tombrossman

In my ~/.bashrc, this works well for me. I did have to add --restrict-filenames after encountering some sites using really long titles that were problematic.

  ytdl()
  {
    mkdir /tmp/ytdl && cd /tmp/ytdl
    for URL in "$@" ; do youtube-dl -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' "$URL" --restrict-filenames; done ;
    mv /tmp/ytdl/* ~/Desktop/
    rm -rf /tmp/ytdl
    exit
  }

This is interesting because Amazon isn't exactly known for supply chain integrity. Who here hasn't received fakes from Amazon? If you rely on a specific medication for your health, is Amazon a brand you trust to deliver it? How long until they start commingling pills and shipping random counterfeit/fake product to users?

Hope it never happens but if they do with pharmaceuticals what they did with everything else they sell, it's only a matter of time before users are physically harmed.

Let's be optimistic though, I hope this helps them finally get their shit together and control the rampant counterfeiting going on right under their nose.

Words matter, and 'brake' or 'braking' have dictionary definitions which contradict your statement. It's an important distinction because experienced drivers know to anticipate problems and slow down before they need to brake. You probably do this already without thinking about it, especially if you drive a manual transmission. Ever drive a speedboat? Same idea, they have no brakes and you learn to look further ahead and anticipate, and allow outside forces to slow you (rather than relying on an internal braking mechanism).

> Slowing down is braking surely?

No, it's your last resort if you must slow down. Better drivers learn to coast, down-shift, or tricks such as using the slight uphill grade of a roadway to adjust speed without resorting to braking.

Next time you are driving and have good visibility far ahead in a long line of cars (such as approaching a big hill) watch for the cars with the brake lights coming on constantly. These are the less capable drivers, and once you spot them you will see them making other mistakes. For example, one trick I've learned is to watch for the driver's hand resting on the turn signal stalk in adjacent lanes as I approach. This is a tell that they are intending to cut me off. When I spot it, I can back off to anticipate them, or be more aggressive and accelerate to close the gap they were aiming for.

I'm curious, do the two of you consider privacy at any point when building this? Well done launching, it's a nice looking site and a good idea which should appeal to non-technical people who need to track visitors and what they read.

I note you are using multiple tracking technologies, each of which have some Terms & Conditions you must conform to. Your embedded Google Analytics code carries the following condition, for example: "You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies that are used to collect data. You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data."[0]

I see something called 'Hotjar' on the page too, and I imagine they have their own responsible disclosure and opt-out requirements, but one of my browser add-ons is blocking their site entirely and there is no way I'm disabling it to confirm my suspicions.[1]

Launching so soon after the GDPR came into effect, my only recommendation is 'begin to think about privacy' and consider adding a privacy policy page, so visitors know what is happening behind the scenes. Just be upfront about it, and consider removing any tracking that is not absolutely essential. Imagine a user uploads PDFs about a sensitive or personal topic, and visitors later discover you were silently tracking them without disclosing it. Are you OK with that?

[0]https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html

[1]https://www.hotjar.com/privacy

This is where Twitter excels. It's the best way I have found to get local breaking news. Don't bother following any media outlets either, it's counterintuitive but their feeds are mostly marketing garbage with extra click tracking/redirects and excessive dupes. Pick a few local journos whose articles or reporting you like and follow them instead. Those, plus random friends and other local people will give you all the news you need almost instantly. I don't even turn the TV on when something big happens any more, I just check Twitter.

They don't mention Gandi because that would be a marketing disaster. Gandi do no advertising, no affiliate/referral links, or anything else shady.

You might pay slightly more, but I believe Gandi operate a significantly better service, catering to shrewd users (I don't work there or have any financial interest in the matter, just a happy customer).

In fairness, Namecheap seem like a pretty decent second-choice, and most of my ire is reserved for all the 'baby's first domain name' bottom feeders out there.

Something like this already exists, see the OpenNIC project. https://www.opennic.org/

In the past, when people have asked me about the ethics of using an ad blocker, I always ask the same question: "When you are watching TV, do you wait for the commercial break to go take a leak?" (Not my line, wish I remembered the origin so I could give proper attribution).

The strange thing is it's one of those conversation stoppers, the other person usually gives me a funny look and does not reply at all. This is perfect and I recommend trying it out.

Not a Linux wizard but as a long time user, I remembered this 2012 news from Canonical: http://blog.canonical.com/2012/06/22/an-update-on-ubuntu-and...

