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pawson Websites that look like desktop GUIs

FYI all that draggable/resizable stuff comes from Ext.JS

https://examples.sencha.com/extjs/7.1.0/examples/kitchensink...

pawson WeWork's Adam Neumann offered package worth up to $1.7B to step down from board

Right, that's the part I'm a bit confused by.

If I'm understanding you right, it sounds like VCs choose to not require fiduciary-style obligations of the founders?

e.g. whatever the contract looks like, I'm a bit surprised it wouldn't have a term along the lines of 'by taking this money you promise not to self deal'

pawson WeWork's Adam Neumann offered package worth up to $1.7B to step down from board

Why do VCs let founders cash out pre-IPO?

AFAIK fiduciary self dealing is illegal in public companies but for whatever reason WeWork's investors evidently didn't seem to care. Why?

pawson Some tea bags may shed billions of microplastics per cup

I would imagine at this scale, It's not so much counting particles, but weighing them. So you need to separate them out to do that.

Elements of different mass can be separated using centrifuges. Not 100% sure for this case, but I know that's how it's done for certain kinds of refinement.

pawson A database of Facebook users’ phone numbers found online

> If you've ever given the service your number, you should consider your real identity linked to it.

I have a feeling it's worse than that. (I haven't rigorously perused the ToS, if I'm wrong please lmk.)

Let's say your friend John has an iPhone and saves your name and # in their contacts. One day John installs the Facebook app & opens it. John is not technical and when the app requests permissions he taps 'Allow'. At that point AFAICT there's nothing stopping Facebook from snagging your name & number and populating a ghost profile, or corroborating a real one.

In other words, if you've ever shared your phone number to someone who uses the Facebook app who doesn't dutifully and consistently reject permissions prompts, it's probably already too late.

pawson Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? (July 2019)

SEEKING WORK

Experienced full stack developer.

Recent projects in React, Kubernetes, Docker, crypto.

Previous projects in Rails, React Native. Formerly a digital forensics investigator.

Location: currently remote, open to chatting. NYC & Berlin

Previous clients have called me their ‘hired gun’ and said I’m ’easy to work with’.

Ask me about dinner at Bill Gates’ house :)

Email pas8314+hn@gmail.com

Mention HN if you like.

pawson Plaid co-founder William Hockey is leaving

If I understand right, using Plaid means giving bank account credentials to a 3rd party by design.

Let's say, for sake of argument, one day a Plaid user logs on to their bank account and discovers missing funds. Does the bank get to say Plaid users automatically lost consumer protections under e.g. Reg E and similar by sharing account credentials? Not an expert but it seems to me the answer is probably yes.

pawson Rückzugsorte – Map of areas in Berlin which are the furthest away from a street

If site doesn't respond for you also here's a mirror

https://web.archive.org/web/20190414020642/https://interakti...

pawson John C. Bogle Has Died

Not sure how many HN people follow the Bogle philosophy, but to me it feels not inappropriate to turn on the black bar.

pawson Show HN: GraphQL lib for real-time apps

Well, to answer you could take a look at their dependencies:

https://github.com/tjmehta/primus-graphql/blob/master/packag...

https://github.com/prisma/graphql-yoga/blob/master/package.j...

pawson Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

Intuit's lobbying budget was $2.39 million last year [1], and H&R Block's $2.66 million [2].

Makes one wonder...

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000026667

[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/lobby.php?id=D000022016

pawson The pfSense Book

Last summer I was looking into a building a little project that could do just that.

TL, DR: It looks like those with the patience to compile a kernel+drivers can probably manage using Denverton boards [1]. I was blocked by no available drivers last year but hope to come back to my build project in the fall.

NB: I'm just a casual tinkerer not an expert.

Back story: Last summer when Intel shipped Denverton, QAT (which offloads crypto) apparently got a substantial speed boost and I saw claims that 10GbE IPSec should be possible. Denverton boards vary but some top end ones apparently ship with 4 10GbE NICs [2].

