Hacker News Reader

frickinLaserson EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

Here we go, two days ago:

https://kfor.com/news/local/wife-accomplice-screenshot-857-c...

frickinLaserson Ask HN: What's up with these Bing/ddg results? (NSFW)

I thought it was a pop culture reference I wasn't familiar with.

I think the more interesting question, though, is why it bypassed the moderate safe search setting.

frickinLaserson Apple is discontinuing the iPod

Yeah, I still run with a 20-ish year old Shuffle, waiting for the day it falls apart.

frickinLaserson Primer: Statistical Armour

nitpick--The AT4 is a recoil-less round with the propelling charge in the launch tube--not a Rocket-Propelled Grenade. I imaging firing one from inside a building would be a regrettable decision.

frickinLaserson TSA confirms controversial Amtrak passenger screening program underway

Interesting timing...

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/multiple-people-shot-i...

frickinLaserson Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

What about Helm?

https://thehelm.com/

frickinLaserson Multiple Vulnerabilities in PfSense

There's also that time they slipped telemetry reporting into their software and hoped no one would notice.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/07/ubiquiti_networks_pho...

frickinLaserson Worldle

For those who don't read in symbols, there are instructions if you click the "?" at the upper left.

frickinLaserson Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

My bi-weekly comment has not improved the situation.

frickinLaserson Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and Health Effects (2019)

Man, I wish I could downvote these threads. This low-effort karma farming garbage belongs on reddit, not here.

frickinLaserson /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

People who work bullshit jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) are already unintentional leeches. UBI would disincentivize that inefficiency. Then those who want to sit on their asses with their $1200 could do so guilt-free, and, in my rosy vision for the world, the fraction who want to do something more fulfilling than making money for "the host" (e.g., FAMAG, Wall Street, I dunno) would be empowered to focus on things that are important to them, and probably to humanity as well.

frickinLaserson Settings are not a design failure

Ugh. As a not-really-power user I can't stand Gnome 3, not least because I have to Google how to and then install a tool just to make useful settings accessible. Everything in Tweaks should be in the default settings panel.

frickinLaserson Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

Given the amount of time between when you posted and when I replied, it's safe to say I hadn't listened to the three-hour conversation between two physicians and a professor. Initially I scrolled down, was put off by the stack of text and images/embeds with no clear organization, skimmed the Cliff's notes, and failed to understand how it correlated with "we didn't impose mandates or restrictions on the rest of society."

They make several good points about policy moving forward and vaccinating children, but they were disregarding Omicron before we even knew much about it. Their general position aged like milk, now that there are more people in the hospital with Covid than at any point in the pandemic. They complain about Fauci holding rigid positions, while my science-illiterate family complain that the rules keep changing/are confusing. None of this addresses the fact that masks and vaccines are consistent with past policy in America and have been more effective than nothing, at least as far as people complied, or that comparisons to the flu are a bit of a stretch.

frickinLaserson Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

Covid has been something like ten times as deadly as the flu. I imagine those hospital beds put way more strain on the system as a whole than a bad flu season (see: ventilator sharing). I think any human with a shred of empathy for their tribe would agree, that this level of misery warranted collective action on the level of our response to measles, mumps, rubella, tuberculosis, diphtheria, pertussis...

And though I really hope it's the case, I've heard no news yet that Omicron will be the last significant variant.

frickinLaserson Ask HN: Where are you going to find long-form content online these days?

I wish his latest post wasn't from last April.

frickinLaserson UK government plans publicity blitz against encrypted communications

Fair enough. I didn't find a ready source on average camera densities by country, but comparing cities at the link below can give a sense of the difference. London has 399 cameras per square kilometer. Beijing has 278. NYC has 26, so not quite as Orwellian, in terms of cameras at least.

Approximate Populations, per wikipedia, for reference:

  London:   9 million  
  Beijing: 21 million  
  NYC:      9 million

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-top-surveillance...

frickinLaserson UK government plans publicity blitz against encrypted communications

https://www.precisesecurity.com/articles/top-10-countries-by...

Holy crap, the US has more cameras per capita than China, according to this. The UK is a somewhat distant third.

Though I think a distinction should be drawn between government-operated and commercial surveillance.

frickinLaserson Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?

You're on a site full of motivated self-learners who would hopefully use that free time to improve their selves and contribute to far more interesting, useful, and fulfilling things than making the widgets the machine can make.

