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Flimm

3,484 karma · joined October 24, 2011

I use tildes to denote sarcasm, like this:

> We all realise that that would be ~so much better~.

If tildes are omitted, then I have not intended to be sarcastic.

If you're looking at my profile to see which gender you should use to refer to me, go ahead and use the male gender.

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Flimm··on Firefox to support Google's WebP image format for a faster web
Safari for Windows has been discontinued a few years back.
Flimm··on Fair Trending: Objectively-Ranked Trending YouTube Videos
Both Youtube and fairtrending.com use an algorithm to generate a list of trending videos, so your comment is confusing to me.
Flimm··on Microsoft intercepting Firefox, Chrome installation on Windows 10 Insider build
I think the mods should modify the title to indicate that this applies only to the insider build (so far).
Flimm··on Tell HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome
I don't quite understand your comment. I think you are assuming that Firefox's containers are like Chrome's profiles, but they're not.
Flimm··on Firefox 62.0 Released
This is the feature I'm most excited about this time:

> “Reopen in Container” tab menu option appears for users with Containers that lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container

This is going to make containers even more useful.

Flimm··on Is try..catch really useful?
Modern Node and most modern browsers will print a warning to the console when this happens. See my answer on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52061395/247696
Flimm··on We are rewriting CodeMirror
Thank you for considering the needs of people who speak non-LTR languages, like Arabic. I'm excited that bidirectional text support is in the roadmap!
Flimm··on Venezuela devalues the bolivar by 95% and pegs it to ‘oil-linked’ cryptocurrency
According to the article, the new Venezuelan sovereign bolívar is pegged to a cryptocurrency petro, which itself is linked to movements in oil prices. I know the basics of crytocurrency, but I don't understand how this works. Could somebody explain?
Flimm··on Blocking Compromised Passwords on PyPI
Could I have a link to your Django add-on?
Flimm··on Google tracks users who turn off location history
I think we have lowered the bar for companies like Google far too much. Honestly, it would be reasonable to expect Google not to do any location tracking across any of their services at all, without obvious and explicit approval of the users, granularly service by service, and with the ability to reverse that decision. We should be aiming for opt-in tracking, not opt-out. Fine print in large EULAs, or dark patterns in privacy controls, don't count as genuine opt-in procedures in my opinion.
Flimm··on Spotify hits 83M paying subscribers, more than double Apple Music’s 40M
Actually, you can filter out explicit songs, but the option is only visible in the mobile app (I have Android). Once you turn it on, it also works on the desktop client signed in to the same account.
Flimm··on “We are now encrypting over 100M domains”
It's probably more the other way around: the Chrome team only felt confident to show a "not secure" indicator, because so many domains are HTTPS now, and there is a good free option to get TLS certificates.
Flimm··on Interactive demos on network theory, game theory, trust etc
This is amazing! I've been waiting for a game like this, even dreaming about making it myself, and now it just pops up in my feed! :)

I can't wait to play with it some more.

Flimm··on San Francisco's zoning makes it illegal to build apartments in 73.5% of the city
The paradox you talk about is well-known. Property owners often don't sell their property even when it seems advantageous to do so, both for them and for the economy in general.

This reminds me of an episode of EconTalk, interviewing the author of the book Radical Markets, which includes new and radical ideas for how an economy could be run. One of the ideas is to allow anyone to buy a property at its set value at any time (giving a reasonable notice period, I presume). The property owner is the one who sets the value of the property. To stop property owners from gaming the system and pricing the property too high, all property owners would be required to pay a tax periodically on the value of their property. (Of course, the lower the price set, the more likely it is that the property will get bought, so the property owner can't set the price too low either.) The goal of this idea is to allow land to be used the most efficiently, the way the market is supposed to work for most goods. Of course, this idea has a lot of obvious drawbacks, but I thought it was an interesting thought to discuss.

