Hacker News Reader

racer-von Show HN: URL Canary – Get an alert when someone finds your secrets

You say that like there's something wrong with exploiting greed.

racer-von “Pinterest needs to be removed from Google IMO”

When I get a Pinterest login popup, I just click the button at the bottom that says "Not now". Then I can browse the images.

racer-von Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

Does that mean if I want to use an open source client with Slack, I can use the Gitter BridgeBot and open source Gitter client? Does it work with private Slack channels?

racer-von Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

From what I have seen the best solution for bridging chat protocols is a "tube" from https://sameroom.io - not free though.

racer-von Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)

Oh man I feel your pain. I spent so much time working on a Backbone project wondering what the purpose of all that MVC structure was, and I still don't know.

racer-von Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)

If only we could build all own systems from scratch. I guess I'd be lucky to finish a working terminal emulator, editor and shell in my lifetime, and maybe a window manager as a stretch goal.

racer-von Stigler Diet

> if you eat a lot of beans dietary cholesterol is actually beneficial

Interesting, I have found some references to beans lowering cholesterol but not this stronger statement?

I've read that the link from dietary cholesterol to body cholesterol levels is genetically variable, but that there's no test at present for determining individual risk factors.

racer-von Stigler Diet

I created a diet optimized for maximum dietary fiber and protein with minimum calories (optimized separately). Highest fiber/calorie ratio is generally cruciferous vegetables; highest protein/calorie is fish and chicken (skinless boneless breast meat). Using these two food groups I can satisfy my macronutritional requirements on 600 calories/day. I add a multivitamin in case I missed anything.

Based on these parameters I can judge any food based on whether its fiber and protein can match (or beat) a linear combination of chicken and broccoli. Basically if (2F + P) * 20/3 <= C then it's on the diet. This includes non-fat yogurt, wheat bran, eggplant, and some types of beans.

racer-von The Substitutability of Physical and Social Warmth in Daily Life (2013)

Which half of your stereotype is patently false? Both?

racer-von Tinkering with electronics

It feels like when you're tinkering with hardware a lot more parts of the brain are challenged and thus generate a more fulfilling experience.

I totally agree with this sentiment, but I would add: I know a guy who designs hardware for a living, and he gets a huge kick from of writing a little Python script. The thrill is mostly in developing fledgeling skills far from your main wheelhouse.

racer-von The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (2016)

The problem is in 2018, everyone intolerant person claims the only thing they're intolerant of is intolerance. Conservatives complain about liberal intolerance and vice-versa. We've moved from plain level-0 intolerance to meta-intolerance.

racer-von Show HN: git self-blame – Blame yourself for others' mistakes

I only resort to blame to understand how a particular odd piece of code came to be

Right. The idea of downplaying "blame" in corporate culture isn't to conceal where bugs came from; it's to make it more socially acceptable to confess when you've caused a bug, instead of keeping quiet.

"Blame" culture is when people take your transparency and use it to create a scorecard against you, which can quickly become toxic.

racer-von In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3B of Snap's Market Value

Crazy that we still use apps instead of protocols for feeds and video. What's the closest thing to an open substitute? I've been looking at Gajim for XMPP + video chat https://gajim.org/

racer-von Anthropocene began in 1965, according to signs left in world’s ‘loneliest tree’

What makes you think we'll be remembered?

racer-von Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums (1972)

There's Homebrew Website Club. These guys are doing the hard work to take back the Internet from social media conglomerates https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club

Also the distributed Internet (e.g. IPFS) and DIY CPU (as in free FPGA tooling) communities.

racer-von Why Peter Thiel Is Leaving Silicon Valley

> Even in a cheap area, nobody is going to open a deli or cornershop without a plan for paying the rent.

Sure, the question is how experimental of a plan can you attempt. In SF 2018: not very. I know people who pooled their money for an experimental space in SF several years ago at $1/sq. foot, and broke even. At 5x or 10x those rates today, this is now a lot harder.

> SV has it's issues for sure, but I wouldn't throw all cities under the bus with it.