Perhaps the author meant there was no 'universal' Linux implementation, however it's been available for a while in certain distros.

Firefox users can visit about:config and manually set the value "network.IDN_show_punycode" to True, to fix this. Tested and working, and I'm not sure why this isn't already the default for users whose language setting is English.

Interestingly, today's NASA Earth Observatory image of the day is "Smog Smothers Solar Energy in China" https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=92054

A quote from the article: "The researchers found that in the most polluted areas, available solar energy decreased as much as 35 percent, or 1.5 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day. That is enough energy to power a vacuum cleaner for one hour, wash twelve pounds of laundry, or run a laptop for five to 10 hours."

In my younger years I worked as a prep cook at a couple fine dining restaurants in San Diego, and except for the executive chef I was the only other white guy there. We spoke Spanish in the kitchen and since I loved Mexican food and culture, I really tried to absorb as much as possible and learn recipes. As a prep cook, I would do the employee meals and the other cooks would loudly exclaim 'Tacitos de Tijuana' once I started getting it right, with perfectly made tacos just like you would find in northern Mexico. I was so proud.

But you know what they really loved? McDonald's kept running a promotion where you could get ten hamburgers or cheeseburgers for something like $2 or $5, and they would constantly make quick runs to the local drive-through at meal time, then burst in the kitchen entrance shouting and waving the McDonalds bag around. All work would stop and I would be called to bring my extra prep container of guacamole so a spoonful of that could be added to each burger and everyone would wolf them down. We're talking like ten Mexican dudes and myself, and 40-60 little hamburgers disappearing in a couple minutes. The executive chef was so disappointed and he'd just shake his head and go sit in his office.

I still prefer tacos to hamburgers though.

One of the best things about ad blockers is that they are really just general purpose content blockers. Want to disable this permanently? Here's an Adblock Plus-compatible filter to block the div if you find it annoying. Tested and working on uBlock Origin:

  ! Disable link preview popups on Wikipedia
  en.wikipedia.org##.mwe-popups

It's just a div with the class ".mwe-popups", and using your ad blocker will persist the change after clearing cookies, which the preference setting (mentioned elsewhere here) does not.

For Wikipedia in different languages, just change the subdomain in the filter.

> Fastmail do the same, i.e. acquiring certs for their customers' domains without asking or informing, with a view to moving them to HTTPS.

Not sure about the the down-voters, but I was just about to post a 'citation needed' comment dismissing this as crazy talk, and I was surprised to discover it is actually true: https://www.fastmail.com/help/files/secure-website.html

> The Guardian have switched to this model and it seems to at least be showing the promise of working.

Not exactly. While it is possible to become a Guardian 'supporter', and contribute financially in exchange for ad-free browsing after you identify yourself by logging in, you are not free from tracking by third-party ad companies as you browse their site.

The parent comment you are responding to said "I think the business model would generally incentivize much more user-friendly operational decisions than an ad-sponsored approach does." and while this gives you a superficially cleaner browsing experience, ad companies continue to track you as you browse the Guardian's website, harvesting data which can be used to manipulate you elsewhere on the web.

The Guardian could choose to disable all third-party trackers for logged-in paying supporters, but they do not. For privacy conscious readers, the only way to achieve what you want is to install an ad-blocker and a browser extension such as Privacy Badger. Contributing to the paper provides little or no privacy benefit, though it's always a good idea to support quality journalism, so if you do it, do it for that reason alone.

> And yet basic video and screen capture is not working for years now. Arbitrary rectangle capture still doesn't work on Ubuntu 16.04 in any tool I know of.

I'm curious, what tools have you tried? I ask because the default screenshot tool works perfectly for stills (including stills of video playing in a window or full-screen), and the few video screen recording tools I've tried all worked perfectly. At the moment I'm using Kazam on 16.04 with the default Nouveau drivers, and a quick test with Chromium playing a video stream + Totem simultaneously playing a local video file confirms that everything is captured no problem. Full screen, arbitrary windows, all tested and working.

Tl;dr try Kazam, unless I'm misunderstanding the issue you describe?

Toilet paper!

This is what I'm using for the past year or so, running daily as a cronjob: https://gitlab.com/tombrossman/TwitterDeleteMost

You can whitelist specific tweets to keep, and set a threshold for favorites or retweets above which the tweets are preserved. For example, if you tweet something and ten people retweet it, the script will save it forever. If you tweet something that no one retweets or favorites, it's gone after 30 days. I call it a 'socially curated' feed, since old tweets are basically worthless to anyone but strangers wanting to profile you.

