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netsharc

12,616 karma · joined April 7, 2016

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netsharc··on Show HN: Neobrutalism.dev – Just added Base UI support and added new color theme
Yum, soft hot dog stand!
netsharc··on Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)
> Zuckerberg actively wants a monopoly. He's, in my estimation, a sociopath.

Fully agree. Facebook apps on Android can/could scan what apps are installed on the phone, and they could see if another social media app's install base was growing. He bought Instagram, he bought WhatsApp, he copied the Snapchat concept of "24 hour stories" when they refused the purchase.

TBH if I had the billions, I'm not sure I'd be any different (at least with the monopoly, I sure as hell wouldn't be blowing it on metaverse).

netsharc··on Show HN: Neobrutalism.dev – Just added Base UI support and added new color theme
Yeah, I can't stand these influencer-wannabe web-devs misusing terms.

béton brut means "raw concrete" in French, and in architecture that's what brutalism is. I'd say only sites that look like they use the default style of HTML with no CSS on Netscape 1.x could be called "brutalist"...

E.g. https://stallman.org

IMO the design is more "Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand Theme" https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho... combined with MS WordArt...

netsharc··on Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)
My "expert" (/s) conclusion of Zuck is that he's a kid who knew some PHP and got really lucky that a website he made went "viral". He's got billions but is clueless, e.g. blowing a lot of money on animated VR avatars "because it's the future", and then blowing lots of money on AI. To be fair that's what the other dumb tech billionaires are doing too, they're building datacenters full of GPUs because they think throwing money at LLM will get them AGI, and they're desperate to be first.

(And no, I don't know if they'll reach AGI, my uninformed bet is: no).

netsharc··on Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe
Ah, yes, skills like reading and maths. Outdated in 2026, just ask AI to do it for you!
netsharc··on Remember Hong Kong
Sorry for your non-existant attention span.

(Not actually sorry)

netsharc··on Remember Hong Kong
Feels like you wrote this without reading my comment to the end, where I do point out with Americans it's not much different.
netsharc··on Remember Hong Kong
A lot of Chinese do have a policy of "as long as we're comfortable (economically, etc), we'll let the government do whatever they want.", some justifying it by saying "society needs their government to be a strict parent".

It does seem most widespread revolutions only happen when the discomfort grows big enough (as the saying (1) goes, "civilisation is n missed meals away from anarchy" (n = a number below 10, I thought 3, but it's 9)).

It's interesting though, the CCP does chicken out. The last time that I remember this happening is when enough citizens in Beijing protested against their prison-like Covid restrictions, that they relaxed it within a day or two.

Same thing with Russians and the war: 2). Heck, Americans are anguishing but most are too comfortable/don't want to go through the discomfort to actually do anything against the rising fascism in their country.

1) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/05/02/nine-meals/

2) https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2022/06/war-of-the-worl...

netsharc··on Proof of Capture: Apple Reference Image, but open source and using steganography
Samples, or sampling of each typewriter's idiosyncracies?

This post https://foxfire.blog/explorations/the-typewriter-that-became... claims "specific machine":

> The forensic science behind this was genuinely elegant. No two typewriters print identically. The mechanical tolerances of individual typebars—those metal arms that swing up to strike the ribbon—create unique signatures. Forensic document examiners look at three primary characteristics: alignment (whether a letter strikes slightly above or below the baseline), impression (whether one side of a letter prints darker than the other due to uneven wear), and damage (a chipped serif, a broken bowl on a lowercase “g”, a filled-in counter on an “e”). Taken together, these micro-imperfections form a pattern as distinctive as a human fingerprint—or so the authorities claimed.

> The East German Stasi took this principle to its industrial extreme. They maintained an exhaustive registry of type samples, a vast database of typewriter fingerprints. When a dissident pamphlet surfaced, the Stasi could compare its letterforms against their archive and, in theory, trace the text back to the specific machine that produced it. The countermeasure was ingenious in its simplicity: dissidents sought out pre-communist typewriter models—early Mignon or Ideal D machines manufactured before the registry existed. A typewriter without a file was a typewriter without a name. It could speak and not be traced.

