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oriesdan

365 karma · joined October 8, 2020

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oriesdan··on Why is the US Green Party's site blocked?
By that logic, any site that allows to display third party content is a phishing/spam site and should be blocked - including twitter, facebook, HN and of course gmail.
oriesdan··on Hackers hide web skimmer inside a website's CSS
I'm glad you enjoy our dystopian world.
oriesdan··on Hackers hide web skimmer inside a website's CSS
Good for Denmark, it doesn't exist here. Plus, there is no way I will install a proprietary banking app. For this to be acceptable, it needs to be a standard and have multiple implementations. At which point, using cryptocurrencies is the easiest way.
oriesdan··on Hackers hide web skimmer inside a website's CSS
And for people often saying it's a solution in search of a problem : that's why we need cryptocurrencies. At least, the ones that could be used as actual currencies.

It would be so much better if I could click a payment link that opens an external wallet software like "mailto:" links, verify the amount it proposes to transfer, and click "send" to send the money at the prefilled address instead of allowing someone to take it.

I really hope that one day, we'll tell our grandkids about that time where we were giving secret codes on the internet and anyone having them could take money on our account as they wish, and those kids will think we're delirious.

oriesdan··on PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available
Nope, there's no option for that in phosh settings. Actually, it's the compositor (phoc) that starts gnome-session in /usr/bin/phosh. I've just tried to edit the startup script to launch gnome-session directly, but it would refuse to start.

It's also a pure wayland system, so it's quite unlike what we're used on desktop.

oriesdan··on PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available
For reference, this was the post, in case you come around the author : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25101199
oriesdan··on PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available
Thanks for mentioning it.

How does fluxbox works on mobile? Is it basically the same than the desktop on a small resolution, or it can receive phone calls and have a notification bar?

oriesdan··on PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available
For the record, I received yesterday the new mainboard that will be in those phones to replace the one of my pinephone UBport edition. The boost in RAM (3gb instead of 2gb) does the trick for me, allowing to use firefox. Not to the point that the experience is even close to android, but at least usable (before that, I used elinks on the phone).

The system I use (mobian/phosh) still feels sluggish, but I suspect it's more a matter of software than hardware, now. I tried yesterday KDE neon/plasma with that new board, but had problems that the screen would black out after a few minutes of use (had to do hard reboot to recover).

I see in this release announcement that their build of plasma is on top on Manjaro, I'll have to try that one. It's especially interesting because someone from Plasma mobile team told on HN the other day that they support MMS.

oriesdan··on Ask HN: I have $1M cash in my bank. How can I stretch it so I can retire?
> If you're skilled I'm sure you can find a company that you can put in 10 hours per week at

Do you have real world experience with that? I found on the contrary that the more skilled I get, the less companies are willing to make me work only part time. Which is too bad, because part time high paid job is really the best of both world.

Part time jobs in restaurants is what allowed me to learn programming when I was in early adult life, and I crave for as much time to learn new things, nowadays. Sadly, while people I work for are willing to negotiate insane amount of money (in my opinion), they are not to concede the slightest amount of time.

oriesdan··on Moving from Macbook to Linux
I'm on Gentoo myself, but for people coming from MacOS, I would recommend to give KDE Neon a try.

It's based on Ubuntu, but made by interfacers (the KDE team). I have used it for about a year and I thought during that time that it was "osx on linux", because of how well integrated everything was.

The Plasma desktop and the KDE project have been known historically to very well integrate their softwares with one another, but Neon is going a step further, by controlling the OS itself and being way less buggy that other distributions of the Plasma desktop.

That would probably be a good transition OS coming from Apple products, before people get a taste for chaos and pure freedom and want to go wild.

oriesdan··on Man Becomes Overnight Millionaire After Meteorite Crashes Through His Roof
So basically, on a planet whose surface is covered mainly by oceans, a meteorite fall in an urban area, is big enough not to disintegrate in the atmosphere and small enough not to blow the house and kill the man (I mean, what happened to craters?), and it suddenly makes him rich.

