debt by falling asleep on that day, and the feeling of rejuvenation is tremendous and I can function. I’ve talked to my doctor about those nights where my mind ‘glows’ with activity and I was diagnosed with mild psychosis. Luckily it’s treatable with meds, so there is that.

lysergiaon Rufus: Microsoft is blocking Windows ISO downloads

I just use this:

https://tb.rg-adguard.net/public.php

lysergiaon Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Yeah and some distros even come with Libre Office bundled in. In all my time using it, I’ve never run into problems apart from some tiny edge cases like not being able to use Windows-specific fonts like Impact etc But you can install Windows fonts in Linux for that situation.

Then there’s ChromeOS Flex where you can open any Office document and edit and store in the cloud with Google Docs. There’s really no excuse for using Windows for office stuff anymore.

lysergiaon Phishers Swim Around 2FA in Coinbase Account Heists

Or just don’t use Coinbase and do everything on-chain and avoid middleman exchanges like Coinbase. All your Coinbase are belong to us.

lysergiaon Arrest of suspected developer of Tornado Cash

Committee? Like as in Satoshi was a team of people? That’s one possibility.

As a side note the Nakamoto Institute website archived all of Satoshi’s emails and ‘his’ IP is Californian. Make of that what you will. For all we know it could’ve been one of Musk’s side projects that caught on and went viral.

lysergiaon Locking down your GitHub-hosted Domains

So this article suggests not using a CNAME DNS entry and pointing your domain’s APEX entry at GitHub’s IP. You could also use an ALIAS record to point the ‘www’ part to GitHub too, though only a few DNS providers support ALIAS.

lysergiaon The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

Long live the dream of the semantic web. For visual learners there’s a great YouTube video explaining the semantic web here:

https://youtu.be/6gmP4nk0EOE

lysergiaon An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

I checked. I have a few alt accounts and all my tweets and interactions are visible when I visit my profile.

lysergiaon An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

I’m six months in and they haven’t asked for a phone number yet. I dread the day when they do. This is where proficiency in the Twilio API comes in handy.

lysergiaon An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

Strange you say that. I’m six months into my pseudonymous account and they haven’t tried to extort my phone number. It’s like they know from my behavior that I don’t want to be doxxed by Twitter Inc. I signed up using a VPN and a weird email address, and used an AD blocker.

lysergiaon The productivity tax you pay for context switching

I’m not so sure about this article. I’ve crafted my daily computing into various buckets not only to stay organized, but to compartment different activities from each other. For example I have a browser profile for NSFW activity that I don’t want anywhere near my professional work related activity. Likewise I have a whole browser profile dedicated to casual surfing of the web with browsing history turned off and all the browsing artifacts get erased upon closing the browser. This isolates sessions so that cookies etc can’t build massive profiles of me. Likewise I have a browser profile where I need to be logged into various services (Amazon, Netflix, Spotify etc) which keeps cookies, and no other browsing is done apart from using those specific sites.

If I need to be productive, again, I context switch into a dedicated workstation that has all my devtools ready, alongside specially configured browsers that I use to test the sites I’m building. These browsers again are separated and highly context specific.

Welcome to modern computing! Context switching is on the menu :)

lysergiaon GitHub suspends Tornado Cash developer account

Code is a form of speech. It’s the way the code was used that frightened the authorities. Just the way certain forms of cryptographic code were reframed as a ‘munition’ in the first crypto war.