Hacker News Reader

metachrison New German law would force ISPs to allow secret service to install trojans

Browsers and operating systems include a list of root certificates which includes those of various governments. Pretty much any government can thus issue valid HTTPS certificates for any domain to MITM traffic.

metachrison Germany's Covid contact tracing app is Open Source

Some context:

> The German government has asked SAP and Deutsche Telekom to develop the Corona-Warn-App for Germany as open source software. Deutsche Telekom is providing the network and mobile technology and will operate and run the backend for the app in a safe, scalable and stable manner. SAP is responsible for the app development, its framework and the underlying platform. Therefore, development teams of SAP and Deutsche Telekom are contributing to this project. At the same time our commitment to open source means that we are enabling -in fact encouraging- all interested parties to contribute and become part of its developer community.

https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-app-android#contribut...

metachrison Off-Facebook activity

Depending on your location, but you could do a GDPR Data Subject Request (DSR)

metachrison Managing my personal knowledge base

I've worked with Evernote a lot, but handling source code snippets is really painful. Got me switching to Notion too.

metachrison Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

They've been around for a few years, and really are a pretty good collaborative tool with a lot of possible workflows and use-cases.

I've seen Notion mentioned often on HN, and after giving it a try I'd recommend to at least look into it to see for yourself.

metachrison Paternity Leave Was Crucial After the Birth of My Child

The US is already spending almost twice the amount on healthcare per person than Austria! https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

* US: $10,224

* Germany: $5,728

* Austria: $5,440

The system in the US is just totally dysfunctional, and I know a complex issue. But in essence it's using a lot more money than comparable countries but the benefits don't even compare remotely.

metachrison Paternity Leave Was Crucial After the Birth of My Child

Just as a reference point how maternity leave works in many parts of Europe, using Austria as a reference: a mother can choose between 1, 2 and 3 years of maternity leave. You'll get the same amount of money over the whole time, and it's covered by the health insurance, so the company doesn't have any costs. It's typical that mothers start part-time work afterwards to ease back into work life.

Fathers can also take paid paternity leave, usually you can split the leave with the mother however you want, and if you do you get a few months extra.

It's also typical that the father gets 3 weeks paid time off when a baby is born, to care for the family. I feel this was invaluable for me and my family.

I honestly find the US system inhumane, forcing mothers back into a job so soon, and a baby so young is just a tiny, vulnerable, little human. Too early to put them into daycare in my opinion, but I understand that many parents are forced to for financial reasons. The US healthcare really needs a big overhaul.

metachrison HarmonyOS is Huawei’s Android alternative for smartphones and smart home devices

The Chinese government can force cooperation from any company operating in China for any kind of data access, without court ruling or any due process. This basically means the Chinese government will have direct data access to phones running Huawei's OS.

metachrison Bitcoin falls below $5,000

> Cash is already the perfect medium for exchanging small amounts of money.

Yes in person, but not over the internet. Crypto currencies definitely have potential for exchanging small amount of money there!

metachrison Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness

Notch coding Minecraft comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhQ70O1MiXc

metachrison REST was never about CRUD

There's still free ranges of error codes you can use, eg. 460+ https://httpstatuses.com/

metachrison Ask HN: What popular apps were made exclusively with React Native or Flutter?

Looks like a beautiful app. Installed and tested... snooze is not working. See the reviews // just tested it myself on Android -- snoozing once will just disable the alarm when it should ring the next time.

metachrison Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

Gitter for dev communities, for broader communities a lot of projects also use Slack and Discord, perhaps Rocketchat.

metachrison How kids in a low-income country use laptops: lessons from Madagascar

Yep, I was part of the open-source dev community back in the day. The push by Microsoft and subsequent deal with Negroponte to have the XO laptops also run Windows really disappointed a lot of the open source developers. Back then it felt a little like the last nail in the coffin, for me at least.

metachrison Swagger is now the OpenAPI Specification

Swagger is typically used to auto-generate nice and interactive API docs automatically, not really meant to be written by hand.

metachrison Bitcoin has crossed $6,000 USD for the first time

And gdax only accounts for 4.25% of the volume. Bitfinex has the largest volume, and does about $352,758,000 in 24 hours.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/

metachrison Introducing App Engine Firewall

I think you are right with the understanding, but its a trade-off to be able to build bigger things more quickly and easily.

metachrison DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment

Which is still about 350 actions per minute for a professional SC2 player, roughly 5 to 6 actions per second.

metachrison Deconstructing the Google Analytics tracking script

Sure, there is interest!

metachrison Alex Honnold Scales El Capitan Without Ropes, and the Climbing World Reels

Many climbers have a fear of hights. Climbing can be a way to get comfortable with it.

metachrison Show HN: Early-stage Yahoo Pipes spiritual successor

Interesting thoughts, I would be interested to read more aboute this. Can you recommend any good references to start?

metachrison Show HN: Boilerplate generator for Python 2 and 3, with various configurations

Thanks! Yes, I know what you mean and share your pain. This is on the feature ideas list pretty far up top.

metachrison Show HN: Boilerplate generator for Python 2 and 3, with various configurations

Great idea, thanks! Adding it to the feature ideas ;-) Btw I'm happy to help with contributions!

metachrison Show HN: Boilerplate generator for Python 2 and 3, with various configurations

Hello all, author here. I built this during the past few weeks as fun and hopefully useful micro-project, playing around with Vue.js for the frontend.

Happy to answer any questions!

metachrison Ask HN: Starting a project today, which web framework would you use?

Backend: Django as soon as you want an admin interface for your models. It just saves so much time, and nobody enjoys writing those dumb CRUD routes. If you don't need an admin interface and want to stay in Python, I'd recommend Flask. Else I'm also enjoying Node.js.

Frontend: Vue.js or React.

metachrison Ask HN: KISS company website: Wordpress, Square Space or roll my own?

I second Hugo as a static website generator. I've been using Jekyll for a long time, but it is just too slow for a nice workflow, especially as the site/blog grows to more than a handful of pages.

Hugo is blazingly fast, has a very active community and has all the features you need. Also it's just a single binary and very easy to use.

You could use a CI system like Travis CI or Gitlab CI to automatically build the site and deploy it to a preview website on pushes.

metachrison Problems with Swagger

I've implemented Swagger with several APIs and agree that it's crazy complex and time-consuming to write Swagger files manually.

I believe the best use-case for Swagger is to develop the API (perhaps just defining the routes with payload and response, but without controllers), and then auto-generating the Swagger files. This way the API consumers always have an up-to-date documentation, and there is only one place which represents the current state of the API.

metachrison CoreOS's rkt and Docker's containerd jointly donated to CNCF

And the related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388721

metachrison Show HN: NoFile.io – A simple file storage site with lots of perks

https://nofile.io/security/

"Your file is first securely encrypted using a secret key (AES-128) with Javascript on your device. Once it has been encrypted, the encrypted data is uploaded to a NoFile storage server over a secure HTTPS connection preventing any malicious users from seeing what you're uploading (as an extra layer of security).

Only those with the secret key (which is in the URL) will be able to see the correct content and filename - if a single character of the key varies, then the file will be unrecognizable."

You need to set this as your preferred method on the upload page.

metachrison The European Parliament votes non-bindingly to reintroduce visas for Americans

The reason being that the US still requires visas from 5 EU countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania.

And "The EU says it notified the United States in April 2014 that it was not meeting EU visa rules, and had given the country two years to comply."