HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Androider

4,272 karma · joined November 3, 2013

submissionscomments
Androider··on Apple redirects Google Safe Browsing traffic through proxy servers in iOS 14.5
No such thing. A company like Apple doesn't just click through a Google developer agreement and generate some API keys and off they go. All integrations will have explicit agreements reviewed by an army of lawyers.
Androider··on Accounts with GAN Faces Attack Belgium over 5G Restrictions
So you just need a GAN trained with a dataset that excludes earrings and glasses. Then maybe another GAN trained to add earrings and glasses onto faces that don't have any :)
Androider··on Tell HN: My entire company's Gsuite access has been banned
Out of curiosity, did you make use Google Cloud Platform?

I don't think I'm the only business owner who is wary of using GCP for anything, as it vastly increases the surface area of unintentional or malicious actions that could make our Google Workspace and all our data in it go poof with no recourse.

Androider··on Kids find a security flaw in Linux Mint by mashing keys
It's still a fundamentally flawed design, because the system fails open when the locker crashes. So it seems Sway / Wayland actually didn't learn anything in this area, and suffers from exactly the same problem as X11 when it comes to the lockscreen.
Androider··on I no longer trust The Great Suspender
In Chrome, make sure you set your less frequently used extensions to run "On click" instead of "On all sites". Extensions -> extension details -> Site access.

For dev tools and such, I set a whitelist of the sites they're allowed to run on, using that same extension details page. There's no need for your JSON formatter etc. to run on every single page you visit. Also speeds up browsing.

Androider··on Google Maps changes a route after the drama of young people lost on a ghost road
And in some cities with grid layouts, Google Maps loves to route a zig-zag stair pattern with 15 turns to save you thirty seconds vs the obvious single turn L-shaped route.

I often wish the app had a "simplest route" option.

Androider··on FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship
Plenty of countries allow dual citizenship, including the US, Canada and most of the EU, so it's not that unusual to have and travel with multiple passports.
Androider··on Things You're Allowed to Do
Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
Androider··on Stripe’s payments APIs: the first ten years
You can have multiple clients at different API versions interacting with Stripe, with a single webhook in your service to receive the callback. Even if you had a single integration, you cannot usually guarantee an atomic switch to the newer API version across all servers, so you either have separate versioned endpoints or your webhook endpoint has to deal with multiple versions.

That said, I do agree you should be able to specify the exact version for a webhook in the Stripe admin UI. But I also wouldn't worry about trying to track the versions too much, Stripe is great in that your integration from 5 years ago will still work just fine today unless you need the newer payment methods.

Androider··on AWS CloudShell
Amazon didn't touch Redshift for years and years, until suddenly Snowflake became a thing and then they remembered they had Redshift.
Androider··on AWS CloudShell
I've worked with Cognito extensively, and it's effectively abandoned. This issue sums up some of the common frustrations https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/3495
Androider··on LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe
Not every social network has to be the same. That's OK.

LinkedIn is the professional network, the alternative to swapping business cards (remember those?). It's where you can add that one person you met at a conference so you remember their name and company if needed, or your colleagues. Would you rather add them to your real social network? Personally, I add everyone on LinkedIn and nobody except close friends and family to my real social network. Working as intended.

LinkedIn is also approximately the only place in the world that I know of that you can go to and actually contact someone, when you only know their name. You can't find people's numbers (and nobody wants to call or be called anyway), there's no way to find their email, so unless you're already in their social circle there's nothing else except LinkedIn to reach out with.

Androider··on Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays
> it's flawlessly undetectable in terms of brightness -- the interface white and grays don't change at all.

In order to pull this off, you need to know exactly how many nits bright the display is, as well as having complete software control of the actual hardware brightness. On Windows, you have neither. Enabling HDR mode completely throws off your current colors and desktop brightness and you have to reset both your physical monitor settings and dial in the new desktop white point with a software slider Microsoft buried in the advanced HDR settings (that almost nobody knows how to use) to hopefully be somewhere in the vicinity of what you had before.

When it comes to display technology, having vertical integration is a huge benefit. Look at high-DPI: state-of-art on Windows in 2020 is nowhere near as good from a software implementation or actual user experience point of view as it was on day 1 when Apple introduced Retina MacBooks back in 2012.

Androider··on Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays
The Windows HDR implementation is complete crap, exactly because they don't have have full control of the hardware stack as Apple does and can't change all the monitor settings like they would need to.

When you toggle HDR on Windows, the desktop becomes dull gray and desaturated exactly because they pull down the previous desktop brightness to something less than 255. So you have to then adjust your monitor's brightness up to compensate. The monitor's brightness effectively sets the upper cap of the HDR brightness, so let's say your brightness was set at 50% before, now you've got to fiddle with the monitor to boost the screen brightness to 100% to allow HDR to function, and to achieve your previous desktop white brightness (you'll probably also have to adjust the software "desktop white" point slider you mentioned, since MS has no clue what the correct monitor brightness and SDR pull down amount should be, so good luck matching your previous desktop colors and brightness). In my experience very few people successfully manage to setup their Windows HDR correctly, and even if you do there's no way to "seamlessly" switch between the two modes (which you have to do since tons of stuff on Windows doesn't work properly when HDR mode is enabled). I haven't checked Surface or other MS hardware, perhaps they're able to do something more clever there?

