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Giroflex

179 karma · joined April 11, 2017

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Giroflex··on Millions of Instagram influencers had their contact data scraped and exposed
It is, actually. Sometimes it's not visible but it's available in a neat JSON format if you view page source.
Giroflex··on A new camera can photograph from 45 kilometers away
> The results speak for themselves. The team set up the new camera on the 20th floor of a building on Chongming Island in Shanghai and pointed it at the Pudong Civil Aviation Building across the river, some 45 km away.

The image right beneath this paragraph [0] contradicts it. Does anyone know the reason for this discrepancy?

[0] https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/single-pixel-imagi...

Giroflex··on Sennheiser Headset Software Could Allow Man-In-the-Middle SSL Attacks
As a bit of a layman, is there even any legitimate reason at all (other than a user installing it in their own machine for reverse engineering purposes) for anyone to install a root certificate anymore?

I could understand it if it was a small company doing so at the time when certificates were expensive, but Sennheiser has plenty of money and certificates can be obtained for free nowadays.

Giroflex··on Kitty – a fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
Yup, I was reading through thinking there was some major update to Kitty and was a bit confused when the page said it was only available for Linux and Mac.
Giroflex··on A military technique for falling asleep in two minutes
The key here is that this becomes easier as you do it. It's hard fighting off those few first thoughts, but I personally find that once I do, my brain is put into slow gear and fewer thoughts come up. This has an accumulating effect and I'm asleep before I know it.
Giroflex··on 1/0 = 0
Well, sometimes the average is 0, e.g. (-2 + 2)/2.

And the whole point is that this is meant to catch unforeseen interactions as soon as possible. If you add a check it's no longer unforeseen, and it may easily slip the programmer's mind.

Giroflex··on Ask HN: How to disclose something without disclosing it?
> You can think of it probabilistically.

But probabilistically doesn't it make sense to skip insurance altogether?

If insurance manages to turn a profit despite having overhead expenses (salespeople, infrastructure, lawyers, etc) and assuming they don't have a special discount in whatever they're ensuring then there are more people paying without using than there are people who need it.

If I'm an average or above average driver, for example, then it doesn't make sense to have insurance, does it? Wouldn't it make more sense to save the money I'd otherwise be using for insurance and pay myself in case something happens? That way my money would go only towards my problem and not towards worse drivers and insurance company expenses.

Is the product that insurance offer really just peace of mind?

Giroflex··on Transfer.sh – File sharing from the command line
What about good old scp?

    scp file.txt user@host:/dest/dir/
Giroflex··on Teach Programming to become a better programmer
> * If I make some claim during class that is not accurate, the students - who, again, are all professional engineers in the work force - will eat me alive.

This is interesting. I imagine that in high-level training for any industry this could happen. I'd personally try to let my students know that I'm not an all-knowing god and ask them to correct me if they noticed something I said was wrong, and I'd be happy learning something new. Maybe this is what you meant, but were you ever met with hostility or animosity because of this?

Also, what, in general, is intermediate-to-advanced Python?

Giroflex··on A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R
Never had any trouble with `pip install --upgrade library`.

Not sure if there's support for upgrading all packages at once, though.

Giroflex··on A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R
>pip install library needs root

Hmm, not really. It's actually advised against [1].

[1] - https://askubuntu.com/questions/802544/is-sudo-pip-install-s...

Giroflex··on A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R
> Even something as simple as installing a library is a conceptual leap for these people (why wouldn't the software just come with everything needed to work?). > Have you ever tried explaining the various python package and environment management options to someone with a background in Excel/SQL?

I don't understand the difficulty I've often seen voiced against this. Why would a newbie or someone who just wants to get analytical work done need anything beyond installing Python and doing `pip install library`? It's certainly orders of magnitude easier and faster than, say, using a C library. The only trouble I can see a newbie running into is if they want to install a library which doesn't have precompiled wheels and they need some dependencies to build it, but that's rarely an issue for popular packages.

Giroflex··on Hair Ice
It's interesting how lifeforms can mold materials into shapes and states we'd otherwise never think of, or that maybe would even be impossible to produce. The strong silk some spiders make is another example.

Leads me to think that there are a lot of undiscovered properties of materials that could potentially be unlocked by engineering different life forms. We're pretty far from exploring all the possibilities in manufacturing techniques.

Giroflex··on Structured Procrastination (1995)
It is both terrifying and comical at the same time.

This made it click for me about why the most productive times I have are also the busiest ones. I thought it was due to "inertia". That is, if you don't stop rolling, it'll be easier to roll. This theory has been contradicted by the fact that it still really is quite easy to stop rolling very shortly after busy times pass.

I had noticed this effect before, but only now after reading about it I'm completely aware of it. I wonder how that came to be part of the human psychology.

Giroflex··on A coworker stole my spicy food, got sick, and is blaming me (2016)
So the perpetrator's thread has a lot of deleted posts which are invisible now.

This link makes them show up again: https://www.removeddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/8825e8/thr...

Giroflex··on Can psychedelics make you a better person?
> If I could have a guided experience from an agnostic and trained professional I would consider trying them

That would be the dream.

I personally got curious about it and talked it over with a good friend and we read a lot about LSD. After studying it a lot from the most credible possible sources and reading arguments for both sides, we decided to try it responsibly; a medium-high dose of 150ug, each on a bright lazy Saturday with the other one sober through the whole trip.

