Hacker News Reader

bleachedsleeton Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum blockchain

Could you explain why you think the fundamental concept is egregiously flawed?

bleachedsleeton Fe – An emerging smart contract language for the Ethereum blockchain

This argument is as tired and old as the curmudgeonly people that make it.

>With a technology that is extremely damaging to the entire planet for no reason…

Not all blockchains are based on PoW. If you actually read even a brief summary of the basics of crypto you’d know this since it’s mentioned nearly everywhere these days. It seems you are therefore either ignorant on what you speak, or are willfully misleading people to fit your own narrative.

>…come away with the opinion that it's junk tech that roasts the planet, both because it's true and because climate change is a very serious problem.

You’re stating opinions as facts and being far more intellectually dishonest and misleading than any crypto native I’ve seen on here.

> If the end result is that cryptocurrency discourse is effectively run out of HN…

You and you alone don’t get to decide or arbiter what HN is used for or who it is used by. This is gate keeping trash that erodes intellectual debate and discourse into an echo chamber of more curmudgeonly people patting each other’s curmudgeonly backs.

> Like it or not, HN is an important forum. People with a fair amount of influence come here.

HN is an important forum full of important people. On this we agree. My opinion, then, is we should probably be open to discussing new technologies, difficult topics, and unsavory ideas as these are the types of conversation from whence innovation springs. Nobody ever got smarter debating which JavaScript framework is the new hotness on the front page of HN.

> …similar to phrenology or eugenics…

Eugenics is worth discussing as it will once again become a cultural hotbed debate as we move into an era of designer genetics. I find it mostly amusing that you punctuate your point about quelling curiosity by dismissing away another topic that requires thick skin and intellectual rigor to properly discuss and even lump these in with phrenology. This is kind of like saying “discussions of meteorology, astronomy, and astrology should be banned.” One of these things is not like the other…

Based on this comment alone, I’d say you also probably like burning books.

bleachedsleeton Microsoft pushes ahead with controversial ‘buy now, pay later’ feature for Edge

One is Chrome, one is Webkit, and the third is completely custom. I do agree with your point below that unless the rendering engine is built from scratch, then the cost of the browser is still being subsidized, just higher up the chain.

Needless to say, it's that third browser I'm trying that interests me most.

bleachedsleeton Microsoft pushes ahead with controversial ‘buy now, pay later’ feature for Edge

I’m currently beta testing two paid browsers and I’m about to be trying a third. We are seeing a bit of a golden age for software right now where it seems a certain subset of the population has become not only comfortable paying for it, but also paying realistic (read not subsidized) pricing for it. I’m not saying this will ever be mainstream per se, but I am suggesting that enough people may be interested to make the model a sustainable alternative.

bleachedsleeton Colorado 'solar garden' is a farm under solar panels

Sounds like a good idea for a DAO honestly

bleachedsleeton [dead]

Calvinists would like a word ;)

bleachedsleeton The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

Or maybe they weren’t and you’re just making an appeal to antiquity out of misplaced nostalgia and recollections about some amorphous Golden Age that never quite existed as you remember.

bleachedsleeton Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

Also, if you do use biometrics and ever find yourself in a sticky situation most modern operating systems have built in features to quickly disable them on demand. iOS, for example, allows you to quickly disable Face/Touch ID by holding the side+any volume button for two seconds and then quickly tap the side button again when the shutdown slide appears.

bleachedsleeton $1M bounty for details on Tether’s backing

This is like saying Z$ should make every fiat speculator or holder very nervous. Crypto is huge. You can be involved without coming anywhere near USDT.

bleachedsleeton Google Pixel 6 Launch [video]

> And what's with all the flat design, we need skeumorphism and warmth back in industrial and UI design.

I’d be interested to know your general age group.

I have a theory that skeumorphism is a cross-generational design trend that serves a purpose to articulate a radical new technological paradigm in a language that makes sense to people that have never experienced it (i.e. A radio app that looks like an actual radio because that’s what everyone grew up using). I think once people are fully immersed and familiar with the tech, though, skeumorphism is limiting and ugly. We don’t need radio apps that look like radios anymore because everyone should now know how digital interfaces work. We can abstract away dials and knobs and make better use of the space for something that fits better with the constraints of a screen rather than the constraints of the physical world. This harkens back to the old discussions around the save icon and how there is an entire generation clicking an abstract symbol that holds no meaning to them while the generation prior comfortably recognized this symbol as “equivalent to archiving on my floppy disks.” Skeumorphism is really only intuitive to the first generation. Everyone that comes after just sees another (possibly ugly) abstraction that makes just as much sense as the next one. Screens don’t need metal dials, plush felts, and eye-popping gauges where a simple shadow would otherwise suffice.

I mean this with no disrespect. We all have our own sense of aesthetic. Just a thought I’ve been ruminating on. Personally I find neumorphism [1] to be a pleasing blend of the positives of both skeumorphism and flat design and I hope to see more of it going forward.

