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EvilTerran

1,298 karma · joined March 27, 2012

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EvilTerran··on Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update
Who argued that, where? I don't see it in this subthread.

Regardless, as I said in my comment, I only mentioned the Unix model "for example" - not to "shift the goalposts", just because I'm more familiar with it than with whatever anti-binary-tampering measures Windows may have.

EvilTerran··on Tor Browser disabled NoScript, but can't update
The malicious code may well have the necessary permissions to write to the profile folder, but not to modify the executable.

Under the Unix security model, for example, that would be pretty likely: your profile's owned by your account, the executable & its containing folder are owned by root & go-w, so code running as you can tamper with the former but not the latter.

EvilTerran··on Scribd taking down the Mueller Report is the future the EU has voted for
I don't know off-hand. The claim that this "is the future the EU has voted for" was made by the article, not by me. I was, for the sake of argument, taking the article at its word on that - and observing that, in that light, its histrionics about Article 13 come across as misplaced.

That being said, even if a speedy review process isn't required de jure, market forces should make it a de facto requirement. Over time, a platform with overzealous takedowns & inadequate appeals process will lose out to any competition which does better on either front.

(Yes, I know it hasn't worked out like that with YouTube. They're close enough to a monopoly that market forces don't really apply, and that's a whole other problem.)

EvilTerran··on Scribd taking down the Mueller Report is the future the EU has voted for
> there is an AI that is granted supreme power to censor content

Its decisions were overruled by humans. That's not "supreme power".

In effect, some uploads were pre-moderated instead of retromodded. There's nothing novel about pre-moderation, some sites apply it to all user content - if you don't have a problem with that, I don't see how it's consistent to take exception to this.

EvilTerran··on Scribd taking down the Mueller Report is the future the EU has voted for
> The company identified 32 copies of the document, all of which were removed and then reinstated

> A separate request Quartz made to reinstate its own versions of the document was resolved 17 minutes after we sent it, seemingly after an employee review.

I... don't see the problem here? Sure, it'd be better if their detector never got it wrong, but in the absence of the Sufficiently Advanced Technology that would require, a speedy manual review process is the best anyone's got.

EvilTerran··on Announce Crossmeta FUSE for Windows
Speaking of alternatives, there's also Dokan:

https://dokan-dev.github.io/

EvilTerran··on What design tools get wrong
Are you aware of the Links programming language / research project? It lets you write code in a uniform syntax that compiles down to a mixture of Javascript, server-side code, and SQL - all from the same source file, if you like. Client- and server-side Links code can call each other seamlessly; and it has a syntax for inline HTML fragments is strikingly similar to, and I suspect influenced, JSX.

Not quite the same thing as you describe, but it's exploring a similar part of the design space:

http://links-lang.org/

EvilTerran··on New study provides evidence that we need different drugs for men and women
> The mechanism of action of analgesic drugs is very simple and well-understood.

https://academic.oup.com/bjaed/article/14/4/153/293533 (2013)

the exact mechanism of action of paracetamol [ie acetamophen] remains to be determined. There is evidence for a number of central mechanisms, including effects on prostaglandin production, and on serotonergic, opioid, nitric oxide (NO), and cannabinoid pathways, and it is likely that a combination of interrelated pathways are in fact involved.

That's the most widely-used analgesic in the world, and its mechanism is evidently neither simple nor well-understood.

EvilTerran··on Read color hex codes
Conversely, the shorthand scale does divide into perfect thirds (#555, #AAA) or fifths (#333, #666, #999, #CCC).
EvilTerran··on Don’t Lead by Example
Firefox's Reader View works great on Medium too.
EvilTerran··on Don’t Get Clever with Login Forms
I can see how that could be a problem with modal logins, but it doesn't have to be a show-stopper: when the modal opens, the site could history.pushState() to a URL that would, when navigated to directly later, serve the page with the modal already open.

Not that I know off-hand of any sites that actually do that, but the possibility exists.

EvilTerran··on An ex-YouTube whistleblower on their recommendation engine
> Tay is an instance of deliberate manipulation, but YouTube is a case of wrong incentives.

I think it near-certain that YouTube is both. Considering the obvious value of getting your video into as many people's recommendation streams as possible, there's surely a whole "SEO, but for YouTube" industry out there, working furiously to game the system.

Anecdotally (albeit not "an industry" per se), on a number of occasions I've observed... let's call them "radical activist groups", organising off-YouTube to flood a favoured video or channel with activity, with the explicit goal of causing YouTube to make it more visible to "the masses".

EvilTerran··on Our Software Dependency Problem
There's some relevant work going on in the "crev" project, discussed here a couple of weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18824923

The big idea is for people to publish cryptographically signed "proofs" that they've reviewed a particular version of a given module, allowing a web-of-trust structure for decentralised code review. I particularly like how, thanks to the signatures, a module's author can distribute reviews alongside the module without compromising their trustworthiness - so there's an incentive for authors to actively seek out reviewers to scrutinise their code.

EvilTerran··on FDA is considering drugs to help kids quit vaping
That chart was an assessment of the situation in the UK in 2011, not the US in the present day.
EvilTerran··on Ask HN: Is it just me or is the AMP project making everything slower?
From my reading of https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec, it looks like you could override this behaviour in uBlock Origin with a style cosmetic filter. Something like...

    ##html[amp] body,html[\26A1] body:style(animation:none!important)
(I can't test it in my current browser, unfortunately, but I think that's right.)

