Hacker News Reader

claudiuson Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

ublock Origin blocks third-party content, including silly fonts hosted by Google, just fine for me.

claudiuson Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

How many of those £50Bn need to go to the NHS to treat illnesses caused by drivers?

claudiuson Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

Then as you say don’t simply ban "private property occupying public space" but require some degree of efficiency when doing so – people can occupy public space, but like with all resources, they must be considerate and efficient when doing so and not let it go to waste.

A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger at all times for vehicles and pedestrians. Trivial to fulfil for considerate means of transportation and quite impossible if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you.

claudiuson Loopwheels: A vibration-reducing wheel with integral suspension

Residential streets are mostly limited to 30 km/h here and even the largest inner-city streets have a limit of 50 km/h which is rarely reached due to traffic jams, traffic lights etc.

claudiuson Loopwheels: A vibration-reducing wheel with integral suspension

How much does it increase friction and would this be feasible on other vehicles as well? Once electric cars are eventually here, their wheels will be the primary noise emitters.

claudiuson Welcome to Armageddon: On MUDs (2017)

Shameless plug: nightfall.org is up and running fairly stable (again) and has a quite nice web client at https://nightfall.org/webclient.htm

claudiuson Show HN: git-bug – Distributed bug tracker embedded in git

A similar but much more minimal tool in shell: https://claudius-hubig.eu/note.sh

It uses a dedicated "bugs" branch checked out to a .bugs directory in the current working directory. To use, copy it to a git repository which has a master branch and a remote for this master branch an run it.

Very bare-bones, but so far sufficient and without external dependencies (but probably lots of security problems…).

claudiuson Lenovo Launches Ultra-Thin ThinkPad P1: X1 Carbon Meets Workstation

To add to that, on Xfce at least it’s not enough to adapt the graphical mouse settings but one also needs to manually set (e.g.) /sys/bus/serio/devices/serio1/serio2/sensitivity to a larger value (I use 220) for a suitably fast mouse.

claudiuson IMF staff made misjudgments in Greece, became cheerleaders for the euro (2016)

With wisdoms such as:

> There were two decent solutions that would have ended this crisis within a year or two. One would have been that Greece default on its debts, paying back for example 30% of outstanding loans. Another would have been for Greece to leave the Euro Zone and go back to using the drachma (their currency before the Euro), and pay its creditors in the new currency. This new drachma would quickly fall in value as the Greek central bank would print more drachmas, making it easier to repay the devalued drachma loans.

How would defaulting on debts have solved any problems? Still nobody would have bought new Greek debt and since Greece was running at a deficit before it still would have run at a deficit, just without any additional funds. They still would have had to get their administration in order to actually collect taxes etc.

The second proposition is even more ridiculous, nobody would have bought the new debt, the Drachma would have been entirely worthless and any sort of import (of, e.g., medicine) would have been impossible.

Edit to add: And what happened of course proves that these two "alternatives" would have been ridiculous. Greece could easily have (on its own) decided to default or switch to a new currency. No outside power could force them to stay in the euro or pay their incurred debts. Yet somehow they decided against these measures and instead took the horrible low-interest loans offered to them.

claudiuson Firefox’s Trusted Recursive Resolver DNS feature is dangerous

Great, all your data is stored for 24 hours and then collected in "anonymised" form for further processing and "internal research"! Also no mention of penalties, either for Cloudflare as a company or the responsible employees (starting with the CEO) in case of a violation. And no notice period of any time should Cloudflare decide to change those terms and have thousands of browsers still pointed at its resolvers.

Why would this make Cloudflare appear remotely trustworthy?

claudiuson Firefox’s Trusted Recursive Resolver DNS feature is dangerous

and the internet becomes sufficiently centralised that you only access a few IP addresses behind which most services are hosted. In other words, we can either

a) trust our ISP with DNS queries and IP addresses which fairly uniquely identify services or

b) trust Cloudflare with DNS queries and our ISP with IP addresses which fairly uniquely identify services or

c) move everything "behind Cloudflare" and solely trust Cloudflare

Given that I can cancel my ISP’s contract, I can hold them accountable if they spew my data into the internet and I have no idea who Cloudflare is or what their aims are, I’d much prefer a) over c). b) is just worse than a) or c).

claudiuson The death of a TLD

Well now I’m really happy that some library doesn’t know how to remove the sub-addresses on my custom e-mail setup :-)

claudiuson Pop_OS 18.04: the state of the art in GNU/Linux on desktop

Focus follows mouse breaks if you need to move the mouse away from the window over other windows to the top bar.

