HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sanityvampire

83 karma · joined September 22, 2017

submissionscomments
sanityvampire··on Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere
I've been using http://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi for ages. Little bit more dated interface, but same idea. That utility also does some pseudo-alphabets using characters from other scripts.
sanityvampire··on Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say that blogs encouraging preteen girls to develop eating disorders are much scarier than furry porn.

Unless... unless it's pro-ana furry porn.

sanityvampire··on Show HN: termwm: A floating WM of terminals inside your terminal
"Make sure to pipe the output to /dev/null when running this program. This is because the redox ransid ibrary keeps spamming stdout..."

Signs of quality software.

sanityvampire··on Micro Snitch – Know when someone spies on you
I'm a fan of the X1 Carbon line; my current home laptop is a 3rd-gen that I grabbed on eBay for cheap a while back. Might leapfrog to the next model when it's released, but the "Alexa for PC" integration is kinda sketching me out.

I know it's just factory-installed bloatware at this point, but I'm concerned that before long Amazon's going to be paying off OEMs for physically integrated spy hardware, and while I love my ThinkPad systems, Lenovo's willingness to include Alexa makes me nervous.

sanityvampire··on Ask HN: How to give cryptocurrency to people in need?
No offense, but "let's give the poor people cryptocurrency" reads a lot like the start of a satire piece, a lampoon of out-of-touch Bay Area tech culture denizens.
sanityvampire··on “Chromecast automatically transfers that PIN using short, inaudible audio tones”
Close Encounters of the Third Kind reference, for those who don't read music.
sanityvampire··on Are New York’s Free LinkNYC Internet Kiosks Tracking Your Movements?
You know, I totally forgot this was a thing. I'm sure modern phones do it. Last time I was on an airplane, couple months ago, I was messing around with airmon-ng, and I was amazed at the amount of personally identifiable information that people's WiFi drivers were just spewing into the ether.
sanityvampire··on Are New York’s Free LinkNYC Internet Kiosks Tracking Your Movements?
Ubiquitous WiFi kiosks with inbuilt cameras, huh? Ostensibly, they're not allowed to track individual user locations, but the combination of functions present in the devices means it would be trivial to start connecting independent databases and building profiles on users. If you were a malicious actor, how would you go about it?

The PoCs on tracking individuals with MAC addresses are old news (and, in fairness, newer iOS devices use random MAC addresses for WiFi probe requests), let alone the user fingerprinting you could do on browsers when people actually use these things. So you've got a database of devices, and then on top of that you start doing facial recognition and gait analysis to collect another set of individual data points. Then you connect devices to people, and you have a pretty nice system for tracking individuals moving through the city, even those with location services and such disabled.

Paranoia? Maybe, but it wouldn't take much for say, Amazon, to start doing this. And Bezos wouldn't be bound by city regulations on citizen privacy.

sanityvampire··on Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
>Vim's commands and keybingings interface (not the UI).

I recently decided to finally get good at Vim, but the UI, being text-only, can be charitably described as "awful."

Solution: Sublime Text 3 with the NeoVintageous[1] plugin. Takes a beautiful, highly customizable, extensible editor and adds most of the Vim bindings. I can do all of my main development work in a gorgeous editor, and when I have to hop onto an unfamiliar machine, I'm still good at using Vim.

[1] https://github.com/NeoVintageous/NeoVintageous

sanityvampire··on Visualization of storm surge – Unreal Engine real-time rendering
Do you think fluid simulation is advanced enough at this stage to simulate something like, "Assuming sea level rises 6 feet at the coast, this is how the surge will propagate across the landscape"?

Or will it be more like "If 6 feet of water is in this (fairly localized) area, this is how the local region will be affected"?

sanityvampire··on Uber Rebrand
I'm just thinking of all the windshield stickers they're gonna have to hand out...
sanityvampire··on Show HN: Namegine – find a name for your startup or product
Idea: once you have a steady stream of users, automate some domain name squatting. Buy the cheap ones (.xyz, .website, etc.) for every name, then threaten submitters with libel blogs unless they pay up.
sanityvampire··on Why is Google selling potentially compromised Chinese security keys?
While I freely admit that I use a lot of Google services, have an Android phone, and so on... I can't fathom why anyone would think it's a good idea to buy security hardware from an advertising company.
sanityvampire··on OCR Software Dev Exposes 200k Customer Documents
Allowing unauthenticated access is the default configuration, but I think you have to go out of your way to make it accessible from external systems, let alone by anyone on the open internet...
sanityvampire··on Hackers sell data of 130M Chinese hotel guests on dark web for 8 Bitcoin
They got that it's a privacy-related thing, but they still called it a browser...
sanityvampire··on NL2Bash – Generating bash commands from natural language
OK Bash: remove objects, recursively, starting at the root directory. Oh, and don't preserve root. Yes, just do it. Thank you!
sanityvampire··on Companies dropping college degree as hiring requirement
Article title's kind of disingenuous, isn't it? Name-drops Google and Apple, and then the rest of the positions are, like... "You can be a barista at Starbucks, a cashier at Whole Foods, or even a housekeeper at a Hilton!"
sanityvampire··on Poll: How do you pronounce “tuple”?
tuple → /tuːp(ə)l/

tupple → /tʌp(ə)l/