Hacker News Reader

Springtimeon Salad Fingers and the dawn of ‘weird YouTube’

Aeon Flux is wonderful. About 20 years ago Peter Chung curated his favorite episodes for some animation festivals. Pity it never was released on Blu-Ray from what I can find via the Blu-Ray.com forums.

Springtimeon Windows NT: Peeking into the Cradle

Easy to read article, in part thanks to the choice of mid-tone blue background and pleasant serif typeface. Kind of refreshing when one is used to just white/dark themes.

One typo that could be fixed:

> a couple paragraphs are completely unreadable due to broken grammar, punctuation, and capitaliazation [sic]

Springtimeon GitHub is investigating an incident with Pull Requests, Issues and Webhooks

They had reactions two years prior as confirmed by their blog post[1] about it.

[1] https://github.blog/2016-03-10-add-reactions-to-pull-request...

Springtimeon A Dutch graphic artist reconstructed Tenochtitlan in 3D

One day I hope there's a city building game that looks like this. Lovely work.

Springtimeon Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?

For that I had the quote saved to a text file of comments, with the link.

If it were something like a web page which I found worthwhile it'd be saved as a MHTML, categorized and with notes in the filename for quick searching via Everything. I don't use bookmarks for anything except regularly accessed pages.

20 years ago there was an article[1] that argued anything worth sharing was worth saving, on the benefit of keeping a copy of content locally vs linking/bookmarking (which is prone to link rot). Ironically that site itself no longer exists.

> If you want your links to be worth anything in two, three, or five years, download all the pages you're linking to to your hard disk.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030207224216/http://www.j-brad...

Springtimeon Can You Customize My Startup's Login Page?

Springtimeon How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

Seems to me a way of testing the visualization vs hallucination (if I can distinguish it like that) gradient would be the ability to trace visualized/'projected' objects on paper, particularly for subjects without prior background in illustration/draftsmanship (less skill to lean on) and for images which require replication of details they're not familiar with (things like dice are relatively geometrically primitive shapes, while say a person's face while it can be built up from primitives is inherently complex). Granted part of this would be testing photographic recall.

Like you describe I can visualize a lot of things, with fidelity, but it's still in my mind's eye (that is, a 'sense' rather than a physically represented image that's as apparent as other IRL objects). I can also hone in on details with my eyes open while doing other things. However I can't trace such things merely from this sense since they're not actually there for me. I can however leverage my draftsmanship skills to be able to focus on the mental visualization/sense and progressively draw from memory and for various familiar things visualize them on the paper but not as an optical manifestation.

Springtimeon Epic Games is laying off 16% of its staff

Looking at their Wikipedia they also apparently bought 7digital, another online music store, earlier this year. Had no idea about this until now.

Edit: to clarify meant Songtradr.

Springtimeon Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

> I mean, how much time did it take for the iPhone to get Copy/Paste?

It's kind of sad to reflect that the Apple Newton had this almost a decade prior[1] to the first iPhone and in an intuitive manner, by selecting text by highlighting it with the stylus then dragging it to the edge of the screen where it would remain in a truncated pill form for later retrieval (dragging out the pill to a document). No menus involved at all.

[1] @ 30 seconds in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sue2BR1AHUE

Springtimeon Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

Blackberry 10 had really nice text selection for their phones with physical keyboards. The keyboard itself doubled as a touchpad so one was able to double tap the physical keyboard anywhere in a text box to bring up a loupe and hold the virtual shift Shift key + drag one's fingers along the surface of the keyboard left/right/up/down to highlight text (dragging the selection handles via the screen was also possible but the keyboard method was faster).

It made intuitive sense coming from a desktop environment and didn't suffer from having one's fingers obscuring the caret or handles.

I still miss this method of highlighting text in Android.

Springtimeon We're the Researchers who looked into the privacy of 25 of the top car brands

The way that multiple (I counted 4) articles of theirs talked about it as though it was a report I was expecting a deeper analysis but they just presented keywords pulled from privacy policies and extrapolated.

The tone used was also oddly casual and blog-like for an important topic ('ugh', 'yikes', 'wtf', liberal use of exclamations—even double exclamations), apart from hypothetical scenarios which don't help ground their points. In the AMA they admit they're unaware what various aspects mean yet the articles present findings emphatically.

Mozilla recently published[1] a page about how they had four lawyers and three 'privacy experts' analyze a Microsoft service agreement and yet the page contains zero comments or analysis from them, merely containing two paragraphs that the conclusion was indecisive.