And props to Mike McQuaid over on GitHub for originally creating this tool, and for helping me adapt it to my use-case.

If you want something high-performance that you can have running quickly, you can do this with a Turris Omnia router + Pi-hole (DNS ad-blocker). The Omnia is about $300. I've done a blog post explaining how to get everything set up here, and it's CC0 public domain licensed so you can copy or adapt it however you like: https://www.tombrossman.com/blog/2017/how-to-install-pi-hole...

No surprises, the Omnia updates itself and reboots automatically (you get an email warning of you want to intervene) and everything 'just works'.

This is like the infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Presumably it would be marketed to 'Adult' performers, some of who will be technically minded and understand how to use SSH, but Nextcloud will have wider appeal and includes an easy to navigate GUI.

Personally, I'm using both but I don't expect everyone to do the same.

Startup idea: Managed Nextcloud instances with (optionally) their integrated AWS S3 backend storage. Nextcloud's sharing UX is dead simple and intuitive using the web interface, with the option to password protect and/or expire the sharing link.

The porn industry is often cited as being innovative / early adopters. As nerds let's help them demonstrate why self-hosting and decentralized tech is the way forward.

Treat this like you would any other copyright infringement (presumably you didn't sign anything giving them ownership of the work or you would not be asking HN?).

Find out where the site is being hosted, usually through a WHOIS search, and contact the hosting company's abuse department. Try a web search for a template of a takedown notice appropriate for the jurisdiction. For example, if the site is hosted in the USA you can send the host a standard DMCA takedown notice. Make sure the wording is correct.

You can go to a lawyer for reassurance (and if you can afford one), but for a simple copyright infringement notice sent to a web host, this is not super complicated and you can get it done yourself.

Obviously you are 'burning a bridge' here with the company that interviewed you, and you will never do work for them again, but they are treating you badly and it's OK to get more aggressive in your dealings with them. If they later claim this was a misunderstanding and remove your webpage, go ahead and invoice them at full market rate for the work anyway. They may tell you no but it's worth a try. These are all good skills to have if this happens to you again.

You can buy hand soap specifically for lead and other heavy metals. One widely available brand is "D-Lead" and it's common to see it at hand-washing stations at shooting ranges, where you are expected to clean up your spent cartridges (they are a slip hazard).

> Why are you storing IP addresses in your logs?

Both Apache and Nginx (and others?) log IP addresses by default. The expected result of this is that storing IP addresses in server logs is widespread, useful for troubleshooting, and entirely normal.

I'm not sure. Two other popular online retailers here, Argos and John Lewis, do not have the same notice on their website when you select a TV and view the product page. It may be a law that they don't bother mentioning but that's just a guess.

Reminder, Amazon's UK site already reports your purchases of many electronics to a police database. There is no opt-out. You could argue that this makes sense for mobile phones, but they do it for many other things, too. Here's a completely ordinary television that gets you listed in yet another police database: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B015EL27TQ/

In fairness, they do disclose this up front. "Please note that devices dispatched from and sold by Amazon are automatically registered on CheckMend and the National Mobile Property Register (NMPR), this information is shared in accordance with the Amazon.co.uk Privacy Notice"

It's important to point out that thinking of free versus paid in financial terms alone does not reveal the true scope of the issue. As you are probably aware, you are 'paying' with personal data, which can be viewed as a more durable asset than cash. When you can afford to pay for something, you can buy it and it's a done deal. When you pay with data, the other party knows something about you forever. They can sell it an unlimited number of times to an unlimited number of buyers. It is quite different from a one-time monetary purchase.

I'm not going to preach that one way is right and the other is wrong - I just want to point out that they are two quite different schemes. Also, you sound well educated and underemployed - I wish you good luck and hope you get paid closer to what you are worth soon.

A typical scenario: Your friends and acquaintances have your contact info stored on their mobile phones. Your phone number, an email address or two, maybe a photo and a birth-date so they don't forget to wish you happy birthday. They install Facebook/WhatsApp/Twitter, etc, all of which upload your personal data from the phones to their own servers without your knowledge or consent.

It's more complicated than deciding not to have a Facebook account, though that's a great first step.

Looks good using Firefox on Ubuntu, until you select the text: https://screenshots.firefox.com/YM46qCrVR3IA0Qar/atomiks.git...