Hacker News Reader

xphxon Discord fined €800k for failing to comply with several obligations of the GDPR

"in August 2021, Discord had reported $130 million in 2020 revenues, triple from the prior year, and had an estimated valuation of $15 billion"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord#History

xphxon Discord fined €800k for failing to comply with several obligations of the GDPR

> treaties [...] not based on trust

How are these treaties enforced? All international treaties are ultimately based on trust. There is no higher authority, only elective councils of and voluntary commitment to procedures (a.k.a. promises) by sovereign states.

Specifically not even these formal promises have been given by e.g. the United States of America which to this day has signed but never ratified either the VCLT[1] or the VCLTIO[2], so is figuratively giving a lukewarm "let's see about the convenience of that when it comes up".

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_the_Law_o...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_the_Law_o...

xphxon TikTok’s greatest asset isn’t its algorithm, it’s your phone

A 2016 talk by Tribeflame CEO Torulf Jernström about the monetization of mobile games called "Let's Go Whaling!" also caused a bit of a ruffle a while ago.

Ominously delivered with smug smirk, met by smug laughter: "I'll leave the morality of it out of the talk. We can discuss it, if we have time, later."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4

Turns out they would have had time later but for some reason opted not to.

xphxon You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are? (2018)

Written as though it's competing for the attention of fourteen-year-olds against meme scrolls, video games and online porn.

xphxon The Harry Potter fallacy

Unfortunately that is also the problem with rational arguments if they are deliberately or ignorantly reductive, i.e. without holistic perspective.

xphxon Dutch schools must stop using Google's email and cloud due to privacy concerns

Web.de was founded in 1995 and GMX in '97. Both now belong to the gigantic German United Internet AG founded in '88 which currently has roughly 10,000 employees and EUR 5.5bn revenue.

xphxon A little story about the `yes` Unix command

Or if homogeneous data is fine, just cat or dd from a source like /dev/zero.

xphxon The hardest program I've ever written (2015)

> If every statement fit within the column limit of the page, yup. It’s a piece of cake. (I think that’s what gofmt does.) But our formatter also keeps your code within the line length limit.

xphxon Avoid Meaningless Binary Labels

I think you are correct and am confused why you're being voted down without explanation.

xphxon Unix in the Browser Tab

I did underappreciate this, thank you!

xphxon Unix in the Browser Tab

Maybe I misunderstand, but didn't JSLinux[1][2] do system emulation running a proper kernel basically since 2012?

1: http://jslinux.org/

2: https://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html

xphxon You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

One Jesus of Nazareth is tolerable, a million people preaching their opinions everywhere would be truly awful. Therefore what Jesus was doing is immoral.

xphxon Google removes Pirate Bay domains from search results citing Dutch court order

Sorry, but Wikipedia also doesn't get to decide what words mean, nor you or I, at least not authoritatively.

Linguistically, tax evasion is: evasion of taxes. I can use the words to describe any action taken to evade paying a tax. The words simply do not imply a state of legality.

That there are domains that overload the terms with extended restrictive meaning is by definition arbitrary and has no priority over natural language.

Usually Wikipedia indicates this by explicitly naming the domain, e.g. "In US tax law, tax evasion is ...", but fails to do so here.

xphxon A Handy Little System for Animated Entrances in CSS

> a relief when i click on a link to any site, and the page loads, and there's no animated anything whatsoever

I've recently disabled CSS animations globally in Firefox's userContent.css and my Web experience has indeed improved considerably. (Annoyingly this particular page content still jumps a little because of some deferred image loading.)

  * {
   animation: none !important;
   transition-property: none !important;
  }

This obviously does not affect scripted animations.

It would be nice if sites respected the prefers-reduced-motion browser media feature.

xphxon Reasons to Quit Social Media

There is a not so subtle implication of your comments being voted down that those claiming HN is not an instance of social media would be well-advised to reflect on.

xphxon 'Superager' brains resist the march of time to have memories like 25-year-olds

>> Maintain (a low waist circumference) and (muscle mass)

xphxon EU draft exempts private jets, cargo from jet fuel tax

https://archive.is/aW95d

https://web.archive.org/web/20210708074814/https://www.argus...

xphxon Manual for a popular facial recognition tool shows how much the software tracks

Yes, the stated original requirement to "find that one person who’s been suspended and is incredibly dangerous" does presuppose that the dangerous person is already in the system and you're just trying to find them.

I don't personally find the rationale persuasive, I'm just answering the question how it could possibly be considered useful.

xphxon Manual for a popular facial recognition tool shows how much the software tracks

I believe the questionable rationale there is that it helps to identify suspended students whose presence is assumed to be dangerous.

“The mission creep issue is a real concern when you initially build out a system to find that one person who’s been suspended and is incredibly dangerous, and all of a sudden you’ve enrolled all student photos and can track them wherever they go[.]”

xphxon The embedded YouTube player told me what you were watching

It's an ageist way of saying that this exploit is less critical for people who take proactive counter-measures, and more affects less technically inclined or security-minded people.

xphxon Undeleting a file overwritten with mv

That would invalidate the byte offset. The intention here isn't so much printing the data as its location on disk.

xphxon Making the GPL more scary

Isn't that the same as when someone offers me a couch to surf and a kitchen to use? Sure, it's unconditional and I'm not violating any agreement, but if I use their stuff and don't give anything back, am I not a freeloader?

xphxon Making the GPL more scary

Could you explain how the term does not apply? Its meaning seems to be: "to impose upon another's generosity or hospitality without sharing in the cost or responsibility involved".

xphxon Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

Hopefully useful nitpick: In the "prisoner's dilemma", it's the dominant strategy. It's only sub-optimal in the /iterated/ prisoner's dilemma, the ominous reason being an expectation of continuity.

xphxon Opera is Reborn

What is a menu bar offering you that makes or breaks a program for you versus several political, philosophical, ideological, practical, and technical other differences?