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cipherzero

172 karma · joined January 28, 2011

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cipherzero··on Show HN: qrframe – generate beautiful qr codes with javascript code
This is awesome. Does anyone know if there is a library for the amazing optical codes that apple uses in its device transfer? I know they have a custom patent for it so I don't know if its something anyone has tried to recreated...
cipherzero··on Untrusted – a meta-JavaScript adventure game
i beat it by having the phone control the direction the robot would move, like an RC controller :)
cipherzero··on XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."
Sorry, I'm unfamiliar with PLT what does stand for?
cipherzero··on DuckDB in Action
Agree, in fact this wonderful book calls this out, stating:

  As DuckDB is an analytics database, it has only minimal support for transactions and parallel write access. You therefore couldn’t use it in applications and APIs that process and store input data arriving arbitrarily. Similarly when multiple concurrent processes read from a writeable database.
cipherzero··on On the proliferation of try, and soon, await (2020)
You’re maybe right, but does that mean the language should be hostile to those that don’t write well designed code?
cipherzero··on Caffeine and theanine exert opposite effects on attention (2017)
What was the article from yesterday? I feel like I missed something helpful.
cipherzero··on College students are learning hard lessons about anti-cheating software
Not saying you’re wrong, but what are you proposing as an alternative? How should comprehensive knowledge be tested? Weekly homework/projects?

P.s. love the user name.

cipherzero··on Test for Divisibility by 13
Just going off the trick above would t it just be: 23 x 10 - 23 = 230 - 23 = 207...

I guess I’m confused what point you’re making?

cipherzero··on YouTube-dl's repository has been restored
This really is great to see, but it’s clear from their careful wording that the google takedown of the recent widevine l3 repository won’t be reversed:

> And our reinstatement, based on new information that showed the project was not circumventing a technical protection measure (TPM)

Since it is clearly circumventing a “TPM.”

cipherzero··on Notion.clone: open-source notes editor like in Notion
Notion tables are WAY more powerful than markdown tables...

You can configure views, filtering, sorting, summary’s, and foreign keys with roll ups....

That’s not something trivial to build, however I’d be pleasantly surprised if obsidian eventually got there.

cipherzero··on British Airways fined £20m over data breach
Slightly off topic, are fines even the right approach to get better behavior? What incentive structure does they encourage?

I fear it encourages you to hide or down play an incident, if possible, when issues do happen. Instead you’d rather want to encourage transparency and some way to prove you’re following good practices and have a good track record. Maybe some incentives like car insurance companies claim to follow: better driving record, reduced insurance costs. (Not that I think car insurance is a successful/good example.)

Failure cases (like data breaches and ransomware attacks) are certainly easier to measure though, so maybe this is the best we can hope for...

cipherzero··on Show HN: Blades – fast static site generator written in Rust
This is neat! Good work. Was any of this inspired by Zola? https://www.getzola.org/documentation/getting-started/overvi...

I’ve used Zola and love the build speed and power that it has. My only real complaint is common mark as the markdown engine. I prefer the tera/jinja2-esque template syntax over ramhorn/mustache-esque that’s used here.

I’ll have to try and port a theme to blades to give it a fair assessment.

cipherzero··on The IRS Is Outgunned
I’d be much more receptive to the IRS getting more resources if we also address the insane complexity that is our tax code.

Given how many weird loopholes it contains it’s no wonder that they don’t have enough horsepower to compete with the lawyers of the ultra rich...

cipherzero··on Ask HN: Why Facebook requires login to view public pages?
Any chance this change was related to the recent scraping decision from the Supreme Court (I think) against linked in? Maybe this is to prevent people scraping content front public pages.

That and as others have mentioned I’m sure they’d love everyone to always be logged in for ad tracking purposes...

cipherzero··on GoDaddy and Felons.io – The life of an unregistered domain
GoDaddy’s response to the earlier accusations from the throwaway account here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303
cipherzero··on Alacritty – Fastest OS X Terminal Emulator – Terminal like tmux/alacritty config
I switched to Alacritty+tmux on macOS about 2 months back. The only complaint I have is a tmux one (nested tmux sessions suck.)