[edit]

Update: I got to a browser I could test it on. Unfortunately, it turns out uBO doesn't let you apply :style() rules to all pages indiscriminately, you have to specify a domain name pattern - which is pretty annoying, because the principle is evidently sound; this does work on the link in OP:

    ehow.co.uk##html[amp] body,html[\26A1] body:style(animation:none!important)
Hrmph.

Alternatively, you could use a CSS injection addon (or userContent.css, in Firefox) to add the rule to all pages:

    html[amp] body, html[\26A1] body {
        animation: none !important;
    }
Or do it with a userscript (ie via Greasemonkey or similar).

[edit 2]

It appears uBO is aware of a need for something like this - they provide an injectable "scriptlet" that adds the necessary CSS: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Resources-Library#amp...

Unfortunately, scriptlet injection also can't be applied to every page indiscriminately. :/

    ! works on OP's link
    ehow.co.uk##script:inject(ampproject.org/v0.js)
    ! doesn't work at all
    ##script:inject(ampproject.org/v0.js)
So I'm just mentioning it here for completeness' sake.
EvilTerran··on Show HN: A tool to find related subreddits
That sounds like Content Blocking kicking in - that's only active in Private Browsing by default: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-blocking

I note that page says "By default, content blocking uses the Disconnect.me basic protection list" - and reddit.com is on that list: https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti...

(I'm guessing reddit's "social button" is considered a tracker.)

[edit] confirmed, it's definitely Content Blocking: I just loaded that jsbin in an FF private window, and there's a message in the console to that effect.

EvilTerran··on We need more keywords
Python has the same idea, albeit on a smaller scale, with its "from __future__ import <feature>" statements:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0236/

EvilTerran··on Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash
Nicotine has stimulant & nootropic effects:

https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#benefits

Tobacco also naturally contains, in addition to the nicotine, other compounds that act like MAOIs - ie, as antidepressants:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16859748

EvilTerran··on PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days
Do you have any citations for these claims? Not calling you a liar or anything - I'm just not at all familiar with the site in question, and it seems like it'd be important evidence if we want to fairly judge paypal's behavior here.
EvilTerran··on Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]
That's a huge help, thank you!
EvilTerran··on Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]
For the benefit of laypeople like myself:

- IID: "independent and identically distributed", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...

- OLS: "ordinary least squares", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_least_squares (I think)

EvilTerran··on The Ant Design Christmas Egg That Went Wrong
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

EvilTerran··on Adapton: Programming Language Abstractions for Incremental Computation
In spreadsheets, too!
EvilTerran··on Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
I use the old mobile site, it's fantastically light-weight: https://i.reddit.com

You can change the subdomain to "i" on any reddit page, or access the same version by adding ".compact" to the end of the regular URL (which can be more convenient, thanks to the ".com" button on mobile keyboards): https://www.reddit.com/.compact, https://www.reddit.com/r/CatsStandingUp/comments/7bcm79/cat/..., etc

EvilTerran··on Star Citizen: The Road to Release, Financials and New Partners
As far as I've been able to tell, Derek Smart and Chris Roberts have a long-standing bitter rivalry over who can make the best space game, driven by the substantial egos on the both of them. At present, that mostly manifests as Smart doomsaying about Star Citizen on the internet to anyone who'll listen, with claims of highly variable quality - but I believe there have been periods in the past when the roles of developer & critic were reversed.
EvilTerran··on Browsers
I wouldn't say the chance is exactly zero - if Google's monopolistic behaviour surrounding Chrome (the "install our browser!" nags on their web properties come to mind) get too egregious, they may be forced to divest via antitrust law.
EvilTerran··on Inside the British Army's secret information warfare machine
> some russian company spending $100K on facebook ads

The Kremlin internet propaganda project had, at its peak, a budget of more than $1.25 million per month.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/mueller...

EvilTerran··on Google Container for Firefox – Prevent Google from tracking you around the web
I'm reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) stories of criminals who underwent various procedures to remove their fingerprints - methodical scarring, acid burns, skin grafts from elsewhere on the body, etc: even the procedures that worked didn't actually help them evade identification, because the marks left by their now-printless fingertips were even more distinctive than before.
EvilTerran··on Fred Rogers wouldn't have wanted to appear in a Google ad
Well said. You've elucidated my thinking better than I could.

Another aspect: I've set up my browser to be pretty aggressive about blocking ads & trackers, to the extent that in practice any website is limited to tracking only what they can collect server-side, with first-party isolation; as such, GDPR doesn't give me that much extra protection when I'm interacting with sites that I'm not actively giving my personal details to.

I'd still appreciate the additional protections GDPR provides, in terms of control over that server-side tracking, and when interacting with sites that do know who I am; and I see the value in even the protections I don't personally benefit from, for the sake of people who aren't tech-savvy enough to lock down their browsers to the same extent (and to deal with it breaking sites, when that happens). So I'm still a fan of GDPR in general - it's just that, when it comes to me personally, just passively browsing a site, my own browser set-up is adequate for my liking.

EvilTerran··on Fred Rogers wouldn't have wanted to appear in a Google ad
> Isn't this copyright violation?

Eh... maybe? I mean, you could achieve the same end result with a proxy/VPN and your browser's reader mode - to do it that way wouldn't be copyright infringement, would it? I feel like, in principle, Outline should be treated the same.

But on the other hand, the fact that they're transforming the page server-side, and caching it there, may push it over the line in the eyes of the law. IANAL, I don't really know.

To be honest, copyright law is such a tangled mess, I don't really give it much thought. Outline does the job, and if anyone's going to get into trouble it'll be them not me, so I'm happy enough.

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