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scarlac

523 karma · joined February 25, 2016

https://github.com/scarlac

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/scarlac; my proof: https://keybase.io/scarlac/sigs/G_TSbwfuDn88bOFcdF4PxEYDnSAGD128eygAP56vL20 ]

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scarlac··on Find a person's profile across 350 social media sites
Enough people have voiced their opinion on this tool but I just tried it.

The results were underwhelming. It fails to find obvious links between sites, makes completely incorrect correlations while claiming 100% matches, and has no way of figuring out if it's the same person. The "useful" features seem to be username generator based on your original input, e.g. you input "john doe" and it suggests usernames like "jdoe", "johndoe", etc.

scarlac··on Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust
Depends on why OP doesn't like Electron.

To be clear to everyone: Electron and React Native are not alike. Electron is a big web browser. React Native work completely differently: It neither renders, computes, or runs the same. React Native uses the Hermes engine, puppeteering native components.

scarlac··on Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites (2019)
Same situation for Denmark and possibly other European countries
scarlac··on No Cookie for You
localStorage and cookies are the same in terms of GDPR. It encompasses all local storage mechanisms such as IndexedDB, cookies, localStorage, sessionStorage, etc.

(source: I read the directive way back when it came out, and also skimmed large sectoins of GDPR)

Other sources: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2905... and https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/30739/do-the-gdpr-an...

scarlac··on I Hacked into Facebook's Legal Department Admin Panel
> I'd demand Facebook pay out $75,000 minimum

Wouldn't demanding money be blackmailing?

A story from one of my startups: A student reached out to us regarding a security vulnerability on the website, demanding money for it. He refused to say what it was or provide evidence at first, so we couldn't assess it. He said he'd disclose it to others if we didn't.

I definitely felt blackmailed. I am not a lawyer but it felt illegal. Maybe someone can chime in to say if it is?

scarlac··on Tinnitus Treatment from Neuromod
What you experienced may be a baseline change when using noise cancellation. It happens with all noise cancelling headphones after long use (for me). I am NOT an authoritative source on it but what I heard was that the brain makes a baseline for the background / silence and when that noise is removed (active noise cancelled) then the brain recalibrates which may cause the same symptom as tinnitus as the brain tries to cancel it out but supposedly without the permanent damage. I consider it "possible" but I haven't seen hard science on it.
scarlac··on HashiCorp Boundary
VPN clients traditionally virtualizes your network interface entirely. Everything acts as if your are actually physically present because it's virtualized nicely. It's great because it "just works".

These "non-VPN" solution seem to use a client on your machine that change any DNS lookup through the OS layer by hooking into gethostaddr() and returning the same IP for all domains if they are in the list of hosts that should be virtualized. Then only the traffic to domains that are needed is virtualized, anything else is untouched. YouTube and Netflix won't get piped over your company network, as an example.

Disclaimer: I don't really know that this is how it works but this is how other providers do it.

scarlac··on Spotify, Ever the Fans of Openness
Yes, but does GDPR require the delivery format to be practical? Over time, if not happening already, you could probably see companies trying to introduce randomness / changing the format every so often for the sake of blocking this.
scarlac··on Nova by Panic
Ok, so some feedback: I'm sad to report I stopped testing already. For my particular job I tend to debug and work with large files, especially JSON. A lot of debugging apps and looking through large crash logs, then looking at application states. This is probably not typical, but it's crucial to me.

The transition is made hard because of the odd default key mappings (they hotkey editor is very difficult to use. I went back and forward and couldn't understand why my mappings weren't working only to find that it was due to having to use the hotkey editor in a specific way). I really think a good keymapping is the first hurdle people have to overcome, so shipping it with an hotkey extension for Sublime, VSCode, etc. would be a big win off the line.

The autocomplete and jump to definition seemed to work well. I had a hard time figuring out if "Find references" were working. It kept telling me to go to some obscure tab or place somewhere but since it's all symbols, I don't know where to actually go. VSCode is easy by comparison - a "peek" window shows up prioritized references.

However, Nova is a no-go for me because it simply stalls when opening a >2 MB JSON files. Forget about trying to search-replace - it's simply too slow. In defense of Nova, Sublime also can't deal with it.

My impression going away from Nova is: It's like Xcode and VSCode had a baby. Perhaps with time it'll improve in performance and be fine tuned to a point where I can use it daily - but given it's primarily paid (not "free with nag screen" like sublime), I can't review it any time soon again.

scarlac··on Oculus Quest 2
Agreed. Their reviews are usually to the point, objective statements with tasteful opinions. This article was unlike others and his opinions were in the way of actually hearing about how it was. I am not even in the market for one yet I do not feel informed after that review.
scarlac··on Nova by Panic
To straight up answer your question: Yes, I have friends who really like the iPad so much and wants to do development on it. Will it practically work? I really don't know. Until I see Xcode and/or Docker on iOS/iPadOS I am not very hopeful.
scarlac··on Nova by Panic
I will be giving it a go for the next few days to see if it'll work for React Native development.
scarlac··on Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS
Yeah it bothers me too sometimes. You can use the mouse to drag it to a new location and it'll remember it. It will also snap to alignment points so it's easy to revert the location again.
scarlac··on Hard to discover tips and apps for macOS
A few tips for Spotlight that made me stop using apps like Quicksilver and Alfred:

1. Typing something and pressing CMD+B will open a browser and do a Google search for that

2. Typing math works now

3. You can change your Spotlight preferences to not include files you don't wanna search on, essentially always showing apps (if you just want it do be an app launcher)

Alfred does a lot more than this, but for me these were the key automation features I needed to stop using it.