[1] https://uxplanet.org/neomorphism-the-hottest-design-trend-in...

bleachedsleeton L0phtCrack Is Now Open Source

I’m under 30 and certainly wouldn’t relegate L0pht to a mere footnote in history.

bleachedsleeton Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website

Language cheapens itself when spoken cheaply. Abusing over the top terminology on minute areas of controversy will ultimately lesson the impact of your outrage when something actually bad comes along. Someone browsing healthcare plans available to other employees of different companies is not something that should win you the label “malicious actor” and come associated with other implications. This data leaking harms literally nobody other than perhaps the company offering the worst coverage to its employees. Your response is the real problem here: If I had done this, reported it, and then been called a “malicious actor” on a forum titled “Hacker News” my knee jerk response would just be to shut up about it next time.

bleachedsleeton Is Mozilla Firefox Getting Sketchy?

https://browser.kagi.com

Not affiliated, but perhaps give them a try? There’s some immensely interesting projects in the space coming out these days.

bleachedsleeton Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

If I tell you the sky is green the best way to refute that to your audience is to ignore me entirely as a person and instead tell people to go outside and look up: Show them some evidence and factually refute my claim. You don’t say “this man isn’t a sky expert, has never spoken to sky experts, and should therefore be dismissed!”

The parent comment’s point would seem to be that this person is making a claim that should be refutable with evidence. But the evidence is Facebook’s own data supporting her claim so they can’t do that. Instead, they diminish her credibility. It’s not “smearing” in the sense of calling her a baby eater, but it is a credentials fallacy meant to make people dismiss her claims regardless of validity.

bleachedsleeton Where Have All the Sex Scenes Gone?

GoT is explicitly mentioned and is used to make the author’s point.

bleachedsleeton Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication

Freenet can be run through Tor using Onioncat as a virtual network. [0]

[0] https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2016/08/18/using-freenet-over-tor....

bleachedsleeton Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)

It will be over, but it’s not over yet. Your link says that it will both take a while for it to come to market and also be more expensive to produce…an expense that will likely be balked at by the airlines until forced to use it at which point it will be the customers that pay.

bleachedsleeton A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

Oh boy, wait until you learn it’s not just Chicago where they deploy this crap [1]

[1] https://www.shotspotter.com/cities/

bleachedsleeton How Does FaceTime Work?

FaceTime is coming to the web

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522889/apple-facetime-an...

bleachedsleeton OnlyFans to block sexually explicit videos starting in October

> The problem isn't that you need an alternative to PayPal, you need an alternative to Visa and MasterCard.

Isn’t that exactly what crypto is?

bleachedsleeton Psst: Fast Spotify client with native GUI, without Electron, built in Rust

Airfoil [1] is worth every penny. The same could be said for pretty much everything Rogue Amoeba makes.

It’s also worth noting that Spotify can act as a remote for its own service across devices. So you can start a song playing on your phone and direct the output over AirPlay and then just interface with that session using the desktop client.

[1] https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/

bleachedsleeton The success of Aubrey de Grey baffles me

“Horse shit piling up in the roads is just our way of life. What would you have us do? Stop riding horses? How would we ever get anywhere? If you’re so smart, let’s have your proposed solutions given our present day limitations. I’m all ears.” ~ Someone a century or two before 1914 probably.

Sarcasm and condescension do nothing to drive the conversation forward and really just mask your own ignorance to solving the problem as well. If a solution already existed to the degree that it was common knowledge in public forums then I guess there wouldn’t be a problem would there?

The fact that massive divisions of companies like Alphabet (Calico) are dedicated to solving these problems seems to indicate that not all of us are deathists satisfied to recuse ourselves to mortality on the basis of some flimsy naturalistic fallacy.

Edit: Typo, changed our to are

bleachedsleeton Amazon Installs Lockers on a Chicago Park’s Sidewalk

Anecdotal, but my building management said they won’t be installing these lockers at any of their new properties due to them being targeted by thieves. They’re apparently fairly easy to pry open for a sufficiently motivated person.

bleachedsleeton 1password is considering a self-hosted option to store vaults

Not the parent poster, but this can be done from inside the app. They hid the link, but the purchase flow is still available from inside 1Password.

bleachedsleeton Sci-Hub Twitter account suspended

r/datahoarder would disagree

bleachedsleeton Bring back menus, QR codes are terrible

Trust me, the wait staff doesn’t appreciate your “ceremony.”

bleachedsleeton Brave Search beta

It does not appear that they are exposing all possible settings configs on mobile as fallback mixing is not shown as an option for me there. This seems like an oversight to me.

bleachedsleeton Brave Search beta

Never heard of this show before, but it got a new subscriber out of me. Thanks for the link to this!

bleachedsleeton Windows 11 screenshots leak, show new Start menu and more

How far back do you want to go? Windows 3.0 file manager is now open source and readily available from Microsoft directly![1] I’ve personally found it a joy to use even on a modern OS like 10.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

bleachedsleeton Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2021)

Location: Denver, CO, US Remote: Preferably, though not required Relocate: No

Technologies: Python, shell scripting across multiple languages and environments, lots of hardware experience in diagnostics and repair, component level repair and modification, learning JS and C++ (currently have basic experience with both); experienced red teaming with applicable real world knowledge of such things like BurpSuite, Metasploit (with some custom shell code), Nessus/Nexpose, etc

I also have a decent amount of experience with UI/UX and have used Figma, Sketch, Framer, and XD extensively for mock-up and prototyping work for both personal and some professional projects.

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MYQLWjm7n5vFstgLg-6oDaJllL7... (PDF)

Email: scratchfive@hey.com

Fast learner, self motivated, love challenging problems that really stretch my knowledge. If I had to point to a weakness it’s that I’m mostly self-taught with very little regard given to industry lingo and acronyms. I can learn, but will need some plain English explanations of what you want to start with. I’m a DIY type with lots of gumption.

Edit: Typo