I do appreciate Mozilla bringing attention to such topics, though for all the money and effort they put in getting people to analyze things I kinda hoped their articles would be more substantive than what a reader can similarly determine.

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/microsoft-ai/

Springtimeon Why We're Pulling Our Recommendation of Wyze Security Cameras

They mention a 2023 report about unintentional access of others' cameras but this dates back to 2019 (I know this since I saved a video about it from an owner who demonstrated it, which is no longer on Youtube afaict). The video showed that while the official app couldn't display the feed if they asked Amazon Alexa to, it would.

Springtimeon The Pixel Tablet is just a few spare parts in a half-empty body

I'm a bit puzzled by the tone of the piece in that the author frames it as a critique yet also points out how much easier it is to repair. I was anticipating some literal 2.5" SSD-like empty husk.

Springtimeon How mobile apps illegally share personal data

> GrapheneOS allows disabling network for a particular app, alongside the other permission settings.

This feature is also useful in LineageOS, as a kind of native firewall. Thankfully most open source apps on my device don't use network connectivity so the permission is greyed out to begin with.

Springtimeon LogoScale – A method for vectorizing small, crappy logos

Yeah I'd be similarly curious how that was arrived at. ESRGAN was co-developed by a researcher at Tencent, who has been involved in a range of similar things.

The only satellite related thing I saw in my brief searching is some separate project[1] based on ESRGAN used for satellite imagery.

[1] https://github.com/Jakaria08/EESRGAN

Springtimeon New LoRa RF distance record

From the relatively little I understand the lower the radio frequency the lower the bandwidth but more range it has/can pass through, while conversely the higher frequency the more bandwidth but shorter range/harder to penetrate obstacles (see eg: 5G). LoRa is the former and used for very low bandwidth applications, so not really suitable for browsing websites but has been used for for remote IoT stats, text messaging, etc.

(Fwiw I wasn't the one who downvoted but thought it'd be worth mentioning)

Springtimeon Fairphone 5

Mmm, for this reason it's worthwhile keeping an eye out for firmware-level issues in case the device is outside the OEM supported range. Eg: CVE-2020-11292[1] which affected Qualcomm chips.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/qualcomm-vuln...

Springtimeon Fairphone 5

Fwiw LineageOS has historically supported various Pixels for many years longer*, eg. the Pixel 2 (2017) which has been updated to Android 13[1]. GrapheneOS on the other hand only supports devices for as long as the manufacturer provides official updates from what I understand.

* Subject to of course willing volunteers.

[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/walleye/

Springtimeon Accessible Palette: stop using HSL for color systems (2021)

Came across an article when looking into this issue, about HSY[1] from a Krita (image editor) dev, which is apparently part of Krita's advanced color selector and addresses the same issue by mapping perceived luminosity of colors.

[1] https://wolthera.info/2014/07/hsi-and-hsy-for-kritas-advance...

Springtimeon A note to young folks: download the things you love

yt-dlp which the article links allows for auto filenaming templates that support channel name (or ID though it consumes more filename length) and the service it was from (eg: Youtube, Vimeo, Reddit). If you add the option to save metadata to the video (with the required dependencies) it also saves the full URL to the file, depending on the service.

A more robust method is also saving the full metadata to a separate JSON (though if one likes to rename files then it has to be remembered to rename both the files).

Springtimeon A note to young folks: download the things you love

I read this quite a bit on the r/DataHoarder subreddit, where users obtain vast amounts of all-in-one content (such as archival projects, piracy, etc) and the data isn't sufficiently organized/cataloged and it becomes too overwhelming to where they feel freed without it. (Granted the subreddit is named Data Hoarder and the focus is often grabbing volumes of data before it disappears).

What helps for sure is like you mentioned in taking things at a more curated pace, where one can organize individual pieces of content at the time it's encountered (eg: saving a web page locally you want to refer/link back to in the future, or buying some music when one likes it and properly/consistently tagging it).

I have tens of thousands of web pages saved for example and it's a wonderful resource as search engines have become poorer for many results and sites/pages disappear. Due to the habits formed over time with filenaming/organization it's also super quick to find resources locally.

Springtimeon Grumpy Website

One thing I like about the site itself is the pagination is numbered in descending order so any links to a specific page should always have the same content and one can pick up where one left off at a later point (assuming the same number of posts per page remains consistent). Quite rare for a blog.