Back then the issue was that the QAT drivers weren't ready, so I put my project on hold. Today I see Intel has apparently shipped Linux and FreeBSD drivers. [3] Would of course be nice to see these drivers land upstream but no idea what the licensing story is like here.

[1] https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c3000-series-launch-...

[2] https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-a2sdi-h-tp4f-review/

[2] https://01.org/intel-quick-assist-technology/downloads

pawson Police raid at Zwiebelfreunde: Donor data compromised

> compiled a database of my political donations without probable cause.

I share your sentiment, I wouldn't appreciate that either of course.

I find it hard to feel optimistic about privacy in America, and in a similar way, probable cause. Three short vignettes:

1) Living in Brooklyn a couple years back I was surprised one day to see a white van with ALPR cameras slowly cruising residential streets, followed by a squad car. There was clearly some arrangement where this private company was teaming up with NYPD to boot offenders' vehicles. Ostensibly the private company had access to some NYPD database [0]. The slippery slope there makes me exceedingly uncomfortable. If a referendum happened on that one, I missed it.

2) Fast forward to Jan 2017 - shortly before Obama left office, the NSA was given significantly increased authority to share the dragnet surveillance it hoovers up [1] [2].

3) In May 2018, as you may have heard, major US carriers were caught selling real-time customer location data to private companies [3] who resold it.

Meanwhile what you might hope would be prosecutors' fear of, well, prosecution for attempting to subvert the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine for e.g. parallel construction [4] seems quite undermined by prosecutorial immunity [5].

I don't claim to be a legal expert but I do find it truly scary to think about.

What else is going on we don't know?

[0] https://paylock.com/who-we-serve/

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveill...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/locationsmart-securus-location-d...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_immunity

pawson Police raid at Zwiebelfreunde: Donor data compromised

I'm not familiar with the history of police misconduct in post-unification Germany, but of course whenever a judge is sympathetic to the police first it's not good for the accused.

In the US prosecutorial immunity[0][1] is one of the most mind boggling aspects of the legal system there. I'm curious does Germany have a similar rule?

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity

pawson Police raid at Zwiebelfreunde: Donor data compromised

Could you help me understand why it's a problem that your account data would be in the hands of the police?

I would have thought the reason for the raid was to collect physical evidence and that whatever the German equivalent to FinCEN[1] is could just pull anyone's financial records up anytime.

Is it simply fear of being targeted? It's not a crime to donate is it?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Crimes_Enforcement_N...

pawson Material UI v1 for React is out

Congrats guys! It's been a pleasure using the pre 1.0 releases -- looking forward to trying 1.0 out.

In addition to the overall polish, one of my favorite aspects of this library is the authors' focus on controlling bundle size. Because of this library I learned that ES6 default imports may not be cheap.

VSCode users: consider checking out Import Cost extension [1] to keep an eye on this.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wix.vsco...

pawson Internal Facebook posts of employees discussing leaked memo

You may find it additionally ironic that about a month before the Boz memo, it was reported[1] that Zuck bought 4 houses located around his own for $30 million.

Privacy is looking pretty alive in that neighborhood.

[1] http://time.com/money/4346766/mark-zuckerberg-houses/

pawson Charles Proxy now available on iOS

Apple introduced App Transport Security[1] with iOS 9. The setting is configured in your app's Info.plist[2].

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Gen...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/48089038/2044952

pawson Congrats Dropbox

Thank you

pawson Congrats Dropbox

Congrats to the Dropbox team.

Apologies if this is a naive question but I haven't had much success Googling.

I've never heard of a company going public without an investment bank's support. I assume there was a law to require this.

When did that happen?

pawson Users Abandon Facebook After Cambridge Analytica Findings

For future readers of this comment, there was previously a parent post here about the overly broad headline for this article.

TIL on HN, if a someone deletes a parent comment, the children get promoted to the top.

pawson Users Abandon Facebook After Cambridge Analytica Findings

Ian Betteridge[1] called for you.