I'm not a religious person myself but I totally get why this man decided to build a church. I just hope he won't make it any weirder by proclaiming himself a chosen one or something, because there's room for that.

oriesdan··on Apple Addresses Privacy Concerns Surrounding App Authentication in macOS
Not any bigger than package repositories on linux distributions, which include the list of all known software and sometimes even rules how to build them.

It's just plain text. If I can have a local dump of wikipedia, I'm pretty sure I can store a list of developer IDs. Especially when I'm a company controlling the hardware and knowing what is the minimum amount of space the hard drives have in my computers.

oriesdan··on Apple Addresses Privacy Concerns Surrounding App Authentication in macOS
They're basically just promising they won't be bad guys, which solves nothing.

The proper way to implement their feature without causing privacy issues would be to periodically update a list of authorized certificates and check against that list locally when launching apps. That would probably also increase performances.

oriesdan··on PinePhone – KDE Community edition
That's awesome. Great job!
oriesdan··on PinePhone – KDE Community edition
Hi, thanks for taking questions.

What is the state of the phone call/sms/mms support in Plasma Mobile on Pinephone?

Also : will the CE edition be some sort of Neon mobile, or will it be based on PostmarketOS or something?

oriesdan··on Is a billion dollars worth of server lying on the ground?
I think the main reason they can afford pricing their services that high is because of peer pressure - probably itself the result of clever marketing, or that would be a really happy coincidence.

I've worked in many startups now, several of them where I was the first (and for a while, only) developer and had to decide on the infrastructure. Each time I was going with OVH, and each time the CEO was trying to push for moving to AWS instead, despite having no clue what the difference may be.

Their problem was that "startups are supposed to use AWS". They were having impostor syndrome. One would come to tell me every month or so how "all his friends use AWS, and they say it's very good". An other one was afraid what possible investors may say when he tells them we're not on AWS.

If people will pay overpriced services to be with the cool kids, why bother competing on price?

oriesdan··on Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium
I usually search for documentation or tech problems in a text browser with cookies disabled, no js, no css, using tor and using an empty user agent.

I won't try to guess why, but the few pages I can access are always high quality, while poor quality pages (as discovered when opening the page anyway in a full browser) always try to block that setup.

oriesdan··on RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms and Pirate Sites
Indeed. Or even make sure to integrate Patreon (or other donation applications) to any privacy-friendly video application.

I have a Twitch account just to have a paid subscription for the Critical Role channel, despite the fact that I never open Twitch and download their videos from Youtube using youtube-dl. It kind of feels ridiculous (especially knowing Twitch will put me in metrics of "their users").

oriesdan··on RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms and Pirate Sites
Peertube comes to mind for discoverability. For ensuring content creators revenue, the best way would probably be to host their own website and put videos behind paywall or accept donations, as they see fit.
oriesdan··on RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms and Pirate Sites
Here goes all the privacy-friendly ways to watch Youtube.

Well, I guess it's a good thing : now we'll have to campaign to let content creators know how terrible their choice of platform is.

oriesdan··on Nutcracker Challenge: Blob-Free WiFi and BLE
I would be very funny to discover they lose their source code :)

A more serious reason I could think of : maybe pine64 is trying to convince them to do just that, and this contest is to show them there is public interest (pure speculation from me, of course).

oriesdan··on Nutcracker Challenge: Blob-Free WiFi and BLE
This is also very efficient guerrilla marketing. Instead of asking users to tell their friends about your brand, you can make a lottery making them win t-shirts with your logo on it. They will be so happy to have won something they will wear it.

In this link's case, if pine64 want to get people excited about that EVB and start hacking with it, it sounds like an efficient strategy. Whatever the real value of the commits are, it's the users who are committed :)

At least, in this case, they ask for contributions on a repos they own.

oriesdan··on A Youtube video downloader written in Go
It's only a cosmetic change from a tech point of view of course, but from non-tech point of view, maybe it would be safer to say it's a youtube offline player than a youtube video downloader.

It would require to pipe downloaded video to vlc or something by default for this to be true, of course.