Springtimeon UX design patterns for loading

I remember reading about the proposed idea back on A List Apart like 12 years ago and thinking it was an interesting idea yet surprisingly have only seen them adopted widely in the last ~5 years.

Springtimeon Mother is arrested in Bangladesh after son in US criticizes government online

> When you use your real identity you behave in a way that you will stand behind. Anonymity goads you into acting in a way that you might feel embarrassed about or regret.

People use/present different 'selves' to different people all the time, even without using pseudonymous identities. It's a core part of navigating life. Online pseudonymous handles help facilitate more separation between contexts but it doesn't (necessarily) mean people change their integrity (I certainly don't).

There's a useful critique[1] of Mark Zuckerberg's 2010 quote that proclaimed there should only be a single identity for everyone. An excerpt that summarizes the piece:

> Individuals are constantly managing and restricting flows of information based on the context they are in, switching between identities and persona. I present myself differently when I’m lecturing in the classroom compared to when I’m have a beer with friends [...] This is how we navigate the multiple and increasingly complex spheres of our lives. It is not that you pretend to be someone that you are not; rather, you turn the volume up on some aspects of your identity, and tone down others, all based on the particular context you find yourself.

Also this cross-linked piece[2] by a teacher which brings up similar points.

[1] https://michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg-ha...

[2] https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/14/an-internet-where-every...

Springtimeon Web scraping for me, but not for thee

An illustrator specifically wrote[1] that this is why they won't be tagging their social media posts with #HumanMade, #NoAI and similar, as it's a signal there's unadulterated training data.

[1] https://www.davidrevoy.com/article977/artificial-inteligence...

Springtimeon Don’t Use VPN Services (2015)

The author of the OP's article was making the case that there's 'no way' to verify whether a third-party VPN logs and thus as their broad conclusion none should be used.

If the baseline position is that any company can and will lie, regardless of available knowledge about law enforcement intervention or audits then one could say nothing can really be trusted (even hardware we utilize everyday), since there's always some potential undisclosed 'gotcha'. Otherwise it's where one draws the line of verifiability.

There have been other VPNs that haven't held up under scrutiny and been found logging (and had poor security), while Mullvad goes into detail about their infrastructure, mitigation methods (including some quite paranoid anti-tamper hardware techniques, which anecdotally the founders were into prior to forming the company), has had various audits, resisted a warrant and apparently doesn't spend on advertising.

Could all these things be some elaborate ruse? Possibly. There will always be some judgment call.

Springtimeon Don’t Use VPN Services (2015)

Mullvad had national police come with a warrant and nothing was able to be obtained as they were able to prove their servers had nothing identifiable on them (and as such it would be illegal to seize anything per Swedish law).

They also had a recent audit of their VPN servers and no leakage or logging was found. Among other factors they're the only such VPN I'm aware of to hold up under scrutiny.

Do I even use a third-party VPN? No; but they're the only one I've seen that are as close to trustworthy.

Springtimeon ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

Mmm, it's funny since many comments are the exact knee-jerk rebuttals to the titular argument that are deconstructed in the essay.

Springtimeon Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

> The Quantum update was an update to the Desktop version of Firefox that happened in 2017. Mozilla did not remove access to any mobile add-ons at that time.

Legacy addon support was removed from Firefox for Android at that point, too. Wikipedia confirms that in 2017 v56 of the Android version was the last to support them[1][2] and according to the official Android release notes the update was also called Quantum.

You're apparently correct that it didn't technically remove support for WebExtension addons though the addons I used became incompatible with the switch (which unfortunately caused me to switch to another browser after a faithful period of sticking with Firefox), including most that never became re-compatible on either desktop or Android again, including the exceptional UnMHT and sadly Firefox since has lacked MHTML support to this day.

It seems the dropping of legacy addons similarly caused others in this thread to recollect FF for Android as having dropped addon support during that period, given the impact in functionality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_Android#Release_hi...

[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/android/57.0/releaseno...

Springtimeon Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release

I've never tried Kiwi Browser but had similarly come across it while searching. The dev themselves refers to them as ads[1] (2022), though prior to being accepted properly into Bing's referral program Kiwi redirected all search queries through their own servers[2][3] (2021) (the original Kiwi repo's issues tab has been deleted since).

Tbf the dev always sounds reasonable in their responses but was a little off-putting initially so I kinda understand the GP's impression.

[1] https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next/issues/91#issuecomme...

[2] https://github.com/Tobi823/ffupdater/issues/35

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210605191305/https://github.co...