HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sandov

1,297 karma · joined November 8, 2016

submissionscomments
sandov··on Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?
What? How and why did they drop support for your screen?
sandov··on The Kawaiization of Product Design
If clay figures are the price to pay for clean, spaced user interfaces and readable text, then bring it on.

This is the first time that I actually like a design trend in the web. Thank god we got rid of those barely readable thin grey fonts on white backgrounds.

sandov··on EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3
Technically yes, but it's understandabe that they don't want someone else to take the code, add functionality and make it closed source.
sandov··on Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results
As a touchpad-ignorant person (I have not used Macbook touchpad, so I don't know what I'm missing) Linux touchpad support had always seemed fine to me until distros started using libinput by default.

Last time I tried libinput, I couldn't disable acceleration on touchpads. "Flat" acceleration profile still had acceleration.

sandov··on AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review: Why Is This Amazon's Best Selling CPU?
> Turns out it was the CPU and how crappy AMD handle C-states that save energy

From my experience, Intel is no better.

I have a 4 year old laptop with an Intel CPU that has the same problem, it was never fixed by Intel. [see EDIT]

For the first 3 years of use I just accepted the fact that my laptop would randomly freeze and I would have to reboot it.

One day, I got sick of it and started digging into forums until I found a way to avoid the specific c-state (by modifying kernel boot parameters) that caused the issue.

EDIT: Apparently, it's getting fixed now. Just 5 years late, issue was reported in 2015 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051

sandov··on Reading Got Farm Women Through the Depression
On the other hand, those who really want to read have a vast supply of amazing content online in both fiction and non-fiction. Those who have time and are willing to pirate books basically have the keys to the kingdom, they can learn whatever the hell they want with just a computer and an Internet connection.

Think of how much of a difference that makes in low and middle income countries. Maybe in the first world people have always been able to buy books for cheap (relative to their income), but the amount of reading opportunities people in low and middle income countries have with the Internet is, in my opinion, a new and beatiful thing.

sandov··on WebAssembly COBOL Pong
Right paddle controls are backwards compared to vim.
sandov··on 92 of top 500 subreddits controlled by same 5 people
In HN you can simply not reply when you don't want to argue.
sandov··on Can AI Become Conscious?
Yes.
sandov··on Humans Not Invited
So this is what deepie feels like when he has to classify data.
sandov··on So I reverse engineered two dating apps
And that's because users broadly don't prioritize security + privacy.
sandov··on US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
Not even Marx uses that definition of capitalism.

Capitalism, as defined by communists is about the "private ownership of the means of production". The term has now been widely adopted, even by its defenders, although we don't care specifically about the means of production, we defend property whenever it enhances the freedom of the human individual (an abstract individual, not any specific person).

Intellectual "property" doesn't enhance freedom in any way. Most libertarians and philosophical defenders of capitalism agree with me on this (except Ayn Rand fans)

sandov··on Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
Oh, I get it now.
sandov··on Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.04
On 18.04 it takes like a full second, sometimes two, to open the calculator anyway.
sandov··on Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers
Because I want my profile to be viewed by anyone, including non instagram users, or at least keep the capability to do it.

Also, if they do this, it's highly probable that they do other user-hostile things. AFAIK, you can't upload photos from the desktop web version.

sandov··on Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers
I would like to use Instagram because all my friends are on it, but I have a low bullshit tolerance and stuff like this reminds me why I shouldn't sign up.
sandov··on Ubuntu Deepin Desktop Environment
I don't like KDE because I like my UI components to have padding and not look like this: https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/kde-plasma-5-16-...
sandov··on What end-to-end encryption should look like
Thanks for your answer.

> the compression algorithm needs knowledge of the video stream, which would be impossible if it's compressed.

That makes perfect sense and I guess my theory of secure encryption + post-re-compression fails because of this. But what if we didn't need perfectly secure encryption, but just per-block encryption. So the server knows that you've sent 60 frames, but doesn't know what is in those frames.

What if the codec was made in such a way that the server knew that certain blocks in the stream could be discarded to reduce size while the stream without those blocks still makes sense to the recipient.

For example: the stream is composed of 64 byte blocks, but the codec says that every 2 blocks there's a discardable block that adds image quality but is not essential. So, with this knowledge, the server discards every 2 blocks when sending that data to people with low bandwidth and sends the original stream with all its blocks to those with high bandwidth.

It's an extremely naive scheme, but maybe this principle could be applied to more complicated codecs, so the server only needs to know metadata about the stream (where each block is and whether it's essential), but not the content of the block itself (framebuffer and audio sample values).

I'm sorry if this idea is too dumb (and my English skills are not the best).

sandov··on What end-to-end encryption should look like
Yes, I think homomorphic encryption is what I was thinking about, although I didn't know its name until now.
sandov··on What end-to-end encryption should look like
Tangential (and noob) question: Could there be an encryption+compression scheme where:

1. Sender sends an encrypted stream at K bps.

2. Server takes the encrypted stream and compresses it, without decrypting anything. It then sends encrypted+compressed stream at J bps (J<K) to end recipient.

3. The end recipient decrypts the compressed stream using a key provided by the original sender, not the server.

This with reasonably secure encryption and reasonably size-efficient codecs, obviously. So the step 2 would add compression additional to the compression of the original codec.

Is this mathematically possible?

sandov··on Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far
The Civ V port works well except for the fact that it has no anti-aliasing option.
sandov··on The Decline of Usability
I'd be fine with an "UI dictatorship" or standardization if it gave us better UI and UX. Gnome's "dictatorship" has only brought bad experiences and inappropriate interfaces.
sandov··on Zoom’s 90-day plan to bolster key privacy and security initiatives
And don't install the Zoom app on a computer where you store secretive data, such as medical information, private keys, passwords, credit card data or anything that you don't want the government or cyber-criminals to know.

Doesn't sound as easy now.

sandov··on Zoom sued for overstating, not disclosing privacy, security flaws
Does it count as lying when it's ridiculously obvious that you're lying?
sandov··on Firefox 75: Ambitions for April
Just got the update on Ubuntu.

The address bar looks horrible when selected [0], it outgrows its container and invades the space of tabs. I thought it was a bug at first, but it's probably intentional. is there a way to go back to the normal address bar?

[0] https://imagehost.imageupload.net/2020/04/08/Screenshot-from...

sandov··on Getting Started with WireGuard
5.6
sandov··on Saudi Arabia ripped off my open-source app and published it on the App Store
Maybe it would count as dual-licensing it: GPL and an ad-hoc non-commercial license.
sandov··on OBS Studio: Open-source software for video recording and live streaming
I think Fedora is the only major distro running Wayland by default. Debian and Ubuntu are still on X11.

I think Cannonical shipped 17.10 (or other minor release) with Wayland by default, but subsequent releases reverted to X11.

sandov··on Rethinking OpenBSD Security
If anything, liability laws would only make it harder for secure computing to exist and be viable.
sandov··on Zoom iOS app sends data to Facebook even if you don’t have a Facebook account
What's the point of having a closed ecosystem if you allow spyware in your store anyway?
Page 1 of 17Next →