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chakerb

121 karma · joined July 14, 2018

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chakerb··on Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?
Reverse engineering android apps. I wrote a bit about it in [0]. In the weekend I also started doing another one. It's interesting to see how these apps behave.

[0] https://github.com/benhamad/blog/blob/main/2024-04-12-dramal...

chakerb··on Switzerland's ingenious cooling caves
It worth also looking to Matmata's underground houses. They will definitely be familiar if you watched Star Wars.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/matmata-underground-hous...

chakerb··on Add 10 GbE to your system with an M.2 2280 module
Indeed, a 4K video can hardly saturate 100Mbps link https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/eoa03e/psa_100_mbps_i...
chakerb··on AWS Support able to access any S3 object due to permission change
Cloudstore[1] can do something similar automatically.

[1] https://github.com/infor-cloud/cloud-store

chakerb··on My Bose QC-35 II headphones burst into flames and left me with chemical burns
I see what you did there! Aside, I had QC-35 v1 for more than two years now and I use it daily for work. I only needed to change the cushions once.
chakerb··on Ask HN: Best cars without too much digitalization?
Don't put the idea into their heads!!!

Kidding aside, I think customers can argue that such ads can be distracting to the driver.

chakerb··on Netflix intensifies VPN ban and targets residential IP addresses
To a recent years, lot of films where banned where I live and watching any of them is a felony! So location indeed affect what you're allowed to watch regardless of whether it's under geofencing intellectual property or another thing.

To be clear I wish I lived in a world where I can legally watch everything without a hassle. But there's no such world like that regardless of how much we want to exist. The same way there's no such world where we get paid equally ( doing the same work obviously) because we're living in different locations/countries!

chakerb··on Netflix intensifies VPN ban and targets residential IP addresses
It affects how much salary we get paid, what language we speak, what we eat ...etc. Why is that any different?
chakerb··on Show HN: I made a sandbox game to help with financial planning
That assumption is definitely wrong! Not everyone in HN is making around $200k per year. The average in the US is about $110k. And still not everyone in HN is in the US or being payed US rates.

Of course if you value your time more than what your employer is paying you then you either need to leave your current job or rethink what's the value of your time.

chakerb··on Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
I can relate to each one of those points. It's awful to feel treated unequally even though you're doing the same work. Before this trend of remote work, usually the solution was to just migrate to a developed country.
chakerb··on Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical
I genuinely dont understand the reason behind hijacking right-click (long press on phone). I'm using a slow internet, and I'm used to open multiple tabs so I can only wait for one and then go through all of them. So I'm eager to understand if this is done to stop people from copying from the site or there's another reason behind it.
chakerb··on Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
I went through program like this (french-speaking country). My concern after doing those two years are:

1- You learn a lot of useless subjects!! I'm a software engineer now but I studied organic chemistry for two freaking years!! And I don't plan to use that knowledge (most of which I totally forgot) anywhere in the future. Something that I wouldn't have picked if I was studying CS in the US.

2- You're using the same filter for everyone, and people can have different type of intelligence which can go unnoticed via such program.

3- You don't get to chose the thing you love if you don't rank well! Actually you may end up with something that you hate, because that's what's left! And you only know this after you spent two years of your life!

4- It's mostly about hard work and luck!!

5- You get out with almost only theoretical skills in the first two years. A good thing if you're looking to continue in the research track afterword but a bit of disadvantage (compared to people who used those two years to master the required skill for the job market).

chakerb··on YouTube Shadow Banned Us WTF Happened?
Money? Doesn't hiding videos leads to less views which leads to less revenue for Youtube?
chakerb··on Show HN: I built an internet speed analytics tool
In my case as well this is true. ISPs ( especially when they have monopolies) don't care about this. I live in a town with 8K people and the whole town is sharing an uplink of 300Mbit/s. And we complained a lot but due to how only one single ( governmental) provider have the rights to install cable internet, we're stuck with what we have.
chakerb··on Show HN: I built an internet speed analytics tool
I gets very confused by marketing terms. But doesn't giving you only 1MBit/s during the whole day counts in "up to 100Mbit/s"? I'm trying to understand the legal merits in a case like this.
chakerb··on What You Always Wanted to Know About Datalog (2018) [pdf]
The reminds me of how powerful the expressiveness of Datalog is. You can even syntactically check whether the program can run in p-time or not. Once you introduce negation in the recursion it starts to be a little bit complicated, though.