More seriously though, it's not unusual for newsroom editors to modify or even completely rewrite article headlines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... ("Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.")

pawson Airlines propose long list of rules to kill or revise

Airlines for America, in its filing, said the [24-hour cancellation] rule allows passengers to hold "an unlimited number of reservations at once, free of any cancellation penalty during the 24-hour hold period," thus eliminating a carrier's ability to sell those seats to another buyer.

"eliminating a carrier's ability to sell"?

What a bunch of horse puckey.

1) Airlines routinely oversell flights. It seems unlikely random individual passengers are buying out a bunch of seats just to cancel at hour 23.

2) Even if that were considered a risk, a passenger would still need to pay for the seats upfront.

pawson Trump's Campaign Payments Totalling $130K

Cool, I hadn't seen this kind of usage of the bitwise operator before.

  for (let bitMask = 0; bitMask < 1 << scanWindowLength + 1; bitMask++) {

pawson Moving efficiently in the CLI

Random tidbit: back when Mac OS X first mapped these bindings to Cocoa, it became possible to use them for evil -- to exploit OS X to grant access it wasn't supposed to. [1]

For example if you had a screensaver with a password prompt, you could type some characters, then: 1. ctrl-a 2. ctrl-k 3. ctrl-y ...repeat steps 1-3 several times and hit enter.

The screensaver would crash to desktop, or on the logon prompt, you'd crash to the console mode available by entering >console as a username.

I think these were largely patched by 10.3.0.[2]

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/mac-os-x-screensaver-security-cras... [2] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/03/07/05/187203/screensaver...

pawson Webpack 4 Beta released

If your existing large app is a React app, the naive thing to try would be migrating the src/ folder into a new CRA app and see what happens.

If you get a lot off runtime errors you have an easier time migrating to CRA, if you eject a new CRA app and gently/iteratively adjust the webpack config on your existing project to match CRAs.

pawson How JavaScript works: The building blocks of Web Workers

I realize it's not the same thing, but just FYI, Safari 11.1 is apparently adding ServiceWorker support. [1]

One year ago it didn't seem very likely this would land. Maybe the future holds some promise for SharedWorkers on Safari too.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/releas...

pawson Webpack 4 Beta released

Two years ago I would have invested some effort to read this thoroughly and try to stay on top of the API changes. I'm sure it's helpful to a lot of folks.

For sure I do care about my build toolchain. The nice thing about being a React developer today, is that thanks to create-react-app, more specifically react-scripts [1], I'm thankful I get to choose to not worry about it. Just like I didn't have to worry about 2.0 -> 3.0 last time.

Cheers to the CRA maintainers. Thanks for giving me some time back!

[1] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/blob/next/packa...

pawson The MacBook Air: A Decade’s Worth of Legacy

Pretty sure you can get an adapter to convert the world of M.2 drives into the MBA propietary plug. A little bit of Google-fu should connect you to it on popular online stores.

pawson The MacBook Air: A Decade’s Worth of Legacy

I also had the 2011 MBA and loved it.

What disappoints me even further since 2016, separate from the laptop regression is how badly Apple dropped the ball on the monitor side.

The previous gen Thunderbolt display doubled as a lovely hub for Ethernet/audio in&out/traditional USB ports/Firewire/Thunderbolt. Convenient way to restore all the usual ports to the svelte MBA, and bonus, all on a PCI bus (i.e. fast).

Enter the LG 5k: the panel itself is fine, but the enclosure is butt ugly, costs more, and has none of the above.[1]

It won't charge things when a laptop isn't connected.[2]

Years later, finally we got power and video on one cable...but the monitor is a 3rd party sub standard mess, and good luck if WiFi devices are nearby. [3]

[1] https://9to5mac.com/guides/thunderbolt-display/

[2] https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/reviews/HKN62B/A/lg-ultrafine-...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/apple-lg-5k-display-...