Hacker News Reader

asperouson Tracking the White House YouTube channel

"YouTube regularly removes any spam likes or dislikes from your videos. It may take up to 48 hours for the numbers to be updated. Find more info about Likes and dislikes report here: https://goo.gl/eA6f1i "

https://mobile.twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/10800251185025...

asperouson Single sign-on: What we learned during our identity alpha

The us government is rolling this out as well: https://login.gov

asperouson Git as a Storage

I thought it was a neat article, I assumed it was talking about git lfs.

It would be neat if github could store all its data in git, similar to fossil scm. But I suppose microsoft would not want to lose lockin.

asperouson New “Report a Problem” link on product pages

In this case though it can flag a human review.. unlike something like Amazon where it’s harder, more expensive, and takes longer to check if something is a scam

asperouson Japan breaks world record for fastest internet speed

It being the same size means they can just push it through the existing holes to replace cables which is cheaper then digging new holes. But certainly far from cheap or easy

asperouson Introducing Age Verification

In the US, how many 13 year olds have id cards? It seems like by the time they have a drivers license they might not be into roblox anymore.

asperouson The web is swallowing the desktop whole (2017)

40 million Chromebooks will be shipped in 2021!

asperouson The SEC has told us it wants to sue us over Lend. We don’t know why

From the wikipedia article it seems the Howey test is the legal test if something is a security:

"an investment contract for purposes of the Securities Act means a contract, transaction or scheme whereby a person invests his money in a common enterprise and is led to expect profits solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party, it being immaterial whether the shares in the enterprise are evidenced by formal certificates or by nominal interests in the physical assets employed in the enterprise."

So presumably the logic is, lend is a security because people are "investing" securities in a contract and expecting returns not through their own efforts.

Sec has additional guidance here: https://www.sec.gov/corpfin/framework-investment-contract-an...

asperouson Please don’t theme our apps

The article says clearly they are talking about distros that apply system wide themes without checking that all GTK applications still look good and not taking about people tinkering.

Distros do this because it looks good in screenshots and give the system a unique flare, but it gives all these applications a bad image when people try them and they look terrible.

Is the expectation that programs like geary should look at all popular distros and make style sheets to look good in all custom themes? I think they are saying they don't have time. People are stepping on their hard work and giving their apps a bad name.

asperouson The 74,000 numbers of Barclays Bank

The file is transferred compressed with http gzip so only 190kb is transferred.

I can see the point of being efficient but this doesn't seem that bad all things considered. At least the list is also human readable unlike a regex or custom compression.

asperouson Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

Printers may do this but it doesn't call the police on them

asperouson The Playdate store is now open

I believe it's the same as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seyQpWf6i60&t=2s

asperouson Continuity Concerns – Computer Animation Oddities

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-forum/nparticles-instanc...

https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/RFM22/Variation+of+Instan...

Although I don't know what tool they used, probably it was something like this, where they created many instances of an object and used a random number function for the color.

Whatever they used for the seed, it must have changed between shots, program reloads, users, or something else and I would suppose the artists either didn't notice or couldn't figure out how to fix it (I suppose you would just set the colors manually on each instance)

asperouson GitHub Copilot

Or development cost lowers by 10% keeping salaries the same, and more work that was previously too expensive to do is now feasible.

asperouson Tucson copter cop says mysterious, ‘sophisticated’ super-drone ‘like no other’

It sounds to me like the city of Tucson and CBP didn't know how to deal with this. I mean chasing a light unmanned drone in a fully manned helicopter is of course going to end up with the kind of silly antics they talk about (the drone flying circles around it).

I wonder how effective an rf jammer would have been.

asperouson Rethinking Triplebyte

You are the recruiter in this instance. You should be being paid per hire you facilitate (~20k+)

asperouson The home computer as a cultural object is physically vanishing (2007)

For the average person this might be kind true, however I can think of at least three places where desktop computers are very much cultural and symbolic:

* “Gamers” or other enthusiasts with their battlestations [1]

* Finace workstations with many monitors and Bloomberg terminals [2]

* Potentially musician workstations as well [3]

Any other niche ideas?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations/ [2] https://images.app.goo.gl/KfaJMqBp8JVkW6Yn8 [3] https://images.app.goo.gl/sVjkdWvKNrMN2xdD8

asperouson Show HN: I discovered a trading algorithm that returns ~24.85% annually

There are cloud services which will run your trading algorithms.

Here's one I found just with a google search: https://alpaca.markets/

asperouson United Airlines will buy 15 planes from Boom Supersonic

Valuation is based on risk and net present value of projected profits.

Advertising revenue is well proven and arrives quick, while as you mentioned this endeavor has high costs, high risks, and is not likely to be profitable for a long time, decreasing present value.

asperouson Covid deaths plunge after 75% of town's adults vaccinated

There is actually more interesting things going on here then the title suggests.

They split this small city into 4 and offered each section vaccines at a different time to get a better real-world test of the exact herd immunity point.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04747821

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-pandemic-ser...

asperouson Cloudera taken private for $5.3B, acquires Datacoral and Cazena

Good points of evidence, however you can't read too much into the google trends. A lot of technologies peak when they are new and then fall to a steady state.

For example "computers" peaked pre-2004: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=c...

Javascript: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=j...

Machine learning: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=m...

asperouson Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

They actually are doing pretty large buybacks though:

https://www.barrons.com/articles/tech-giants-have-ramped-up-...

Apple recently $77B in buybacks, Alphabet $8.5B, Facebook $3.9B

asperouson Common data model mistakes made by startups

To your point, many of these could be addressed by making an analytics database copy of the transactional database, for example scrubbing test data and removing soft deletes in your etl.

From my experience with metabase, this makes it easier to use anyway but it means you have to maintain an etl.

asperouson Fullerton settles lawsuit against bloggers for publishing City Hall documents

This is my experience as well with contract language; return all files and delete/destroy all copies. With contract work “return” makes a bit more sense, as the other party may not have the most up to date versions of documents I worked on, for example.

asperouson Counter-Strike Global Offsets: reliable remote code execution

Remember “Don't be snarky”.

I appreciated your comment. Maybe saying RCE is “ok” was a bit of a hyperbole, it depends on the game. MMOs people could steal credentials, etc.

SELinux, App Armor, and MAC is what I mean. Windows has mandatory integrity control but it’s no where as comprehensive as Linux, MacOS, iOS.

Windows does have some opt in isolation controls as well like you suggested, but their recently released security features like App Guard is based around virtualization which think won’t work for the average program due to performance and overhead.

asperouson Counter-Strike Global Offsets: reliable remote code execution

Another example is why app level security is so important. Why shouldn’t games allow arbitrary code execution? It only matters because the access space for programs is still so broad.

People complain when applications on Mac request permission to access files, but that makes such a huge difference. It’s time for kernel level permissions to be standard on desktops.

asperouson DarkSide ransomware gang quits after servers, Bitcoin stash seized

There’s a huge network of financial controls to prevent and detect this sort of thing, it’s one of the foundations of the fields of accounting. Often there are departments looking for fraud regularly.

I suspect small or medium organizations rather then megacorps would be easier targets if they haven’t invested money in accounting controls.

asperouson Why does every advert look the same? Corporate Memphis

Because they are professionals. Software engineers, lawyers, doctors... skilled people who have creative control often put pride into their work as a means of expressing their talent and enthusiasm, even if it doesn’t make a direct tangible difference.