Most of us also probably live in countries where a significant fraction of the population would choose Playstation/Netflix/heroin instead. That's their choice, but you're probably right that much of it is learned behavior. Perhaps some significant resources (government funded or volunteered) should be applied toward teaching people how to make better use of their free time, if that's what they want.

It's certainly a better vision than making widgets 40 hours a week for a company with dubious social impact.

frickinLaserson How death rates from Covid-19 differ between vaccinated and unvaccinated

It seems like it could be a debate worth having. I'd love to see a similar breakdown of vaccine deaths by age (though I don't think there's an official count of confirmed vaccine deaths yet).

If a healthy under-40 individual had the same or slightly higher risk of dying from the vaccine as from covid, but a lower risk of passing it to their parents and any elderly person they come into contact with, should they prioritize their own small statistical advantage over the lives of those others? Should they also consider infections down the line, generated by the individuals they infected?

If someone were to present a convincing case that such a hypothetical were true, I might be forced to rethink some things. However, since the vaccine isn't mandatory, I don't see much in the way of actionable conclusions (other than posting the stats to the CDC website). Personally, I'd take on at least double the (low) risk to try and protect my family. But I'm also biased by knowing how shitty COVID can be, and preferring a quick death to a COVID death.

frickinLaserson How death rates from Covid-19 differ between vaccinated and unvaccinated

For the irrationally angry throwaway, here you go: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...

VAERS (an early warning system that allows unverified reports and requires physicians to report all seemingly related deaths) shows 0.0022% (9,810) of vaccinated individuals in the US died after receiving the vaccine.

Generously assuming all those reports can be directly linked to the vaccination (they can't), that figure is already three orders of magnitude lower than the 1.6% (772,000) of people who caught COVID that died. Looking at the linked charts, if we'd had the vaccine at the beginning, we could surmise that roughly 77,000 (87,000 if you want to add the unconfirmed vaccine deaths) of COVID deaths would have been vaccinated, and almost 700,000 would have been unvaccinated. Add in the potential effect of herd immunity, which we never achieved--who knows how well off we'd be if people hadn't wasted so much energy railing against the public good (for an idea, maybe look at how the polio vaccine went over with the public, and how many people in the US now have polio).

Every death is a tragedy. A little bit of elementary school knowledge of how vaccines work, combined with actually using your brain, indicates the degree of tragedy could be reduced at least 10-fold if all the irrationally angry people would just get vaccinated.

frickinLaserson A Xiaomi phone might’ve shipped with a censorship list in Europe

I'd suggest reading OP's comment history before flinging such accusations.

frickinLaserson GCHQ award spy agencies cloud contract to AWS

Apparently it's a surprise that this exists.

https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/

frickinLaserson GCHQ award spy agencies cloud contract to AWS

Did we miss the time where the NSA the same thing a couple months ago, and the fact that Keith Alexander is on the board now?

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nsa-awards-secret...

This is lucrative for Amazon, and likely convenient for the Five Eyes and their data sharing ambitions.

frickinLaserson SE aeronautics claims tri-wing aircraft could revolutionize commercial aviation

Placing fuel bladders overhead seems like a terrible idea for a passenger jet in the event of a crash landing.

frickinLaserson 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

Do you mean like this other guy did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab

frickinLaserson O.mg Cable

I don't know. I haven't worked in that system for many years. That said, it was more received wisdom than a written rule, and I was aware of exceptions who were prescribed more than ADHD meds.

frickinLaserson O.mg Cable

That statement wasn't about politics at all. Let me put it another way: Had he been trying to get clearance for a normal position, he would probably not have received it.

I also never said he had access to everything. Nobody has access to everything. Not arguing for a shadow government--it's already a fact. It happened when classification rules went from "what would harm national security" to "what would cause problems if American citizens found out we were doing this."

frickinLaserson O.mg Cable

Don't do drugs (including marijuana), don't get blackout drunk, don't talk about your work, don't need psychiatric help... For the last sentence...Trump had all sorts of clearance when he clearly should not have. But he was in an important position.

frickinLaserson O.mg Cable

This is ridiculous. Wtf are cops good for, then?

frickinLaserson The rise of user-hostile software

> Disable telemetry? Not a chance - you better be ready to have seven layers of defense in /etc/hosts, Pi-Hole, and a custom-built DNS + firewall + URL filter + deep packet inspector inside a server rack in the basement. I am exaggerating, of course. You only need six layers of defense to make this all work.

That's in the post (and, incidentally, it appears OP works for Microsoft)