Since they had control of commerce, I suppose it was possible to intercept every typewriter and "fingerprint" it before it is sold, or even tweak the typewriter to produce something unique (e.g. chipping a typebar so it prints a particular letter distinctly). Hah, needing to register your name/address to buy a typewriter feels spooky too. And if it gets stolen, you'd have to tell the authorities that it's no longer in your possession.

netsharc··on NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami
Also not an expert, I wonder if there's some rule where a "Go around!" order has precedence over any other activity anyone in the cockpit wishes to perform.

As a passenger I had my first go around a few days ago, but we were 5km away from the runway.

netsharc··on We Are Still Living in the Broken World Sept. 11 Created
I remember reading that Clinton's team was very concerned about Al Qaeda, but the Bush team ignored their warnings. It might have been very different with Al Gore in command.

But this article portrays it differently: https://time.com/archive/6738066/the-truth-of-the-matter/

> In his strongest public statement, to 60 Minutes, [Richard] Clarke said Bush “ignored” the terrorist threat before 9/11. To the commission he testified, more soberly, that, for the Administration, it was an “important issue but not an urgent issue.” Clearly, the Clinton White House worried more. Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger remembers telling his successor, Rice, during the transition that, for the Bush team, “the No. 1 issue that you’re going to be dealing with is terrorism generally and al-Qaeda specifically.”

> The record of the Bush Administration’s first half-year suggests its members didn’t buy it. They were more focused on Russia, China and especially missile defense. In his book Bush at War, Bob Woodward quotes Bush himself saying of Osama bin Laden, “There was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace … But I didn’t feel that sense of urgency.”

> Clarke’s strongest argument in this dispute is the pace with which the Administration considered the plan he proposed on Jan. 25, 2001 for combatting al-Qaeda. The program had evolved during the Clinton years, as al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and then the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000. The Bush team put the proposal through an April meeting of senior officials, took their time with it over the summer and finally brought it to Bush’s Cabinet-level security and foreign policy chiefs, who approved it, just a week before 9/11. None of that suggests it was a national-security priority.

netsharc··on Eiffel Tower employees strike after female staff removed
"They wanted us to hide female staff" would get French society to support them again..
netsharc··on Eiffel Tower employees strike after female staff removed
And there's respecting of guests' religion.

What if the Hindus had said "we are vegans, please don't serve us meat" - probably reasonable enough, although I seem to recall some rightwingers getting angry about some other occasion where only vegetarian food was to be served.

Yeah, as a host I'd be fine with meeting their dietary restrictions; but would refuse their with staff gender restrictions. Somehow the management company didn't know where this acceptability border lied.

netsharc··on Eiffel Tower employees strike after female staff removed
Regarding 3) This is France, where in some areas swimwear on beaches is regulated. No "burkini", even non-tight-fitting swimshorts were disallowed.

So to shake your head and think "Woke Europe" would be too simplistic.

netsharc··on Eiffel Tower employees strike after female staff removed
As a thought experiment, perhaps someone there thought not fulfilling the Indian group's request would be seen as insensitive.

I suppose the decisionmaker needs to know what societal values one has to uphold, and in which order of importance. As a wild example, if the group had demanded the women walk around in the nude, because of their religion, it'd be obvious to say no because it'd violate so many of the employees' values.

netsharc··on Eiffel Tower employees strike after female staff removed
Probably not HN-relevant...

But I find it flabbergasting that in 2026 someone in the management thought it'd be okay to tell female staff to hide, just because some delegation demanded it. But for the tech-relevancy angle; They could've asked AI "Would this be fine?".

(Untested, presumably the AI would say "Merde! Non!")

netsharc··on Muse: Meta's personal AI agent, features and capabilities
I've read that if you give FB/IG/WA access to all files/photos, and you have GPS metadata for photos (I do, hey it's useful to know where I took a pic), it can trawl that data to see where you've been and when...

