Hacker News Reader

spacehunton Private Israeli spyware used to hack cellphones of journalists, activists

Singapore COVID-19 contact-tracing data accessible to police

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-singap...

spacehunton HK media erase their archives amid rising arrests

I wouldn't say it's "very few", all flights from HKG to LHR are fully booked despite the ongoing pandemic.

spacehunton HK media erase their archives amid rising arrests

> What westerners do not understand is that the 2019 riots in HK are motivated by hatred toward Chinese mainlanders who have risen in wealth in recent decades and to whom HK residents have historically felt superior.

No it was not. Stop peddling CCP propaganda.

spacehunton Temporal: Getting started with JavaScript's new date time API

date-fns's insistence on using the native Date object makes handling timezones horrible and error-prone though. Luxon is much better in this regard.

spacehunton Apple Daily: Hong Kong pro-democracy paper announces closure

HK can easily afford desalination (especially since the mainland water is quite costly), but of course the Chinese occupation won't ever let that happen.

spacehunton Cities with the Best Work-Life Balance 2021

They use country-level data for many factors, including for "Inclusivity & Tolerance". Having also lived in both cities, it's clear why this list is flawed.

spacehunton Cities with the Best Work-Life Balance 2021

This is a very weird list. I'll just comment on the places I've lived and worked in:

- Why is Hong Kong even on the list?

- Sydney and Melbourne: expensive; Internet is both low bandwidth and high latency; lack of travel destinations due to distance; poor air quality due to excessive use of fossil fuels and bushfires (yes I checked, nowadays average air quality across Melbourne is worse than HK); toxic politics. Not to mention lots of unpaid overtime. Why are they so high on the list?

spacehunton KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices

When you click Download you are given the list of supported platforms.

spacehunton Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

Wait, isn't Porkbun based out of Portland?

spacehunton Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite (Gabeldorsh) is written with Rust

The browser in S60 phones was actually WebKit. In fact it was Nokia that started the work of fitting WebKit into memory-constrained devices.

spacehunton China passes Hong Kong “patriot” election law

> I d be more interested to move on and start discussing how we elect the president of our country now that we all agree we should be patriotic ;)

I take this as evidence that you are planning to overthrow the current government? You do realise posting this is an offense under the National Security Law?

spacehunton China passes Hong Kong “patriot” election law

> In Hong Kong, the most common thing I heard was vaguely racist grumblings about mainlanders. People were unhappy with mainlanders behaving in an "uncivil" manner. There was a majority acknowledgement of China's sovereignty over Hong Kong, and a strong "Chinese" identity.

Really interested to know when did you talk to the people in Hong Kong. What you described might have been the views of some Hong Kong people 10 years ago, but it's definitely not the mainstream view nowadays.

spacehunton Wi-Fi 6 is designed to reduce congestion from devices

I'm also in HK. Keep in mind that there are solid walls and floorings between my home and other apartments and buildings.

I can count 67 APs right now.

spacehunton 68.3% of people in China use third-party keyboards – many of them use Signal

Here's a popular, commercial Japanese IME: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATOK

spacehunton Google: Open Letter to Australians

There's been a very noticeable drop in quality in The Age's reporting though. And then there was this back in June:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/14/journalists-at...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/18/age-editor-ale...

spacehunton Google: Open Letter to Australians

https://www.afr.com/rear-window/is-news-corp-still-paying-ze...

> ... there’s the withholding tax [News Australia Holdings] pays on interest it pays to a News Corp associate offshore, which News likes to lump in with income tax.

(AFR is Fairfax / Channel 9, take that what you will.)

spacehunton Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

This is only because almost all native Cantonese speakers are trained to read and write in Standard Chinese from the very beginning.

Standard Chinese can be spoken in Cantonese, but while understandable, it is never done, in contrast to Mandarin.

In recent years written online conversations (like blogs, Facebook posts, instant messages) by Cantonese speakers are increasingly written in Cantonese instead, and this is slowly spreading to more "formal" media such as books.

Source: I'm a native Cantonese speaker.

spacehunton Google: Open Letter to Australians

The context you're missing is that in Australia, the "big monopoly" is News Corp and not FAANG.

spacehunton Google: Open Letter to Australians

If you look a few lines down in the same infobox, you'll see its parent is "News Corp" which is in the US.

spacehunton Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai arrested under national security law

> Xi was praised by majority of mainlanders because he lifted the country out of poverty.

No, CCP is the entity people often attribute China's economic rise to. And even that is not completely correct; Deng opened up the market a bit, and the Chinese people themselves took the opportunity to rebuild the economy from the ruins of central planning.

> How to govern this big country effectively if not dictatorship?

You can say that about groups of any size. It is often said a benevolent dictator is the most efficient and effective way to run a group: see Linux for an example.

But this only works if everyone has shared goals and shared values. What if people have different opinions? Hint: look at how much China spends on "stability maintenance" (维稳) each year: it's bigger than their military budget.

spacehunton Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai arrested under national security law

> a leader who violated the national security law

As a Hong Konger, I'm always amused by how much influence the CCP thinks Jimmy Lai / Apple Daily / Next Media wields.

Inciting riots? Really? Can you point to a single Apple Daily article that demonstrates this?

spacehunton Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point

Airtable is closer to a database than a spreadsheet. Records are represented as rows in their default grid view, but there are other views available. They can also be retrieved as JSON objects through the API that Airtable automatically generate for you.

spacehunton Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point

Airtable has a hard limit of 50,000 records across all tables in a base though.

spacehunton Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design

He did not start the Linux Foundation.

spacehunton Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design

Little known fact: Motorola's Dragonball series of CPUs, used in the original Palm, was designed by Motorola's lab in Hong Kong.

spacehunton Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design

That's... not what happened. LF was formed by merging the FSG and OSDL. Only then did the combined entity have sufficient funding to hire Linus.

spacehunton Student group leader arrested on suspicion of inciting secession in HK

Did you even read the article? It's about Trump defunding OTF, which funds Signal.

spacehunton Firefox 79

Ctrl-K goes to the search field.

It's easy to remember because the shortcut for the URL/Omnibar is more often cited as Ctrl-L.

spacehunton Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

But even the Home Office doesn't know the exact number.

They know how many current BN(O) holders there are. But they don't know how many are eligible exactly -- they have the entire list of people who have received one, but that's over 20 years ago, and a lot could have happened to them since.

spacehunton Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

Congratulations, you've just violated the brand-new HK National Security Law, which according to article 38 applies to everyone on Earth.