octosphere

Anyone find anything that Google does these days to be aggressively competitive? As a one-man startup guy, I feel everything I do pales in comparison to what Google are doing and I feel nothing more than /eclipsed/ by them. I have found myself wondering: "If you can't beat them join them" on many occasions. I probably should just merge into Google one day and stop my worrying?

Anyone know of English words that we can use to make a 'domain hack'[0] out of this?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack

Curious to know, but where can I buy one, and what registrars offer .su? Seems entirely absent in my usual haunt where I go to get obscure TLDs:

https://www.ovh.co.uk/domains/prices/

There is however the following you can get on OVH which are similar:

    .sucks
    .supplies
    .supply
    .support
    .surgery

You should report them to Plain Text Offenders[0]. They're doing God's work.

[0] https://plaintextoffenders.com/

[0] https://plaintextoffenders.com/submit

Interesting easter egg on the main page:

http://lh.mk --> views source

    <!-- who.lh.mk for the curious ones --> 

http://who.lh.mk

I'm going to 'recycle' an older comment of mine, pertaining to the comments about the book. The original comment can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583363

I was annoyed that someone called Ed Snowden a 'Traitor'. Hopefully it gets a bit more recognition in this thread

__________________________________

For me he made the Great Game of Privacy a lot fairer. You should read the excellent entry on Wikipedia about the aftermath of the leaks[0]. If the leaks meant that privacy-loving folk went 'dark' in light of the leaks, then this is a net plus. Snowden's actions possibly hindered NSA in catching undesirables, but it's a small price to pay for a bolstered Internet and privacy-respecting comms. And who's to say that the apparatus even worked that well in foiling the efforts of plotters? Bill Binney[1] consistently drives his message home that the NSA's surveillance apparatus is very inefficient at foiling plots, and I agree with him.

Even if it stopped one plot in all the time of its existence, it's still an enormous effort and an enormous amount of money spent just to foil one plot. Old fashioned police work is better at foiling plots because it doesn't have to rely on big data algorithms sifting through the noise of Internet traffic (most of which is innocuous). Old fashioned methods work because they employ simple detective work - it doesn't need the NSA at every choke point and decrypting countless crypto.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli...

> When Elon Musk has an idea, it pays to sit up and pay attention.

Not necessarily so. He's just a billionaire doing billionaire things and thinking billionaire thoughts. Of course he would say scary things about AI and try and scare us about the machines taking over, but strong AI is actually very nuanced and not easily explained; mainly because we don't know how it will play out and what kind of balance there will be when we do merge with computers. Will we go full machine or will we have a healthy balance of human and machine? Or will the Luddites complain we've gone too far and want to reclaim the monkey body? Nobody really knows how this plays out, albeit sci-fi is often a good yardstick by which we can approach with more caution (Think Terminator, The Matrix, 2001 Space Odyssey)

A brilliant article, also something that is posted nearly every other day on HN https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> You can run the server within your own cloud

For me there is a tradeoff. On one hand, Bitwarden's online offering where you trust them with your data is convenient, but also a single point of failure. If their server goes offline, you can't access your passwords (And servers do go down). On the other hand you can repair your own instance if it goes down and have full control over it. The only caveat with self-hosting being the overhead. Regular non-techie people just don't have the time or intellectual curiosity to experiment with self-hosting. For me personally I just sync a Keepass database with Dropbox and call it a day.

I tend to stay away from Instagram as I once read a study (too lazy to find the paper) that Instagram is more detrimental to mental health than other social networks and is generally to be avoided (partly this is because you are comparing other people's highlight reel to your boring drab life).

I use Facebook, albeit sparingly and only ever to make meaningful interactions with my family, and nothing else. I don't feverishly 'check in' to locations, don't engage in 'groups', don't 'like' a million-and-one things, or otherwise engage in the Facebook app in any meaningful way. It means Facebook can't build a dossier of my interests, although they do know my social graph, but then: I'm not a person of interest anyway. I am actually very forgettable.

For Twitter, I have a locked down account and only follow what I'm interested in. I don't actively seek to get more followers, and have literally nothing in my bio that is about me. I don't use my real name. My account is purely for discovery of positive news, and content that stimulates me intellectually.

I recently started to experiment with Neuro Linguistic Programming[0] and a big part of that is deciding what you pay attention to (especially online) and feeding your brain with content that enables you to grow as a person and not be bogged down with negative content that only appeals to your 'monkey brain'. I haven't gone to extremes by cutting out all social media, instead I just use it mindfully and by carefully choosing the types of content I consume.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

It's handy for easter eggs, for example:

https://github.com/justdeleteme/justdelete.me/blob/master/si...

Check No Code Founders: https://www.nocodefounders.com

Glad. I do affiliate marketing, and as part of my research into this area I have to look at hundreds of landing pages with talking heads explaining how to buy cheap cialis. One notable ploy they use is autoplaying audio & video to grab your attention. Little do they realize that users instantly find the offending video and close the tab. Autoplay actually increases the churn rate.