Agree with other comments here, as well : youtube-dl reference should probably be removed. It will be added back by those who link to the project.

oriesdan··on Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
Oh yes, I'm not saying those are bad projects. What they have in common is that migrating from previous version to them was especially difficult and painful.

The few symfony developers I know indeed loved symfony-2 very much. But migrating their projects from symfony-1 to symfony-2 was felt basically as a rewrite.

oriesdan··on Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
Thanks, I'll have a look at it.
oriesdan··on Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
After 9 years of ruby, I finally switched to Go as my professional language 3 years ago, after a couple years of side projects with it.

My feelings after building for that long : safety and productivity.

I initially thought it was because of moving to compiler and type checking, but then I learned C for my personal use (an other thing passing through Go allowed for me), and was surprised to realize my C compiler was not allowing me close to the same peace of mind than my Go one. Go is just a well-designed language that makes everything straightforward.

The main reason I started learning and building with C is that I'm not confident the code I write in Go will age well. The discussions around Go-2 make me extremely nervous (it has something that reminds me of angular-2, python-3, symfony-2, bootstrap-3, and others major redesigns who left developers in a lot of troubles, I hope time will prove me incorrect).

So basically, I'm enjoying it, but I worry if it will last. I guess that means I really love it.

oriesdan··on The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?
It sounds like a good idea, but I'm afraid it may be a nightmare for packagers (like the ones providing packages on GNU/linux distros), as they see updates to upstream only to realize they are just pings and don't need to be repackaged.

It wouldn't be that often, though. And maybe they would actually love to have such heartbeat. I would love to hear a packager on that.

oriesdan··on The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?
This sounds like a bad case of Cult of Release.

X works perfectly for me, and there is nothing I would want it to do that it doesn't do now. Why should it change?

I have many programs I wrote years ago that I don't change and I use every day. Constant changes are not a measure of utility.

But again and again, you'll find users looking at repositories and deciding that something is "dead" because there isn't any recent commit, often blaming developers for not doing more free work for them. This is a toxic attitude. When we have a software that works well and solves our problems, we should celebrate it, not complain it doesn't find new problems to solve.

oriesdan··on GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015)
I'm lost browsing the radicle website and all its links. Ultimately, I found https://github.com/radicle-dev/radicle-link , following the link "browse the protocol", which mentions: "WORK IN PROGRESS - In fact, there is nothing substantial to see here yet". Is it a yet unreleased software? (that would explain why I can't find a way to try it out).

If it's the case and if anyone from the project is reading this, it would be helpful to mention it on top of landing page.

Also, the landing page is mentioning ssb, is this related to git-ssb?

> how do you handle issue/comment spammers?

I love how ssb is handling that : it's not a problem because you create a "web of trust" and only content from people you trust and people they trust reaches you - and trust can be revoked in case of problem. Obviously, it creates an other problem, though : how a benevolent total stranger can reach you?

By the way, yet an other alternative is hypergit ( https://github.com/noffle/hypergit ). It uses hyperdb/dat. I used it a few times to share code with friends, I loved it because it was the most straightforward for them to install and use.

oriesdan··on Google Play Music, Music Play Store and Music Manager are going away
Well, as far as I'm concern, if they only provide content with DRM, then piracy is fair game. I pondered for a time if I should buy the content on abusive platforms and then download it illegally without DRMs, but I decided that respect must go both way. Just to be clear, I pay for a lot of music every week and I even give a lot every months to charities, this is not about money and my difficulty to part with it. Ultimately, I very rarely use piracy anyway because when I have to, I lose respect for artists and don't want to listen to them anymore (it's not me making it political, it's just a feeling that happens when I realize the artist will force spyware on me). The only content I download through piracy is from long dead artists, mostly (they didn't chose to only be available with DRM).

That being said, I've been surprised how common it is to find albums on Bandcamp or bands' own sites. It may be the music I listen to (I try to never limit me to a few "genres", but I very commonly listen to music with small audience). I guess fees asked by platforms have something to do with it too.

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