What Apple does, is that when your display brightness is 50% and you display HDR content, the HDR content will seamlessly appear at a brightness somewhere between 75% to 100% of the maximum screen brightness. That is a seamless HDR effect, giving you the whiter than white experience next to your other windows that just works.

Androider··on Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
So, just like Google Talk / GChat was in GMail back in 2005? We've finally come full circle.
Androider··on Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Slack
The video meetings are easily the worst part of Slack. Even though Slack meetings are free and integrated, everyone at my org still uses Zoom with Slack instead.
Androider··on Summary of the Amazon Kinesis Event in the Northern Virginia (US-East-1) Region
If you start haphazardly changing things while firefighting without testing, you might make things even worse. And there's worse things than downtime, for instance if the system appears to work but you're actually silently corrupting customer data.
Androider··on Tips for Performant TypeScript
It tells you what the function return type is, which isn't necessarily the same as the return type you might have manually typed or intended. For example, undefined's sneaking into the type because of branching code.
Androider··on The HubSpot Culture Code [slides]
HubSpot? The company described as Office Space meets Scientology? The company that is famous for churning through new grads, the one with the fucked up culture an entire book was written about (Disrupted [1])? The one that FBI investigated because they manipulated and extorted people [2]? That HubSpot? Okay.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/books/review/disrupted-by...

[2] https://www.samueljscott.com/2018/12/19/hubspot-fbi-report

Androider··on We chose Java for our high-frequency trading application
1TB of RAM is cheap though, versus spending engineering hours.

Reminds me of the classic WTF "That would've been an option too" https://thedailywtf.com/articles/That-Wouldve-Been-an-Option...

Androider··on Gitlab compensation calculator is not open to everyone anymore
Buffer doesn't compete for San Francisco talent and that's OK. Of their 85 employees, they have 1 engineer in SF. Maybe that person isn't making bank. But the 3 persons in Barcelona appear to be. Average engineer salary in Barcelona is $44K and Buffer is paying $100K+. Good for them!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11s9VSyf4yaYUsqBKLaVH...

Androider··on Gitlab compensation calculator is not open to everyone anymore
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's pretty much universally the case across all industries and roles. I'm always surprised to hear that software engineers are surprised about this.

The interesting thing will be to see how remote work will change this over the next few decades.

Androider··on The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?
The problems Wayland solve are those of yesteryear, sprinkled with the broken dreams that we'd all be running it on Linux phones by now. In that context a strict security model makes sense.

Trouble is, that security model makes no sense on today's desktop. In 2020, people aren't downloading and running native applications on desktops, not even (especially?) on Linux. The desktop is now solely a manager of browser windows. Everything that normal folks do is done through the browser, from email to office collaboration. Maybe a few Electron apps sprinkled in (mostly targeted for developers, ironically). Maybe the calculator? That's pretty much it.

The most important desktop apps today? Chrome and Zoom. Both which barely work in Wayland. But at least all that non-existent native desktop software can't now spy on my web mail? Too bad screen sharing is now a complete shitshow.

Actually worthwhile problems to solve on the desktop are for example high DPI and fractional scaling, rock-solid multi-monitor support, dynamically plugging in and removing displays, mixing displays of varying DPIs, high refresh rates and variable sync etc. The desktop will increasingly become a niche for high-end developer setups.

Androider··on The majority of Facebook's traffic now uses QUIC and HTTP/3
Node.js v15.0 now has experimental QUIC support. For production usage, I wouldn't expect anything usable before the v16 LTS release in October 2021 (and it might still be feature flagged at that point).

But that's pretty irrelevant for most production deployments, as you'll almost certainly want to have some type of AWS ALB, nginx, Cloudflare etc. load balancer in front of your Node services.

Androider··on Babies' random choices become their preferences
I absolutely believe picky eating is a learned behavior. The wide varying cultural differences in food already tells us there's nothing biologically innate about the preferences.

Toddlers will observe their parents facial expressions and behaviors even as they're being served. If you scrunch your nose when giving them broccoli, they won't like it. If you incentivize eating it, they learn they're not "supposed" to like it. At the other extreme, if the parents fight for the last piece of broccoli the kid will happily join in, in my direct experience. Somehow we have convinced our toddler that broccoli is the best thing ever and lollipops will break her teeth and should be avoided :D Your reaction to hearing about this kind of "conditioning" is also no doubt a product of your own environment.

For things like sour or spicy which may be unpleasant at first, repeated and consistent small exposure over time changes their preferences almost without fail. Millions of Korean kids loves Kimchi as a staple, if you could replicate that environment your kid would too.

