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daviduon No to Chrome

You know this is a very superficial understanding of what has happened right? And it doesn't capture how the design of the algorithms are actually shaping peoples views? The idea that it just gives you what you want is just not an accurate understanding of what is happening.

I suggest you read the work being published by Stanford U and Renee DiResta -- https://twitter.com/noUpside

daviduon Open-Source Home Automation

same

daviduon Save .org

This is essentially a hijacking of the DNS as far as I’m concerned. The sale of .org is heinous; And I’m an unabashed capitalist.

There is absolutely nothing defensible about this move that I can see.

Is there any argument that this is beneficial to anyone except Ethos and Internet Society? Is it even clear they have the right to sell it?

Has every person at ISOC submitted conflict statements? Are they willing to commit to never benefit financially from Ethos controlled entities for 10+ years?

daviduon How VCs Make Money

Most funds these days, at large firms, are fully deployed within three years. So a ten year fund still has 7 years left on the clock, and then there are ways to extend the clock beyond that.

The huge winners take even longer to reach a liquidity point, and this class of investors are very patient.

daviduon A Calculator for the Billionaires – Elizabeth Warren

Here's a scenario of punishing the American dream:

Imagine you're a startup founder who has a high-flying startup. You own 20%. It just got valued at $800,000,000. Now you're worth $160,000,000 ON PAPER. That's awesome. But it's not the same is being rich.

Imagine your salary is $150,000. With the Warren plan you now owe $2,200,000 PER YEAR in taxes from cash you don't actually have. So you now what, sell your company? Try to secondary? Congrats you just got taxed real money on fantasy paper gains that you never realized.

daviduon Re-Licensing Sentry

Correct. And the reality is, this is a reaction to a hypothetical threat (though certainly an obnoxious threat) -- name one company Amazon launching a hosted version of their open source code has killed?

I believe the current number is ZERO.

daviduon DNS Wars

"The DNS was co-opted in this effort and OpenDNS tried to achieve this with a recursive resolver that performed NXDOMAIN redirection into a search engine, in a reprise of Sitefinder. For a short period, OpenDNS also redirected the domain name www.google.com to a different search engine."

Well this is false, and misleading. The connection to Sidefinder is a red herring -- sitefinder was applied Internet-wide, OpenDNS was a choice. Saying OpenDNS redirected www.google.com isn't accurate either. There was a URL that was redirected for a portion of users for a very short period of time because Google installed a hijacked version of the Google toolbar, and once we did this, they reverted their erroneous behavior and we reverted ours and we wrote about it extensively (https://umbrella.cisco.com/blog/2007/05/22/google-turns-the-...).

Geoff knows better, but is being lazy or sloppy while trying to provide a historical record. A shame, because it's a worthwhile topic to go over.

The real conclusion he fails to make is that between Android, Chrome, and Google Search, there is a total monopoly on navigation for the vast majority of the Internet. That's distressing, and until there is a major platform shift, it's hard to see that changing.

daviduon Remove default "terraform" partner_id

Isn't this what Partner ID is designed for?

"Injects" is a strong word.

Maybe "Hashicorp provides an Azure Partner ID in Terraform deployments for deployment stats, and some users may not want that" would be a better title.

daviduon Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

But finally there are viable, open, replacements that are emerging: https://www.2dimensions.com/explore/popular/trending/all

which uses Flare: https://www.2dimensions.com/about-flare

(and is using an Open Source runtime that runs natively)

daviduon Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

I've been running one in AWS on a micro instance and I don't like running it. I'd have paid for this had I seen it when I was doing this.

daviduon Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

This is a great passive income type of business.

Here's a nearly identical version that a number of folks use: https://hostifi.net/

daviduon Day Trading for a Living?

I don't doubt the headline, but "We observe all individuals who began to day trade between 2013 and 2015 in the Brazilian equity futures market" seems like a weird way to come to that conclusion.

daviduon Lorem Picsum, death by a million pixel-gigabits

More interestingly, the github repo is just a wonderful example of a fully built application using modern techniques in a microservices architecture: https://github.com/DMarby/picsum-photos

It's so hard to always find how all the pieces fit together and this repo has it all. Really impressive.

daviduon Who Owns Huawei?

Regardless of the legal ownership structure (I believe the SSRN perspective), it is effectively "state directed when needed." That's not a xenophobic perspective, that's a reality of being a company in China and it'd be hard for someone to push back on that based on the last 20 years of game film for Internet related businesses in China.

daviduon Webvan

There are no bad ideas, just early ones.

(I believe this was first said by my partner Marc)

daviduon Tinder Bypasses Google Play, Joining Revolt Against App Store Fee

You have no evidence of that (and I totally disagree) and you just continued to drag her into this years later.

