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scbrg

1,834 karma · joined August 13, 2012

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scbrg··on RF Cafe
On the About page (https://www.rfcafe.com/business/about-rf-cafe-disclaimer.htm) there's a map showing some high level visitor distribution, and there's a couple of dots in Thailand.

There's also the following copy on the same page:

"Repeated, crippling DDoS attacks from the following countries has caused me to block their access. Apologies to the innocent.

Brazil, Singapore, Angola, Seychelles, UAE."

My guess is that the geolocation Gods placed GP in Singapore.

scbrg··on How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
Kallax :-)
scbrg··on UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions
I don't know... I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're from a country where football isn't very popular. I don't think you realize just how many fans there are. How utterly ingrained it is in the culture of many countries. "non-fans" make up a minuscule minority of the population of at least Europe, and as far as I understand it South America and parts of Africa too. Not sure about Asia (varies wildly between countries, I suppose), but according to [0] it's estimated that about 3.5 billion people are considered football fans.

This is certainly something many people I know have cared a lot about - and again, I'm not a football enthusiast myself, but still the vast majority of the people I know are, because, not being one really is an outlier.

[0] https://www.topendsports.com/world/lists/popular-sport/fans....

> There are plenty of stoppages in game already which take as much time.

Well. Not really. And those "stoppages" are part of the game. Actually watching the players quarrel with the referee and whatnot is something football fans want to do. It's not comparable.

scbrg··on UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions
I'm most certainly not a football fan, but I definitely know that a match consists of two 45 minute (and then some) halves. It's pretty much equivalent to a non motor enthusiast knowing that there are usually four wheels on a car.

I'd say this is very, very common knowledge in huge parts of the world. It's not something only enthusiasts and purists know.

scbrg··on Kill The Cookie Banner
Is it completely unthinkable that we just don't want to be spied upon?
scbrg··on Kill The Cookie Banner
I've seen people argue, with a straight face, that they prefer to get ads that are "relevant to them". Including here on Hacker News.
scbrg··on Dupes took over the world
Of course it is. I have no idea why you'd suggest such a thing.
scbrg··on Dupes took over the world
> And maybe there are even fewer people to worry about this, because when the moved to the city, those people stopped having children.

> Who is this good for? Is it good for you?

Well, as a global population reduction is sorely needed, this is good for pretty much everybody. There's absolutely no way we can keep extracting resources and polluting at the rate demanded by our current enormous population (which has more than doubled in my life time).

Unfortunately, your theory isn't working, as the population still grows.

scbrg··on Why American ambulance rides are so expensive
Foreigner from the socialist Nordics here, so perhaps I'm brain washed or something, but I don't get it. After some brief Googling it appears that you mean they have proposed a tax on a service that for some reason used to be tax-exempt.

Why was it tax-exempt? Why should it be?

What sets it apart from any other service where you pay someone to do something for you - such as cook you a meal, transport you somewhere or build you a house?

scbrg··on India's surprise baby bust
An alternative take is that we've endured thousands of years of propaganda aimed at keeping women as child bearing, house keeping slaves, and we're finally starting to see the end of that in at least some cultures.

But of course, it's only "propaganda" when you don't like it.

scbrg··on We are Poles, so, of course, we print in Latin
Both priests are assumed to understand Latin. The situation they want to avoid is starting up a conversation with someone in a language they don't know.

So the options are:

1) Use Polish, with the risk of being rude if you happen to speak to the Spanish priest

2) Use Latin and ask "do you speak Polish?", and both the Polish and the Spanish priest will understand.

You could of course argue that it's not so very rude to accidentally try to strike up a conversation with someone in a language they don't know, but apparently Tade0's father thinks it is.

scbrg··on Exit IP VPN servers mitigation rollout
> But unfortunately these addresses are hard to remember and "nobody" recognizes them when reading examples.

How does that matter? The point isn't that the reader should know that "oh, this is a reserved address". The point is that there should be no room for the address that's actually being used by someone to end up being used incorrectly just because it showed up in some random documentation.

Much like how you probably wouldn't be thrilled if your phone number was used as an example in some random documentation somewhere.

scbrg··on Ploopy Bean: a trackpoint for every computer
Perhaps. But these ones have been around a while. Here's the new HN story, seven years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21263264

Not sure how long you're a startup...

scbrg··on The vi family
Well, TRAMP was preceded by ange-ftp, which let you edit files remotely over ftp. I was using that in 1995, and I didn't get the impression then that it was brand new, so it had probably been around for a while already.