Curious, what are the limits you see with having to use tmux?

cipherzero··on Giant Pacific Octopus
Thanks! That does make sense, and it’s entirely fascinating to think about!

Does anyone know what this area of study is called?

cipherzero··on Giant Pacific Octopus
Does their brain consciously drive the control of their cell pigment/color ability, or is it something more subconscious/reactive/instinctive? Seems like the brain has to be involved to coordinate...

I wonder what the closest thing like that would be for humans? Would it be akin to me thinking “i want to be more tan” and somehow my cells get the signal to be more tan?

Obviously we will likely never know, but there is some leap here I wish we understood better. (Or do we and I’m just unaware?)

Edit: thinking about it more... i don’t know what happens when i think to “make a fist” and yet it happens, so maybe it is something more at that level...

cipherzero··on How big is a neutron star?
My understanding is that we're not totally certain if all black holes form from stellar mass black holes.

There is a theory that black holes can form from direct collapse. In this case, as I understand it, it can skip the star phase and just collapse straight into a black hole.... but I really am not an expert.

You can find more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_collapse_black_hole

And I HIGHLY recommend the PBS NOVA episode "Black Hole Apocalypse" (Jan 10, 2018, Season 45 Episode 1). It was on Netflix for a while (and may still be.)

Edit: here is the full episode on PBS (thank you NOVA!!!) https://www.pbs.org/video/black-hole-apocalypse-yj34qi/

cipherzero··on Colon and rectal cancer cases are going up among people younger than age 50
Absolutely painless. The “worst” part is having to drink enough water (with laxative and electrolytes) to clean your system for a clear view. I just had mine done and I was way more more anxious then I needed to be. Now I feel silly for being so worried about it.
cipherzero··on Show HN: My daughter and I made a site to explore the photos from the ISS
Yes here is the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Head,_Hawaii
cipherzero··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Dude good for you! I’m jealous, it sounds like you’re using this time very productively and have learned a lot from it!
cipherzero··on Show HN: Write a private diary using good old email
How about just open source and allow self hosting...
cipherzero··on Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016)
Yes. Thank you! From my experience multi-repo doesn’t make problems go away, it just defers them and introduces others. I’m not against multi-repo or a strong proponent of monorepos... each have their strengths and drawbacks and there is a time and place for either. I struggle to deal with folks who firmly lie in one camp or the other.
cipherzero··on Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016)
I’m not sure I understand what branching monotonically means, could you explain that? I’m not disagreeing with you - but is this something that can be done with googles monorepo? And when would I want to do so?
cipherzero··on A Twitter app bug was used to match 17M phone numbers to user accounts
I agree. I read that he harvested 17M numbers for 2 months and have a hard time believing he’s a security researcher...
cipherzero··on Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
I agree. I will say the price was at a point that I didn’t even have to think about it at 1$/month. I looked at the features, signed up promptly, and wired up a custom domain. The only thing I’m not excited about is rotating all my emails...

Thank you for putting this together. I love that you even have 2fa support.

cipherzero··on GoDaddy injecting JavaScript into websites and how to stop it
He did a Reddit AMA after starting: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/23v7f3/hi_im_blake_ir...

I remember it being surprisingly good!

cipherzero··on Show HN: Avenv – A more isolated virtualenv
Is this a serious project?

> Linux only support

>

> Tell your employer to stop using Macintosh

... because that doesn’t seem like a sign of a serious project to me...

cipherzero··on Mozilla hit with takedown request for anti-paywall addons
Would you be making the same argument if we were talking about your bank's website?

IMO Effective access control works both ways. you can't send the ALL of the content back and then have the access control work on the client machine. What if i just used curl and viewed the HTML raw to read the article?

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