Focus follows mouse is an extremely useful feature which allows you to move focus without changing the relative arrangement of windows to each other (whereas Alt+Tab or relatives would bring the selected window to the front).

Additionally, a top-level menu bar is always there and requires a horizontal layout (I think?). In a window, each application can decide to hide the menu bar at will with only a vertical panel being visible at all time in all apps.

claudiuson The EU's biggest fines on tech companies

> There aren't really robust ways to stop US firms selling to the EU over the internet especially for services, which are excluded from tariffs via GATT.

It’s rather easy to seize transfers made to foreign companies in violation of a local law. So while that foreign company then wouldn’t have to have a presence in the EU, it also couldn’t receive payments from EU companies or customers.

Much the same way the US will complain if you transfer funds out of the US to terrorists or drug lords or whoever is politically unfavourable today.

claudiuson EU fines Asus, Denon-Marantz, Philips and Pioneer $130M for online price fixing

So far and iff Greece does pay back the remaining debt. It’s not entirely uncommon for a lender to make some money from interest before the other party defaults and the lender loses its investment. Could you explain why this is controversial? Should Germany have donated funds to make up for the mismanagement of the Greek government?

claudiuson European Commission fines Google €4.34B in Android antitrust case

> Is the EU going to fine ARM next for having a monopoly on mobile CPUs?

Having a monopoly or being in a dominant position is not the problem. If ARM starts a pizza business and requires everyone who wants to buy mobile CPUs to also order pizzas exclusively from them, then this would be an equally-fineable abuse of a dominant market position and the EU would almost certainly step in.

As it stands, ARM doesn’t force others to buy pizzas exclusively from ARM PIZZA PLACE and hence doesn’t abuse its dominant market position in one market (mobile CPUs) to support its position in another market (pizzas).

Google, on the other hand, uses its dominant position in the "licensable mobile operating systems" market to support its position in the "internet search" and "browsers" market together with anticompetitive behaviour forcing its licensees to exclusively use the Google-approved version of Android.

claudiuson EU parliament calls for Privacy Shield to be pulled until US complies

But leaving the EU will solve none of Italy's problems. Immigration pressure will continue (without any Frontex help) and likely rise with actually closed borders in the north, funding for poorer regions via EU programmes be removed, working labour markets in the north will be closed off to Italian immigrants, tourism will suffer etc etc.

At least the UK could argue that it may get better trade deals, but what's in it for Italy?

claudiuson California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

Alternatively, don’t force the company to accept/deny specific forms of communication; simply make it clear that any communication is sufficient to cancel a contract.

There’s no point for a company to build a convoluted website if any customer knows they can send an email to info@example.com or a direct message or a text "I cancel my contract with you, my account number is 1234." and the only claim the company could make to counter that is that it didn’t receive the e-mail/message. Not that it’s internal processes didn’t allow for the message to be received, but that its infrastructure never actually received it (in which case the user would have received an email bounce message). To be nice, request the company to acknowledge receipt of the notification and, if not received, repeat on multiple channels (including certified snail mail).

Oh, and make it illegal to hide surprising bits in terms and conditions due to the information asymmetry typically accompanying those :)

claudiuson Will the European Union ruin the internet?

> #1 Mandatory filtering of uploaded user content. This is to prevent possible copyright infringement. There are two things that will happen: the large companies will generate upload filter mechanism that won’t work perfectly so they will deny many uploads. Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies

I find this actually quite good. Companies accepting "user uploaded content" are mostly entirely pointless, cost a lot of bandwidth and unnecessarily centralise yet another part of our lives. Anything which harms them will effectively be a net positive.

> #2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw.

Note that it’s not a link tax but a tax to use snippets of the article. You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok. Right now this is already a somewhat grey area and, again, it won’t exactly hurt anyone but the right people.

So, sure, this is some extra burden yadda yadda, but mostly it will just limit pointless business activities sucking up bandwidth.

claudiuson Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?

    $ apropos space
    CORE (3perl)         - Namespace for Perl's core routines
    arpd (8)             - userspace arp daemon.
    CMSG_SPACE (3)       - access ancillary data
    CUDA_ERROR_INVALID_ADDRESS_SPACE (3) - (unknown subject)
    cudaErrorInvalidAddressSpace (3) - (unknown subject)
    df (1)               - report file system disk space usage

claudiuson Improving DNS Privacy in Firefox

Trying to access any IP directly also typically works, e.g. 8.8.8.8. The redirect to that IP following the login is then of course broken/timing out, but that’s not really a problem.

claudiuson Why Is Location Data No Longer Private?