scarlac··on Ask HN: How to do cross platform GUI?
Yes, I have. "Microsoft React Native" aka React Native for Windows is not that great for the public yet. There are basic layout bugs that need to be addressed before it's good enough that I'd recommend it. But if you are feeling experimental, you would eventually get good iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS support all in 1 app.
scarlac··on Ask HN: Does Google have a way to report scam advertisements?
Both. The headlines link to websites filled with fake articles that relink to shopping sites or directly to those websites despite being unrelated to the ad.
scarlac··on Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court
Yes, steam is responsible for refunding. In EU there is protections like this so you are allowed 14 days (if I recall correctly) to return an item bought online because you had no way to review it "in person". If you consider this law sans Internet it still makes 100% sense. It applies to phone-ordering from TV shopping channels, or mail-ordering as well. It keeps merchants honest for at least 14 days of products use, forcing them not to (re)sell items that will quickly disappoint. It overall makes it much easier to be a consumer which should be in everyone's interest.
scarlac··on Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]
> apple can't argue that users having alternative means to install apps is insecure, as they allow to that on the mac

I don't agree with this evaluation. They can argue it, as all macs are shipped with only access to the app store. You need to specifically opt out.

macOS does have security issues, perhaps moreso than iOS, and that's an argument they could make: Allowing Epic to run a store would compromise the phones of kids and open them up to tracking, aggressive adware, etc. I think it's a fair argument, even if I think 30% is a steep price to pay for what they provide.

scarlac··on Ask HN: What feature did you find after years of using macOS?
In any native text field, try a few CTRL-hotkeys you'd type in Terminal:

CTRL + K (delete to end of line)

CTRL + D (delete in place aka delete key (not backspace))

CTRL + A (go to start of line)

CTRL + E (go to end of line)

scarlac··on Decentraleyes – Local CDN Emulation
Was Opera's "Turbo" mode not a similar feature? A feature launched in the early mobile/late dail-up days. Albeit the proxy CDN was provided by Opera. It would take proxy JPEGs, compress them more, serve them from an edge node. It don't think it was marketed as a privacy feature but mostly bandwidth/speed. But in theory if you trust Opera, you'd get more privacy?
scarlac··on Understanding Convolutional Neural Networks
Neurons have weight and bias. Weight is multiplied, bias is added. Really that simple.

Here are examples of equivalent notations that may make it more familiar:

  y = 2⋅x + b or
  y = a⋅x + b
- x would be the input to the neuron, often named 'x'.

- a/2 would be the weight, often named 'w'.

- b would be the bias, often named 'b'.

- y is the output.

In neural network documentation this is often written as (often case sensitive, which may be confusing): output = w⋅x + b (output = weight * input + bias).

I hope that explains it.

scarlac··on Hundreds of Botswana elephants dead in mysterious mass die-off
All the videos of painting elephants I've seen include a handler that very clearly is holding their tusk or ear. I'd absolutely love this to be true but it quite honestly seems like puppeteering?
scarlac··on Forget Google, time to end the Visa-MasterCard duopoly
It will probably happen, but will take a while. My bet is that this is what Apple is working on. They will launch a version of Apple Card that is free of MasterCard.

So far it's been a really long-haul play where Apple has spent a lot of time establishing deals with banks manually, in order to get a tiny fee, which they can due to the increased security of their system. This hard work is necessary in order to create a payment network that can work for everyone.

Eventually, Apple will be in a position to launch their own network, while increasing fees for themselves and lowering fees for merchants.

As someone who's been a merchant I'm very happy to see this happening, although it's like watching a tree grow (paint drying would be exciting in comparison). It's likely Google will follow suit, and depending on Apple's choice of implementation, we could hope that it will be backed by a stable cryptocurrency - but that's just a shot in the dark.

scarlac··on Why we won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple
Yes, that's mentioned in the article:

> if there are platforms where AnyList doesn’t support Sign in with Apple, like Android, and someone wants to log into their account, they’d have to know their privaterelay.appleid.com email address.

scarlac··on Why we won’t be supporting Sign in with Apple
It used to be true that during a Facebook Connect session the user was asked if they wanted to share their email or not. I faintly remember you could even choose a proxy fb e-mail aka "fake email". Did they remove that feature?
scarlac··on India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps
I strongly disagree. We should prefer to not divide the world if we can. The sentiment "If they can be bad, so can I" is not the recipe for a world I want to build. I believe the world would regress if we kept acting like that.
scarlac··on When you type realty.com into Safari it takes you to realtor.com
You are not crazy. There is a bug in the last 2 minor releases of Safari where you can type in or paste a link and it'll just end up reloading the same page. You can do this several times. It drives me mad, quite honestly. But it is indeed a bug. No idea why. I doubt it's related to this suggestion feature.
scarlac··on iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
Generally, no. But there are ways for an app to stay active in the background. Some are grounds for App Store suspension. Music playing apps may stay somewhat active in the background. However, I don't know if the clipboard API will still work when an app is in the background.
scarlac··on iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
Yes, that's probably part of the reason why 1Password clears the clipboard after a minute or so
scarlac··on iOS 14 will let you change your default email and web browser apps
Disclaimer: I'm speculating on the reason: There may not be a standardized URL scheme for mapping applications whereas both e-mail and browsers have it already (http(s): and mailto:). It's possible though! Apple could define a standard and say "that's how you can open maps" but currently it's a moving target as mapping applications support varying features like directions with waypoints, POI searches, general searches, area selections, etc. They'd have to settle on some standard that Apple Maps support which almost is guaranteed to not support several Google Maps features.
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