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lenlorijnon Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

Why is incarceration suddenly not an appropriate possible punishment for theft if it is done by someone in a suit. These are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars being swindled from poor people. Not a single 5 cent mistake as you try to make it out to be.

lenlorijnon A common urban intersection in the Netherlands (2018)

By far the largest amount of cyclist deaths and injury are still caused by cars. The ebikes just get more news coverage because they're novel. But cars are heavier and go faster so will almost always be more dangerous to other cyclists and pedestrians.

lenlorijnon A common urban intersection in the Netherlands (2018)

Electric bicycles basically solve the hill issue. Dutch people bike in any weather. We have a ton of terrible weather, both hot and cold but mostly wet. Our summer heat might not be very hot, but the summer heat is very humid, it feels hotter than it is.

Also the Netherlands is not the only region where people bike a lot. There are places in Finland for example, with more hills and more extreme weather that have loads of people biking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

lenlorijnon PHP 8.4

Most PHP apps use a deployment method where a symlink gets set to a directory with a new version of the code. Because of how opcache works this has no impact on running requests, while new requests get handled with the new code.

lenlorijnon A common urban intersection in the Netherlands (2018)

Bikes are small and fast, and only a small fraction of cars will need to turn here as this is a street going in to a neighborhood. The chances of multiple cars wanting to take this turn and there being a long stream of bikes that holds them up is small. So 'never' is not the right word here, but the times this happens is negligible.

lenlorijnon London saw a surprising benefit to ultra-low emissions zone: More active kids

I'm sorry but anecdotal evidence is barely any evidence at all. I could list a very large number of news reports of cars ramming in to houses an businesses, which I can promise you are not built in a lane. Bike lanes and car lanes should be physically separated, sure for bikes to not veer out of lane, but more importantly to keep cars in theirs. In any of these situations cars are still the ones bringing a 1.5k bundle of glass and steel to the fight. Just take a quick look at https://x.com/WorldBollard for numerous examples of cars going all over the place and making a mess of it.

lenlorijnon London saw a surprising benefit to ultra-low emissions zone: More active kids

You say this as if cars adhere to the rules given at all times. The difference is that bikes do it at their own peril and cars do it at the peril of others. Give cyclists good infrastructure separate from cars and they'll use it.

lenlorijnon London saw a surprising benefit to ultra-low emissions zone: More active kids

I briefly studied law in the Netherlands and it was used as an example. Our lecturer told us that if "A person on a bike would jump out of an airplane on a bike, land with a parachute on a highway and get hit by a car, just maybe would the car have a case." The reasons for this are varied. Cars are insured, bikes are not. But most importantly, in basically all traffic situations with cars and bikes the car introduces the danger and should thus bear the responsibility of any accidents.

If I go out in public swinging a katana, and someone walks in to it. I'm still the person swinging a katana in public. Driving around in 1.5 metric tonnes of steel and glass comes with certain responsibilities.

lenlorijnon RegreSSHion: RCE in OpenSSH's server, on glibc-based Linux systems

As the security maxim goes: POC || GTFO

lenlorijnon The Reasons Not to Use Scrum

Also having some iterative improvement instead of a large project (waterfall) seems to fit quite well for certain (software) engineering projects.

lenlorijnon Animal Sex Determination Is Weirder Than You Think

Yes

lenlorijnon Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London

I see lots of folks in the comments assuming what would happen when you bike drunk, seemingly not ever having done so themselves or seen it.

I live in a student city in the Netherlands (Groningen), where most students go out on the town by bike. It's really not much more dangerous than walking drunk. And it's very much preferable to driving drunk.

Thousands of students park their bikes in the city's central underground bike parking spots every weekend. I have never heard of someone dying because biking drunk. The biggest danger for any bike, drunk or not, remains the car. This is also reflected in the enforcement of laws by the police. Although driving drunk, and being drunk in public is not allowed, fining cyclists for this is rarely enforced. Partially because the consequences are not too bad, and partially to make sure people don't drive home drunk instead to avoid a fine.

According to the Dutch central bureau of statistics in 2021, out of all deaths of cyclists 34% are due to losing consciousness, getting a foot stuck in the wheels, making a wrong movement, or due to bad road conditions and slipperiness. Out of this 34%, 72 % is over the age of 70. https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2022/37/meer-fietsdoden-na-e...

lenlorijnon Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London

Space is expensive in city centers. Cars take up lots of space.

lenlorijnon Reassessing relative temporal lobe size in anthropoids and modern humans

Basically we can. Not everyone, but you can imagine someone that relied on it for their survival definitely could. In these races the horse gets to subtract hold time. Take a look at this interview for example where one of the racers explains this, and won over a horse by an hour and 15 minutes: https://www.irunfar.com/catching-up-with-nick-coury .