> Another atrocity is an alert with a “don’t ask again” check box, especially in something that is unnecessarily-modal (read: developer was lazy). Pro tip: if you think the user won’t want to see your message ever again then you need to redesign your system to keep the message from appearing even the first time.

That one I think is rather sensible for permission requests from apps. "Do you want to share your location with this app? - Yes/No; [] don't ask again", where the tickbox serves to store the preference forever. An alternative would be "Yes, always"/"Only now"/"Not now but ask again later"/"Never". Not sure which one I’d prefer.

claudiuson Boeing's folding wingtips get the FAA green light

But the problem with that is not so much that it creates a market for old airplanes but rather that airplane certifications don’t expire – if the 50’s planes you allude to had to obey the same standards as new planes (after some grace interval of e.g. 10 years), the problem could be solved?

claudiuson Jolla is the last company with an 'alternative' mobile operating system

I got a LineageOS/OnePlus 3T a couple months while having a Jolla before and I still miss the possibility to go from a full-screen app to a closed app. It appears the only option is to go the the drawer/recent app things and then swipe right there whereas before I could simply swipe from the top and immediately close it.

claudiuson Sydney’s plan to split into three cities in as little as 20 years

Berlin also has the advantage of only becoming a large single city in the 1920s. Beforehand, there was "Berlin proper" and a number of cities nearby nearly equally large and locally equally relevant (e.g. Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf and Spandau in the west, Köpenick in the southeast and Lichtenberg in the east). Due to there being no cars, travel between those cities was impractical on a daily basis up until the rise of mass transport. This lead to these cities setting up their own city centres with residential areas formed around those city centres.

After extension of the city of Berlin in 1921, this lead to it having many "city centres" around which life was formed in a similar way Sydney attempts to achieve now by this artificial after-the-fact split. I’m doubtful it’ll be successful.

claudiuson Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

> If there is evidence for it, this isn't it. Tesla cars having higher claim frequencies compared to say the puny Fiat 500 Electric (noted in the article) could just as well be explained by people driving it dangerously because it has "Ludicrous Mode".

This is not the claim in the linked article. The linked article claims that Tesla cars have a higher claim frequency than comparable gasoline-powered cars (i.e. large luxury cars such as a Porsche), whereas for example the Nissan Leaf has a lower claim frequency than comparable gasoline-powered cars (namely the Nissan Versa).

Put another way, if your choice is between a Tesla and a gasoline-powered large luxury car, the Tesla is more dangerous. If your choice is between the Nissan Leaf and the Nissan Versa, the Leaf is less dangerous. There was no comparison between the relative danger from a Tesla and a Leaf.

claudiuson Qusim.py – A toy multi-qubit quantum computer simulator written in Python

Just as a data point: Current state-of-the-art methods for Lanczos-type methods on state vectors are around 40 spins/qubits incorporating many symmetries and additional shortcuts one does not have in a generic "quantum computer simulator". Without those symmetries/shortcuts, the limit is likely closer to 30 qubits (i.e. approx. 16-64 GB per state vector), as it’s not only necessary to store these beasts but also do operations on them.

If you don’t insist on a single dense state vector but a sparser tensor network-based formulation, you can go to much larger systems (hundreds or thousands of spins) but will be limited by the amount of entanglement you can represent in your system.

claudiuson The Subway Is So Late, It’s Making New Yorkers Early

Wouldn’t it be possible to have nightline buses operating the same routes as the subway during that window? It works well e.g. in Berlin and Munich and only takes minimally longer than the train (since the roads are not congested at night and the bus can hence go much faster).

At least it should be possible for a temporary maintenance window?

claudiuson C++17 Compiler Bug Hunt

    auto i = {5};

is a std::initializer_list<int>, whereas

    auto i{5};

is an int (as of C++17): https://godbolt.org/g/eXXN3o

claudiuson Tell HN: 17 years on the same game

I’m now hosting one of the older ldmud-style MUDs (Nightfall) and the additional load and memory consumption on my server is absolutely negligible. There’s some continuous CPU usage now, but in the low % (on an ancient AMD Opteron). Unfortunately we do have only a few players nowadays, though.