- Podcast episode: http://www.econtalk.org/glen-weyl-on-radical-markets/

- Article from website of the book: http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/property-is-monopoly/

Flimm··on What travel insurance really means
He did read the policy. He also read the 94 page medical manual they later sent him, which presumably wasn't in the original policy. He found the reason in all those pages of text why he was eligible for getting his costs covered, and they still replied with:

> “This is a general exclusion and doesn’t apply to you specifically. Our decision still stands with curtailment. No further medical input needed.

Why do you feel that he shares any part of the blame here? Why do you expect him to be an expert in reading and interpreting insurance policies in the middle of a medical emergency?

Flimm··on What travel insurance really means
Name and shame, please.
Flimm··on Spanish Wikipedia also shuts down in protest at proposed EU copyright law
I suppose the argument would be that those companies launched in the USA first, were successful there, and then had enough capital and resources to launch in the tougher more fragmented European markets.
Flimm··on PEP 572: Python assignment expressions has been accepted
Previous discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16949248
Flimm··on I fear Google's control of the web
Thank you for your reply, and for reading the article. The comment you linked to is dead, so I guess we were both right about that.
Flimm··on I fear Google's control of the web
I didn't see anyone here say "you must not understand how HTTPS works!" or "Security is good, m'kay?". I'll take it in good faith that the comments you quoted are only missing because they got deleted since, or maybe there is some misunderstanding.

If you scroll down the article by Scott Helme, you can see that he does respond to Winer specifically. Here is the link with a fragment that goes to that section of the article:

https://scotthelme.co.uk/https-anti-vaxxers/#davewiner

Since you asked for a quote, here it is:

> It's pretty easy to see that Dave's problem really is with Google here and I disagree with this on many fronts. First, ...

(Read the article to see the rest to avoid copying the whole thing.)

Flimm··on Show HN: Why Do I Procrastinate? – Web MD for Procrastination
This quiz is based on the The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel, which is perhaps the best book I have read on the topic.
Flimm··on Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?
No it's not. Please don't turn HN into a joking competition. There are other websites for that.
Flimm··on I fear Google's control of the web
You're right that the "anti-vaxxers" title is off-putting to many people. It's a shame that you choose not to look past that.
Flimm··on I've spent the last two years building a new email client
This looks amazing, I can't wait to try it out. My main problem with Thunderbird is that it doesn't have a conversation-based UI, but this looks like it does. Good stuff!

(By the way, typo: "accessable" should be "accessible")

Flimm··on Ask HN: Has anyone switched from being a night owl to being a morning person?
Yes, I have. In a desire to change some bad habits, I stopped using alarms to wake up, and I configured my router to stop providing me Internet access from 11pm every day. I also put a sign on my bedroom door, saying "this is a phone-free zone". The sunshine wakes me up. I kept this up at least for a couple of years. I genuinely feel like a morning person now, instead of a night owl that I used to be.
Flimm··on Show HN: HoneyMoney – 100% more Bees than any other personal finance software
I used to love YNAB, but once I started needing real support for multiple currencies, I had to stop using it. I haven't found a daily driver replacement since, and I've tried around 10 apps. I even started writing my own, although it's not done. Does HoneyMoney support multiple currencies?
Flimm··on Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
Do you have any useful commands like these that can handle multi-byte characters in UTF-8? For instance, handling the zero-width space U+200B, which in UTF-8 takes up more than one byte. I've got some custom scripts that do, I was wondering if there was already something out there.
Flimm··on Examples of everything new in ECMAScript 2016, 2017, and 2018
> This is because ️ is two bytes long ('\u2764\uFE0F' )!

No, that's not bytes. You're counting code points. Because of the way Javascript works, it can't accept code points greater than U+FFFF, so it has to use surrogate pairs.

Flimm··on Storyboarder: free, cross-platform storyboard tool
I agree with you on "open source", that term was basically introduced by the OSI and people still stick to the OSI definition, but I cannot agree with you on the term "free", that word has a very long history of meaning gratis long before the FSF.
Flimm··on Lockbox – A stand-alone password manager that works with Firefox for desktop
Does this offer any password-sharing features? Can you share some passwords with other Mozilla/Firefox accounts?
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