Just because someone has found employment is not much of a signal of how they are doing.

I think you should edit your post and at least remove her name so it’s not indexed. It’s not nice. I would flag it for the mods but don’t see a way to do that.

daviduon Boeing 737 Max Grounding Could Stretch into 2020

My comments back in January (before the 2nd crash): https://twitter.com/davidu/status/1085881783319699458

""" Semi-related, they also found the 737MAX cockpit voice recorder from the downed Lion Air plane. My guess is that this will turn into an indictment of the new anti-stall software. You couldn’t pay me any amount of money to board a 737MAX-8 until that system is improved. """

daviduon Google clears up AMP’s confusing URLs by hiding google.com

"The answer to the AMP URL problem are "signed exchanges", which allow a publisher's domain to be displayed in the browser address bar, even though the content is loaded from Google's cache when a user clicks on an AMP link in Google Search results."

Someone smart thought this was a good idea.

"This allows you to use first-party cookies and storage to customize content and simplify analytics integration. Your page appears under your URL instead of the google.com/amp URL."

Creating opacity in security and misdirection in trust is unwise for users. Making the address bar lie is dangerous.

I just don't get how the smart people at Google allow this to happen. The developers of Chrome and AMP can try to rationalize bad behavior but I'm surprised how all their coworkers let it stand. There was once a Google that would have been displeased with this kind of action.

daviduon Show HN: Milkshake – Make Websites from a Phone

Another approach to this (doing quite well): https://onuniverse.com/

daviduon Los Angeles – scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control

Just s/Los Angeles/San Francisco/g and it's the same story.

daviduon Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

I believe all of these justices care a lot more about their legacy of justice and the sanctity of the court than anything else.

daviduon Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

My understanding is that when compared to alternative, qualified, right-leaning candidates, he was the most moderate. This is just based on people I know who have worked with him and tried cases in front of him.

daviduon Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

That certainly could be true. I like to believe supreme court justices remember that with that role comes with the truest ability to be impartial and unbeholden.

daviduon Supreme Court rules antitrust lawsuit against Apple can proceed

Prior to the confirmation insanity, Kavanaugh was viewed as one of the best supreme court justice nominations for all sides. All the confirmation hearings did was potentially radicalize him to the right. One of the best things about being a supreme court judge is that he no longer has to care about being reappointed or elected. He's not doing damage control, he's just being a supreme court judge.

daviduon Setting Up an Ad-Blocking VPN with WireGuard and Pihole

This isn't really true. The wholesale networks are operating at speeds that make this kind of sniffing impractical. I'm not saying they don't ever siphon traffic for LEO or other reasons, but not for privacy-violating/ad-targeting reasons. DO probably is running 40gbps alone with each transit provider, plus sending traffic over peering circuits, so it's just way less practical.

So what you are suggesting isn't actually true, and it's hardly hypothetically even possible.

daviduon Gall's Law

Related: Second System Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

As an aside, I'd love the Twitter engineering teams that fixed the fail whale to one day write about this as it related to fixing Twitter's stability and performance. It seems they simultaneously made major platform shifts and managed to fix things. Maybe it was done in small pieces, piece by piece and perhaps a SOA/Microservices architecture may have enabled that to feel like a rewrite without being one all at once. I'd love to hear the story. My understanding is that in addition to platform shifts, the actual engineering teams cycled out almost completely at least once, too. Really hard changes to manage through.

daviduon Sears has another chance to avoid closing down

This feature still shows up almost constantly for me... there are a few flavors (some of which appear contemporaneously on a single product page for me) including "after looking at this item people purchased..." and "similar items to this item..." and "people who bought this also bought..."

daviduon What Happens When a Founder Is Fully Vested?

This is a good post and it was pretty comprehensive. Worth noting however, that there are many more hairy solutions Fred didn't raise.

For instance, some founders will negotiate a grant upon IPO or upon sale of a company beyond $x dollars as a way to try and align interests with investors. The problem with those is that it can cause unnatural behavior (eg, Snapchat IPO'd too soon, I'd argue, because Evan's investors gave him a grant that vested upon a qualified IPO exceeding a certain price. Or the tax issues late-breaking grants can create upon a trigger.)

daviduon Encrypted SNI Comes to Firefox Nightly

DNS does not need to be plaintext and DoH is not the only alternative. It's the alternative that the advertising engines and CDNs prefer because it extends control. The privacy of DNS argument is a major red herring.

DNSCrypt (or DNS over TLS or DTLS) is a wonderful alternative that works in-band and works with DNSSEC.

People are also ignoring the consequences of the switch from UDP to TCP.

daviduon Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

A founder of Mimosa (CTO Jaime) is a friend of mine. I'll try to direct him to this thread.