Of course, if your problem is "/usr won't mount", then it's likely that the ftp server isn't running either, so the advice still makes sense.

scbrg··on Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users
Alright. I didn't know that. "Just call them" did not sound like it included any kind of authentication procedure.

But giving birthdate (available to anyone via a single query in a public database) and (sometimes?! - what?!) PIN over the phone wouldn't really be considered good enough here. Birthdate is, as I said, public knowledge. And a phone is too insecure a medium for transmitting a password.

I'm not super interested in an long argument about whether it's reasonable that this isn't considered secure or not. I'm just letting you know what reality looks like. And the reality is that "just call them" is not a solution, because such information will simply not be handed out over the phone.

scbrg··on Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users
Not sure how that's relevant. There are computers now. Regulations change with the times. Green lasers weren't controlled in the 1700:s either.

Are you comfortable with anybody being able to ring up the hospital and say "yo, it's majorchord, how are my gonnorhea results?"

scbrg··on Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users
Fairly sure that would be considered a breach of patient confidentiality where I live, at least.
scbrg··on California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws
Odd point to raise in a thread about a family killed while waiting at a bus stop in broad daylight. Do you think reflective clothing would have changed the outcome of the event significantly?
scbrg··on SI Units for Request Rate (2024)
I guess there's a difference between talking about how many requests a system is capable of handling, and how many they actually get.

At least when i encountered the discussion initially (some thirty years ago) I'd say we usually talked about how many requests the system was capable of handling. Then requests per second was the obvious unit since a request usually took less than a second to process (obviously depending on the system and so on - but mostly), so using that unit often gave a fairly low, comprehensible number.

Was it ten? A hundred (very impressive)? Perhaps even a thousand (very, very impressive!)?

Multiply those numbers by 60, and there's suddenly a lot more mental gymnastics involved. By 3600 and you're well into "all big numbers look the same" land.

scbrg··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
I've got 6.19.8 in stable-backports. I don't know. I don't feel massively outdated.
scbrg··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
> Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.

Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.

scbrg··on GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
Fair enough. Point taken :)
scbrg··on GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
Well, yes, that sentence definitely simplified matters a bit. The fact is though, that those who expressed concerns about Microsoft - in that particular thread, and in others - were generally ridiculed in roughly the tone I imitated in my original post.

Of course there were people raising concerns, though. I figured that was pretty obvious in my original post. If there hadn't been any people raising concerns, nobody would have had to dismiss them - condescendingly or not.

So yes, I (incorrectly) used the word "everyone" to mean "a lot of people" in a sentence where I figured it was quite obvious that that's what I was doing, and in a way I've seen it used before in English so many times that I thought it was a common and accepted pattern. Perhaps I am wrong about the last bit though. ESL speaker, so that's quite possible.

scbrg··on GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now."

-- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition

scbrg··on Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)
I once saw this pattern referred to as a bashtag, which I think was an excellent name (no matter if you actually run bash as your shell or not).
scbrg··on Two Years of Emacs Solo
> The ~foo as backup convention is not part of any standard.

Emacs does foo~ by default, not ~foo.

In either case, you're not really supposed to edit files in sites-enabled. That directory is expected to contain symlinks to files in sites-available. I'm not going to say with any certainty that one of the reasons for this indeed is that the pattern (which was used by apache as well - and perhaps other things before it) protects against accidentally reading backup files, but it's not impossible.

So there's definitely a case of holding it wrong if you end up with backup files in that directory.

scbrg··on Warn about PyPy being unmaintained
No. PyPy development was ongoing long before the first release. The first intact commit in the PyPy repo is from February 2003: https://github.com/pypy/pypy/commit/6434e25b53aa307288e5cd8c.... And that commit indicates there's been development going on for a while already. The commit message is:

"Move the pypy trunk into its own top level directory so the path names stay constant."

PyPy migrated from Subversion to git at some point. Not sure how much of the history survived the migration.

scbrg··on Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings
> Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.

Somehow I can imagine that a world where a the brightest minds of a generation didn't spend their prime optimizing ad clicking wouldn't necessarily be a complete disaster.

scbrg··on I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?
ChatGPT has too many users for it to be possible to enforce any kind of rules consistently. I have no opinion on whether OP's story is true or not, but the fact that two ChatGPT users claim to have observed conflicting moderation decisions on OpenAI's part really doesn't invalidate either user's claim.
scbrg··on The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
> Or just a long black expressed in a complicated way?

Presumably this. Coffee terminology is (apparently) not global. I've never seen the term "long black", and I visit cafés quite a lot. Wikipedia lists it as a thing primarily in Australia/New Zealand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_black

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