It was very fun and mind-opening and I think it's an experience pretty much everyone should have at least once in their lives. We have done it recreationally a few more times since then (and alone with lower doses and together with both tripping on lower doses) and it has been nothing but positive things; it's exhilarating to discover the world in new ways.

I think it would be fantastic if we could have professional guiders and spaces specifically designed for responsibly tripping. Not only is it fun, but I believe it would lead to a healthier culture as it's not unusual in my experience to see a lot of things wrong with our society and personal behavior when looking at them from a different perspective.

I think it's really a shame that it's not possible due to the substance being illegal (wrongly, IMHO).

Giroflex··on Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
Was about to post the same. Ghostery for me reports 22 trackers on the website, 3 of which are from facebook, including the "pixel" tracker that is mentioned in the article.
Giroflex··on Requests-HTML: HTML Parsing for Humans
I actually had the same experience. I was scraping a large number of pages and upon profiling my script, I found out that bs4 was really slow. Changing the parser from the default to lxml helped things a bit, but I decided I would just try a regex to check quickly whether things could be better. Lo and behold, it was much faster. It's true that it's impossible to parse HTML in its entirety with regex, but if you're looking to extract only a portion of data from a page with a known structure, a bit of regex might be the way to go.
Giroflex··on Facebook spamming users via their 2FA phone numbers
When I first opened up the Netflix mobile app and it asked me if I wanted it to show me notifications I thought "hey, that's nice, most apps just start spamming me without asking". I clicked "No thanks" and went on my way.

It turns out, though, that it asks that _every_ single time I open the app. It's really annoying and I'm about to allow them only to block them at the OS level.

Giroflex··on Coincheck Says It Lost Crypto Coins Valued at About $400M
Sending to that new address would be public.
Giroflex··on LGPL violation/Missing references to Ethereumj project
It's different to copy/paste code from SO and to copy/paste code from an open-source project with a non-permissive license and remove/ignore the license.

The controls to prevent developers from doing this sort of stuff in a serious company should be to let them know they will face disciplinary action/lose their job if they pull it.

Giroflex··on Everyone's Getting Hilariously Rich and You're Not
This articule just seems to revolve around some pretty skewed data.

> Recently the founder of something called Ripple briefly became richer than Mark Zuckerberg.

Became paper richer, which is really quite different. The "market cap" calculations just don't represent reality; he couldn't realistically dump all of his Ripple and expect price to not crash (not even taking into account the huge natural correction in price after the peak of the bull run)

> The cryptocurrency community is centered around a tightknit group of friends

This statement implies that there are few people in the community at all, which is just not true.

> some estimate that 95 percent of the wealth is held by 4 percent of the owners.

This links to an article that says that 95% of the wealth is held by 4% of the wallets, which makes an absolutely huge difference. This is because:

- Some of these wallets are held by exchanges, who hold all of their users' crypto

- Some of these wallets are lost early adopter wallets, from when a large number wasn't something impressive (e.g. Satoshi's lost Bitcoin, accounting for 4 million (!) Bitcoin)

- Many of the wallets created are never used or have already been used just for moving funds and thus have 0 balance (in fact, the article's graph states that 41.93% of wallets hold just 0.01% of bitcoin)

Giroflex··on Learn to Code Ethereum DApps by Building Your Own Game
Well, why did you use all your Ether buying pictures of cats instead of a used car?
Giroflex··on DARPA's “Unhackable” Computer
To be fair, 600ms is a long time for what I assume is an analogy for a hashing algorithm.

Maybe it would be a fun idea to have sensitive data encrypted in such a way that a part of the hashing algorithm involves solving a physical Rubik's cube.

Giroflex··on Backdoor with root access found from OnePlus phones
Are there any serious known issues on LineageOS for the OP3, other than the camera being weaker?
Giroflex··on Show HN: Getting started with Puppeteer and Chrome Headless for Web Scraping
> Since the official announcement of Chrome Headless, many of the industry standard libraries for automated testing have been discontinued by their maintainers. The prominent of these are PhantomJS and Selenium IDE for Firefox.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I'm notm mistaken Selenium IDE has been discontinued due to lack of mantainers, and that has little if any relation to Chrome Headless.

The IDE is just a more effective way of programming test behavior; the Selenium webdriver is still up and working with straight code (as is the case of this tutorial).

Giroflex··on Google launches Hire, a new service for helping businesses recruit
> Bebop, a company Google acquired last year for $380 Million

> When Google decided to bring Diane Greene on full time to run Google Cloud, they had to purchase her company in order to facilitate that

Well, that's an expensive hire.

Giroflex··on Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
Not too many decades ago, computers were also prohibitively expensive and largely only available to corporations and governments.

I don't think we can discard any possibility given the exponential nature of human advancement.

Giroflex··on Microsoft's Calibri font is at the center of a political scandal in Pakistan
The fact that it was indeed publicly available before 2007 kind of throws the whole thing out of the window, though.

Even if it seems obvious, how are you going to prove that they didn't actually download the font or have the special Windows edition?

Although it might turn public perception, it shouldn't, I believe, be considered judicially.

Giroflex··on Operation Car Wash: Investigating corruption at Brazilian oil company Petrobras
Not true. It was the guy who originally registered the case, but he didn't actually investigate it, that is in someone else's hands.
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