Also the fact that the language it self is declarative it's inherently more parallelizable than imperative languages.

chakerb··on Finding the 'invisible' millions who are not on maps
> Google and Apple maps do not differentiate between a good road and a bad road - but that's so important

They also don't differentiate some closed borders! I had an idea in mind to travel across the Arab Maghreb[0] (well excluding Libya for obvious reasons) after the COVID-19 situation start to get better. However, Google Maps said that I can drive car between Algeria and Morocco, which isn't the case[1]. I chose to reroute it to pass through Mauritania instead, however it suggested a non paved road (according to the satellite images) and it seems from my research that the area that Google maps suggested in Algeria is closed for foreigners.

EDIT: OSM seems to suggest to go through Mali instead which indeed a better choice ( well road-wise, giving that I want to go through Mauritania).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Maghreb_Union

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algeria%E2%80%93Morocco_relati...

chakerb··on Automatically download symbols and sources in GDB
The Nix ecosystem have dwarffs[0]. If you generate debug symbols during the build ( not enabled by default ) and save it to the "nix cache", you can use dwarffs to download it.

[0] https://github.com/edolstra/dwarffs/blob/master/README.md

chakerb··on AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review: Why Is This Amazon's Best Selling CPU?
I can confirm this. I'm running a 3700x with the stock cooler and It's idling at 50-60 degree at 3.6 Ghz. If I enable Game boost mode in the motherboard (it basically push the frequency to 4.2 and turn up all fans) it increase the performance of the CPU in cinebench from 4662 to 5087 points. That's said, the CPU reaches a whopping 100 degree!!! Probably need to get better cooler before enabling that again.
chakerb··on Don't set the language of your website based on user location
Yes, please. I don't mind even if you set it it by location, but at least provide me a way to change it manually. I live in a north African country, but I get the currency set to south Africa (looking at you origin) without the ability to override!
chakerb··on Tech workers consider escaping Silicon Valley’s sky-high rents
The fact that people were forced to stay at home may influence their view. If people willingly choose to try working from home, I would guess that the result would be much different. Not only that but the fact the you are stuck at home all day long would make you eventually leaning towards getting out.
chakerb··on Ask HN: How do you work with slow/metered connection?
Yeah, this is quite interesting indeed. However, currently I require a powerful machine in my day to day work. I considered renting a Hetzner machine as they are reasonably priced specs compared to AWS.
chakerb··on Arab states are embracing solar power
0.021 usd per kwh. Farmer are sparsely located, so linking them to the main grid is costly as they need to pay for it by themselves.
chakerb··on Arab states are embracing solar power
They're not a good investment due to high cost of the panels compared to the price of electricity. Which to be fair is heavily subsided be the state. I'm looking forward to install ones myself, but I'm in the 90th percentile of people in my country that can afford to write big check upfront for power for home usage. Again most of the usage now is limited to agriculture since it makes sense there financially.

By large I mean around 2m² each. Not sure the best size to capture the most out of the sun. But we're at the edge of the Sahara desert, so the climate is a little bit helping there.

chakerb··on Arab states are embracing solar power
Well, we have only one company installing solar panels in a ~25 km radius. And they're installing around 3 installation per month, each have 8 large panels.I don't have the exact number of how many watt they generate. But they are capable of powering pumps that pulls 12 liters per second.
chakerb··on Arab states are embracing solar power
A lot of solar panels were insalled where I live compared to none five years ago. However their only use case here is to pump water out of the ground. The prices of the panel don't make them good investment for home usage. And even the government don't provide enough incentives to invest in them.
chakerb··on Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)
> There used to be a video game that taught how to use VI. Is it still around?

You're probably referring to https://vim-adventures.com/.

chakerb··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2020)
According to the Oxford dictionary, "hire" is "the act of paying to use something for a short time". How an unpaid position fits into this definition?
chakerb··on My NixOS Desktop Flow
Simply to compare the author list to mine and check for compatibility issue if needed. Ryzen 3000 series CPUs are known to have issues with systemd while booting ( which affect nixos https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/64443). And the fact that it works for the author helps me deciding that 3700x suits my needs and budget without worrying that i will need to use old versions of NixOS. Also the suggestions that you gave are valid, but that doesn't mean I will go with them because as you said I'm doing my own research. For example I will stick with the stock cooler because it got good reviews and my budget won't allow another cooler for now.
chakerb··on My NixOS Desktop Flow
Can you share the list of hardware you choose to build your tower?
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