OOPSEC Fail

Some services like Amazon make it outrageously difficult to leave their service. You have to contact support and the link is buried really deep in their site, you have to jump through serious hoops to leave their service.

There's a great site called Just Delete Me[0] that lists all the services where leaving / deleting your account is hard and the user is subjected to dark patterns.

[0] https://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/

It's probably called dark because the user is often 'left in the dark'[0] about how to use the interface

[0] https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/left+in+the+dark

Every now and then we see articles which dissect how the Internet works, and then are appalled at all the supposed privacy violations. Trackers are part of the web and have been for a long time. I don't see them going away soon. They fund the web and keep it moving along. We get into trouble when all our browsing is done in one session / container and no effort is made to containerize our browsing so that chatty scripts and trackers can't talk to each other via cookies as you traverse the web in any meaningful way.

Personally I divide up my browsing into many different compartments to avoid or seriously hinder tracking. I also only ever enable JS on a site if I really have to. I am suspicious of news articles that demand JS just to read a small bit of text. This is not some magic bullet - I know I will be tracked; but at least now my identity is divided up so much that it's hard to discern who I really am. Couple this type of compartmented browsing with an anonymous mixing network like Tor and it's game over for trackers.

Having one single container / session for all your activity (and without an adblocker like uBlock Origin) is borderline stupid in this day and age and can do more harm than good. The modern web has been designed to be as hostile as possible when you surf 'bareback' without an adblocker and without dividing up your sessions into discrete containers. Of course you will get people that like to surf bareback, with literally zero configurations in their browser and without an Ad-blocker. These are the people who are the most exploited, their every activity mined like it was oil - their whole life put into databases that could leak and be hacked at any moment, meaning they're very susceptible to 'doxing' or having their life ruined.

Most redirects on the web are fairly innocuous, but now and then they are used to point to malware or otherwise deceive. Since this is a magazine/news site I wouldn't worry, though there is the chance it's another hacked Wordpress site used to redirect visitors to malware / drive-by downloads.

It's funny looking at some of the contributors to this. Some of the accounts seem to be vague, single-duty accounts made for the express purpose of contributing code to CyberChef and nothing else. I admire their OPSEC

(From: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/graphs/contributors)

https://github.com/n1474335

https://github.com/j433866

https://github.com/d98762625

https://github.com/s2224834

https://github.com/GCHQ77703

I have come to think of DevOps as an all encompassing term that includes everything. Why not just say the person's a 'wizard' and leave it at that? It's actually not a derogatory term and I would be happy to be called a wizard or even a generalist.

I thought the ending of the third movie was conclusive enough. I dread to think the machines changed their mind and now Neo has to fight another war. Also: In fairness if AI hasn't conquered space yet, then it's not sufficiently strong AI. The fourth edition should be set in space...

Interesting that the download button says "Not supported for Linux" when you're using Linux. But what if I want to try this out on Windows, but use Linux to acquire the software? Sniffing the useragent and providing the relevant message is annoying for users, because if they want the software, they are going to find ways of acquiring it, regardless of the useragent sniff in place.

Note: I downloaded the beta version, and within 10 minutes of using it, it crashed. I reported the crash however so hopefully they can fix this

Always annoying that things like this don't launch both in the U.S and Europe. All I see in my feeds is mentions of the Apple Card and I have to ignore it because it's a U.S thing only and I'm in Europe.

There's a few copies of Encarta lying around on Archive.org if anyone is interested in getting a copy:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=encarta&and[]=mediatype...

Most of the time we are programmed by the device itself. That is to say, we should program a PC instead of having it dictate our day and tell us what to do. An email inbox for example is nothing more than a todo list created by someone else and apparently we have to check each item off and reach the mythical 'inbox zero'.

Then we have the browser where news comes at us randomly and we have 100 tabs open but no idea how or where those tabs come from - they are an example of how unorganized our thoughts are when we use the web. There's no curation, no attempt to organize information, because apparently its done already for us in the form of Google and other crawlers.

> These toilets are an example of high tech hostile architecture

There's a good article on Wikipedia about hostile architecture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

Such an archaic thing to have when the masses have largely adopted smartphone and tablets and are subscribers of things like NowTV, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or even paid YouTube subscriptions (among other less popular services which I am leaving out).

> I get stressed out from programming

Deleted code is debugged code. There is a fallacy that more lines of code means a better world. Why not try doing things that don't require coding skills, and try doing more point-and-click things. Personally I only code if I really have to and my livelihood depends on it (but luckily I can now afford not to code and focus on other things). I recently switched to doing social media marketing for a small handful of clients. It's good money for what is essentially managing a few Twitter & Facebook accounts :)