My critique is specifically of the negative effects of overcrowding and overcapitalization in the SF Bay Area. By extension this would presumably apply to other places like Manhattan with similar conditions. I'm definitely interested in finding other cities with the networking advantages but that manage to strike a balance with livability. Austin has been mentioned already, although some folks will complain they're headed in the same direction.

racer-von Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

You can't control every factor. Arguing for "equality of opportunity" really just means taking a laissez-faire attitude as to who succeeds. It means not making explicit exclusionary rules as to who can participate, but also not undertaking a vain attempt to equalize every conceivable variable.

racer-von Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

Are things in the US are that bad? Maybe you should focus on how to help people with lower-paying jobs not starve, rather than pushing to make sure that the scarce "living-wage" jobs are going to women instead of men.

racer-von Why Peter Thiel Is Leaving Silicon Valley

Without cheap rent, it's very difficult to experiment. In places where space is plentiful and inexpensive, you can try setting up a quirky shop or cafe. In an overcrowded and expensive market like SF, you can't rent commercial property without a proven business plan. Where rent is cheap, you can spend a summer "funemployed", work on your hobby project and pick up a couple bucks doing odd jobs. If you pay $4,000/mo for an apartment, you need to be employed full-time all the time.

Personally I find that innovative ideas can be brought to maturity in places where you can find people to develop them, often in cities. But the germ of the ideas will happen when you have some time and space to yourself. I think there's a happy medium where there's access to people and infrastructure, but not the oppressive overdevelopment of Silicon Valley.

racer-von Chrome 68 will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”

My only concern is that the end user can always control which Certificate Authorities his/her browser accepts, and that anyone can set up their own CA. It seems like both of these conditions are vital for the future of decentralized web.

racer-von Chrome 68 will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”

I use the neverssl.com trick and I worry: if browsers stop supporting plan HTTP, doesn't it mean this won't work anymore?

racer-von Lift Weights, Eat More Protein, Especially If You’re Over 40

Right, that's why I find their nutritional claim hard to believe: 2g protein per 35 KCal is better than tahini, eggplant, or chickpea individually.

racer-von Lift Weights, Eat More Protein, Especially If You’re Over 40

Plant sources tend to have a higher ratio of calories to protein, so it's tough if you're limiting calories. Chickpeas, eggplant, and tahini all have protein; Trader Joe's Eggplant Hummus has all three, but somehow manages to claim a lower calorie-to-protein ratio than any of its ingredients (not sure how that can work). Mushrooms are good too. Also seitan if you don't mind something a little more "processed".

racer-von Disabling ANSI color output

I'd be happy with just the Graphic parameters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#SGR_(Select_G...

racer-von The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason

The original post was about having easy access to nature. Yes, you can do push-ups in a prison cell. Enjoy.

racer-von The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason

Nobody is saying that you can't have healthy habits in 2018. Now they have to be a deliberate choice, because the default is driving / riding to work (as most people do). Nor is anyone saying the past was ideal. I am saying we can selectively choose certain aspects of the past as a model for how to make better choices for ourselves in the present. Some other advantages:

- default lifestyle (for economic reasons) is living in the city / suburbs where walking is often aesthetically unpleasant; humans have an aesthetic response to being in nature.

- again for economic reasons, processed food like bread is the default choice; it's hard for some to afford (in time and money) to get all their calories from fresh vegetables and meats. Again the past is a model (I'm talking about humans' natural diet in the days before food preservation / grain agriculture).

- let's shoot for no smog and no cave lung

- social stratification led directly to mass starvation and poverty (poorest segment of society experiences stress-related declines in longevity)

If we assume that every change that's ever happened is for the better in every way, it blinds us as to how to make improvements.

racer-von The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason

- walking instead of driving

- eating fresh foods instead of processed starches

- no factories and industrial agriculture producing greenhouse gasses

- social organization based on communal resources and personal autonomy (hunter-gatherers) instead of authoritarianism and hierarchy (settled agricultural governments)

racer-von Disabling ANSI color output

Crazy idea - what if other utilites were aware of ANSI codes and behaved appropriately? For example 'grep' could ignore color sequences when doing pattern-matching, and then re-apply the colors to the output. Then you could do something like `git log | grep` and see the original coloration in the output.

racer-von Elevated Use of Absolutist Words Is a Marker of Anxiety, Depression [pdf]

According to the theory of Non-Violent Communication (NVC), it's better to identify a specific instance of the behavior rather than generalize.

1. Agree that a particular thing happened

2. Express how you felt about that thing happening

3. Explain what your needs are

4. Request the person to do it differently next time

Realize these arguments should really be about getting your own needs met, rather than proving that the other person is objectively wrong because of how they "always" or "almost always" do something.

racer-von People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate

It's a data point that many crime victims ask not to be contacted by the perpetrator. Again I'm asking you whose benefit this apology is for. If it's for your own benefit, maybe it's not warranted.