So now Android strips location info when sharing an image to an app. A filter layer between filesystem and app, to add complexity to the whole system...

netsharc··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
My suspicion is that things like URL previews, or when the app calls a handler to open a link (YouTube, browser), are still monitored.

So e.g. opening a link to an Amazon product that a friend sent makes you a target for ads in that category.

It's a suspicion, they'd probably argue their EULA allows this. The typical "we have to monitor links for dangerous content" is always the standard bullshit.

netsharc··on Germany Power Grid Sabotage: Launch Devices Found Near Weisweiler Plant
If Russia financed a German who's fed up with his government, is it Russian sabotage?

Seems there's plenty of those around, on the left and on the right.. (there was a left-anarchist sabotage of power distribution in Berlin in winter)

netsharc··on Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings
Faith that the blog poster chose carefully to convey meaning, including with images. A huge image, 95% of it white, just for "I want to show you the address bar" is incoherent communication. Technical issues like "It's because I write the HTML myself" make it even worse, because you hide behind that and can't even see why it's disrespectful to the readers.
netsharc··on The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay
As far as I can tell it's not AI slop, but I wish this author had asked one LLM if his example is A/B testing, because the AI would've told him no, and we wouldn't have to have read this garbage.
netsharc··on Watch the 'Eclipse of the Century' Next Year When Spain, Egypt and More Go Dark
Somehow it feels like social media spread ever more FOMO for this year's eclipse, there were long queues for eclipse glasses at local opticians, although where I lived we only had 90% totality (people think each person needs a pair, not aware that you're not going to stare at the thing the whole time, and sharing is possible).

And since the 2026 one is fresh, the 2027 one has a lot of hype and more FOMO for those who MO'ed.

netsharc··on Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings
The fact that the first screenshot is a totally empty browser window (just to show the address bar) made me lose faith about reading the rest of your writing...
netsharc··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Well, that reads like the justification you want to give to yourself after the fact.. the interesting question is what's the real reason...
netsharc··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
"Both sides are just as bad" is copium for when the guy from "your side" is revealed to be a corrupt piece of shit. You don't like it, so you justify to yourself that the other party is also full of creeps and assholes and thieves, so you can continue to support your guy guilt free...

Of course the supporters of one particular political party is much more better at gymnastics of the mental kind than the other side. Having no spine makes it quite easier...

netsharc··on El Niño is now stronger than at any point in the last 1k years
So, are any of the sane-ish governments of the world preparing for the upcoming disaster? Maybe prepare for international deployment of help?

I guess the Chinese government would do it quietly. Maybe Australia, Japan are doing something...

netsharc··on Using jq to format JSON on the clipboard
A universal tool (well, since I use Windows, a Windows tool) to modify the clipboard would be cool.

So, copy text to clipboard, press a hotkey to popup the menu, and it'll offer options depending on the detected text. For example changing the clipboard contents to prettified (if it detects JSON, XML, HTML), or formatting a number back and forth (e.g. working with SSN's out of numerical DB entries when they prefer AAA-GG-SSSS).

netsharc··on When Claude Code went rogue, years of Bengaluru heritage work disappeared
I want to laugh at an "IT professional" not doing backups, but hmm, the article turned to a mirror...
netsharc··on Enough! Open Letter from Jewish Pros in Defense of Mark Ruffalo [on Ellison]
Hah, what a timeline, that the makers of entertainment like The Godfather series, Forrest Gump, Ferries Bueller's Day Off, Star Trek, Transformers (1) is now part of a genocide-supporting mahinery.

But this is barely "hacker news" so some "This is irrelevant!" experts will flag it to death...

Source: (1) https://www.ranker.com/list/paramount-movies/leah-collins

netsharc··on Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10
I suppose the only good solution is like those "game streaming services": move all the logic to the server and use the client only as a rendering device.

Even sending metadata so the client can use local sprites to render the enemy is hackable, if the end-user knows the coordinates where to render the enemy, it can immediately tell the server that "user aimed at $COORDS and pulled the trigger"...

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