It's also covered in this very nice episode of Radio Lab: https://radiolab.org/episodes/man-against-horse

lenlorijnon Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming Moments in Years

I've only had this experience with one game that was marked as not supported at all (Batman: Arkham Asylum). After first setting a different version of Proton for the game as per internet instructions I could not get past the startup menu at all. I tried all the buttons and got quite frustrated that I had to quit the game with the available shortcuts every time.

Then I found out I could just click next on the touch screen :')

I haven't had any issues with games since. Lost of games, even some marked as not playable, ended up working fine.

lenlorijnon A Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur's MongoDB database

This is why security in depth is important. A simple DB user could have prevented this, and many other consequences from misconfiguration. This time it's docker, next time it's a broken private cloud setting or a compromised node elsewhere on your network.

lenlorijnon CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017)

Do you think your culture might be close enough to the US that your opinion is biased in a certain way?

lenlorijnon Penetration testing and low-cost freelancing

This isn't really comparing the results to other pentests, so I have a hard time seeing the use of this. I think almost any pentest will miss some/many security issues.

And these issues look more like CTF style issues than real world security issues. If you're not thinking about the challenge in the right way, it is probably harder to see the vulnerabilities.

lenlorijnon Free and Open Source Product Information Management(PIM) System

I think this should have "Show HN" in the title. For people looking for an open source PIM, https://www.akeneo.com/ is also worth considering.

lenlorijnon Letsencrypt, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I usually enjoy articles by Jacques, but this one has a different tone and I don't think I understand its point.

Saying things like

> hey should just shut up, sit in a corner and do their bloody job. seems unnecessarily blunt.

And if you don't like Let's Encrypt, don't use it. It's being compared to convenient paid services, so why not use those instead if they end up being more convenient for your usecase?

lenlorijnon GDPR guide for developers

It means remove any data that identifies the individual. So saving data that is not identifying is fine, saving a record of there having been a request is also fine, saving identifying that is part of the request is not fine.

There are also limits placed on this by other laws. For example tax agencies often require companies keep sales records for multiple years. A request for deletion doesn't remove all invoices from sales records with their name on it. I imagine there are more examples, but I think it gives a good indication that GDPR is not where the buck always stops.

lenlorijnon Patriot Act amendment needing a warrant for browsing history fails

Metadata such as what domains/ip's are contacted can still be harvested.

lenlorijnon The Original Cookie specification from 1997 was GDPR compliant (2019)

GDPR only mentions cookies once.

Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers […] such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers […]. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them.

As long as you are not building profiles of people, cookies are fine and you don't even have to ask for permission to use them. Stop collecting data you don't need, and if it is part of your business model, maybe ask a lawyer what part of GDPR actually impacts your business instead of doing what everyone else is doing or relying on internet comment sections.

lenlorijnon PHP in 2020

PHP uses composer as a package manager, which is quite simple to use and very easy to install (it's a phar archive, basically an executable zip file). And frameworks like Laravel can be installed with a single composer command. This is still very little setup to come to the same point.

lenlorijnon Route Leak Impacting Cloudflare

We have several websites running behind Cloudflare. Only one out of our 8 or so seem affected

lenlorijnon What does the GDPR actually mean for startups?

My opinion is that the GDPR over the long term, will hamper the ability of EU companies to do business on the world stage, even more than currently. But that's a completely different topic for another time.

I would argue the opposite. Most of the laws laid out in the GDPR were already laws in EU countries such as Germany and the Netherlands. Creating a single EU law should reduce the effort needed to launch a company that is compliant in multiple countries within the EU.

Also, you wont need a DPO if you don't process large quantities of PII. (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-37-gdpr/)

And you don't need to hire an expensive company to 'prepare' for gdpr. A conversation with a lawyer should suffice where you lay out how you (plan to) use or process PII.

lenlorijnon What does the GDPR actually mean for startups?

Well, for example, one of the mentioned points is about sending PII to a 3rd party where the startup didn't read the 3rd party's privacy policy. So how would the startup be able to accurately present me with information on how my data will be used if they don't even know? I think having an accurate and updated privacy policy is common sense handling of data, wouldn't you agree?

lenlorijnon How the Dutch created a casual biking culture

That's because they're talking about a "Dutch design manual". Not a law. So obviously local governments won't implement this if it is prohibitively expensive. It's just a suggestion.

'inch-thick top coat', they're talking about a top coat, not just the paint. To make sure the paint doesn't wear after a couple of months the entire top part of the cycling path is red asphalt. Though I doubt it is 2,6cm everywhere as it differs per municipality. But its definitely thicker than a coat of paint most of the time.

lenlorijnon How the Dutch created a casual biking culture

My Dutch law teacher explained it to me this way: "If you are in an airplane, with your bike, then parachute down to a highway and get hit by a car. The car might have a chance to not be liable, but probably still will be."

The reasoning behind this is, whatever accident happens, one of the two people involved is protected by a ton of glass and steel, one is out in the open. The one that is protected inherently has to bear more responsibility.

lenlorijnon Ask HN: Alternatives to Vagrant for development environments?

Why would it be a terrible option for those cases?