Androider··on Babies' random choices become their preferences
I do believe your wishes and even your knowledge of the space of what is possible is a product of exactly those things.

My wish to change and then taking an action to change is a function of the environment and everything that came before, probably I read or heard about it somewhere. Similarly, perhaps by me writing about it here a neuron will flip in someone else's mind that the way "they are" is not immutable, and that they can take an active role in molding their own personality and likes.

Androider··on Babies' random choices become their preferences
We constantly lie to ourselves and to each other about why we like and do the things that we do. Split brain experiments prove a hemisphere will simply make something up, lacking some key information provided only to the other hemisphere, and you will honestly believe the made-up explanation is correct.

Your entire identity, hobbies, likes and relationships are a construct of your environment, genes and randomness. I personally feel that "Being who you are", "Staying true to yourself" etc, are very negative things to tell someone, that we tell each other like crabs in a bucket. You absolutely can and should shape your identity around what type of person you want to become in the future. You can objectively look at your likes and behaviors and decide to replace them. If you're on the spectrum, like I suspect a lot of HN readers are, in some ways it's even easier to take this kind of detached view of yourself. Personally, I used to really like X, it was a core part of my identity. One day I simply decided to not do X anymore, I didn't like the people doing X and I didn't see any successful people in my orbit, and I replaced it with Y & Z. It changed the type of people I was around, it changed my career path, and my core personality. Just like you can choose to work on your computer, house, you car, etc. you can choose to work on your identity, personality and likes. There is no one true yourself, just many different versions and possibilities.

Androider··on Apple Watch momentum is building
Lots of praise for the Apple Watch here. Here's my take as a first-time Apple Watch Series 6 user who really tried to make it work, but just couldn't. I returned the watch today as the 14-day return window came to a close.

For a smart watch, it's remarkably dumb. To me it felt like you have to tell it everything you do, when you plan to go to sleep, when you start exercising, etc. You can enable the "automatic workout detection feature", but it's automatic in name only. Instead, it will literally pop-up a dialog for you to pick an activity from a list as you're working out. Same thing when you stop, another manual confirmation required. The heartrate function isn't continuous at all, something I was unware of. It samples at a 10 minute internal, except if your arm is moving (what). The sleep tracking has zero details. All of these are things that a $150 Fitbit nailed 5 years ago (I haven't worn one of those either for years): automatic workouts, continuous heart rate, automatic rem stage tracking etc. The audio handling is bizarre, press play in Spotify or Overcast and my iPhone 50 feet away starts playing, despite having Airpods in and paired. Why would you ever want to do that? Audio routing and making the watch have a silent vibrate-only with no alarm on the iPhone is two things I never did figure out in the two weeks I had the watch.

But worst of all, as someone else said, it's a massive notification factory. I mean, constant, continuous, incessant pinging, buzzing, vibrating, unread red dots etc. Out of the box, it probably pinged me 25 times an hour, a lot of it emails sure, Slack, but also remembering to breath and stand and wash my hands and everything in-between, all of the latter ones I ended up disabling within the first week as too annoying. Yes, you can (must) configure notifications in detail (depending on how many apps you use, literally hundreds of toggles), but what a terrible experience.

Ultimately I decided that I want something that makes my life simpler, not another gadget that I have to babysit (and charge every day), with anxiety inducing notifications. That's without going into the bugs... in the 14 days I had to unlink and re-pair the watch twice as it permanently lost the connection to my iPhone 11 Pro despite power cycling both devices multiple times. From reading Reddit this seems to have been a persistent issue over the years with the watch and nothing unusual. Except when you do, you have to literally start from scratch in creating your watch faces, configuring your zillion notifications, etc. After returning the device, I just felt relieved.

Androider··on New T4g EC2 Instances, Powered by AWS Graviton2
I think where these Graviton instances will really shine is in the AWS managed services, like RDS, ElastiCache etc. where the architecture is entirely irrelevant to you as a customer. All that you care about is that it's both faster and cheaper, a no-brainer choice.
Androider··on The compositor is evil
There's some hardware fixes that are becoming available.

Variable refresh rate (VRR / G-Sync / FreeSync / Adaptive Sync) and high-refresh rate hardware is now starting to gain traction on the high-end, usually with both technologies combined. Apple's ProMotion is often touted as a "120Hz" feature, but it's also a variable refresh in that it can support much lower framerates. Without a static v-sync interval, you can display the frames as they become available, for both perfect tear-free visuals and lower latency. It's quite likely we'll have that on Mac's as well.

I recently got a 144Hz FreeSync (G-Sync compatible) "business" monitor, so this tech is starting to filter down from the gamer side. It works great with a compositor on Linux! Ultra smooth mouse and input response at 144Hz, and completely tear-free. I would highly recommend it for developers as well.

← PreviousPage 4 of 14Next →