phantom_oracle

I wanted to build my own e-ink tablet as I prefer OSS. The issue that makes e-ink tablets not worth building?

The expensive displays that cost between $150-$300 for 7-8 inch screens, excluding shipping.

It is disturbing how the moderators of HN are condoning the comments in this thread (the top comment by 'neonsunset' provides tools that enable DDoSing a foreign government website) that are encouraging cyber warfare against a nation-state that is considered an 'enemy' of their state (the USA).

Had a Russian/enemy state website had a similar thread that condoned cyber-attacks against the USA critical infrastructure, they would be flagged as terrorists and 'empire' publications like major US newspapers would be all over it as "war against the USA".

All this bluster from capitalists merely reflects hypocrisy.

Perhaps Westerners view all non-western science as pseudoscience or made up, but it is a well-known fact in many Eastern cultures (and their medicinal practices) that the stomach is a primary source of disease (and not just depression, but all kinds) when abused through bad eating habits.

Then the wheel is re-invented with intermittent fasting, a diet with less processed foods, more veg/fruit, less meat, etc.

Whenever I see articles about health on HN, I no longer take them too seriously because the reductionist approach to medicine is why people get mistreated for symptoms instead of the disease.

Even the ancient Greeks (the so-called birthplace of "western knowledge") took a more holistic approach than what the sketchy for-profit medical/pharmaceutical cabal does.

But of course, we need to take it seriously because "the scientists say so", even though their own research system is so badly broken that a for-profit cabal runs the publishing arm of research.

Strange times we live in.

784 upvotes at the time of writing this comment. I see a lot of links/threads bashing Google for their shitty AI and non-existent human support on HN all the time but ...

I think the same resentment is slowly brewing for YC too. Whether it is misinformation or weak arguments, it won't matter too much. People generally don't like monopolies at all and YC does have a monopoly on the SV startup scene at the moment (from an outsiders view, every startup with even an idea knows that YC is the springboard for unlocking more opportunity/capital/network).

I wonder if the end result is YC ending up being innovated out of the startup scene itself. I don't think so because they are in the money game, not the tech game (see JPMorgan, Goldman).

As for the content, I can't be arsed. Capitalists will be capitalists.

This is such an amazing technology for the many tech people who are having to deal with hand/finger/elbow issues after extensive usage for years on their keyboards.

I was looking for this type of tech for at least 2 years and I am glad it now exists.

FOSS is amazing!

I like this idea for the very simple fact that I now know its plausible to write blog content with a pen and paper and then some GPT-3 AI will scan those words and make it into digital text for me.

Sparing my hands from using a keyboard!

Brilliant idea!

Counter-intuitively, I wonder what gaming would be like if everyone ran the same cheats/mods? Would it be the same as "if everyone is rich, then nobody is" or would it devolve into such a state where cheating/modding gets so boring that people just go back to casual play ...

On the other hand, gaming is now a big commercial entity, including 'pros' and 'streamers'. With money involved, fraud and cheating ain't far behind.

Every few days, articles like these keep cropping up with click-bait headlines about preventing all types of diseases in old age. The headlines almost always never match up to the content or even the reality of trying to treat or prevent these many diseases.

Another reality is that death, old age(and sickness with it) strikes such fear into people's hearts that they are willing to walk around with perpetual erections to prevent Alzheimer's disease(and the absurdity of my comment is linked to the absurdity of the click-bait title)

This must be a PR nightmare for Israel, which brings me to my related topic of Israel's other major weapon in its cyber arsenal.

I think this falls under a type of disinformation. I don't know of any other state that has effectively weaponized any/all criticism against it as religious discrimination: antisemitism

Here is a basic example:

> (in no way am I promoting antisemitism or encouraging racial stigmas but this example is so common and the least harmless I can think of) "all Jews are greedy" - clearly antisemitic

> Israel is guilty of murdering non-combatant children in Gaza - has nothing to do with Judaism. Involves the very sensitive problem of murdering innocent children. Is part of the complex Israel/Palestine political issue. Yet this could also end up being spun as an attack on Jews and being antisemitic.

I think getting labelled an 'antisemite' in a country like the USA is career-suicide. It does play into the conspiracies about Israel's influence, but my theory goes that criticism of Israel in a country like the USA is just wrong-think/wrong-speak. Getting to this level of disinformation is incredible. Hopefully the dictators in the Middle-East(and customers of NSO) don't catch on and start weaponizing criticism of them as Islamophobic ...

I was hoping to see some link between labor and demand. Wouldn't more employed people or higher salaries translate to increased demand? By that inverse, if demand is decreasing, does that mean less employed people or stagnating/lower wages?

I should have added that my comment implied as much to do with DDG as it does with cheap-VPN-provider-35 with a shell company in Belize.

The original comment was in reference to DDG proudly making claims of not getting requests from .gov and marketing themselves as a company who "cannot see what you search for".

I will add add a disclaimer to this comment that it is tinfoil-hat and just speculation(bordering on conspiracy) but many of these "we are a privacy-first company" might actually just be honeypots and fronts for 3-letter agencies.

The comment is not wholly conspiratorial, considering the CIA owned Swiss crypto company: Crypto AG [1]

It's within the realm of possibility that most of these privacy services could be owned by 3-letter agencies or small enough to be coerced into cooperation.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3050193/crypt...

This article is poorly written. It says the bot was used by more than 30,000 people. Does this imply 30,000 people looking for jobs used his bot or that 30,000 recruiters used his bot to screen candidates or 30,000 job applications were sent by him or (more than likely) a substantial portion of bots make up that 30,000?

Firstly, it is sad to say that HN is becoming more negative like the rest of the internet. On the front page there are more articles devoted to the ever-evolving shit-show of American-focused news issues. There are far less links to things that I THINK HN is more suited for: like BGP protocol or building your own ham radio.

That aside, my theory about whistleblowing is that it is a counter-intuitive exercise that results in very little at the expense of orgs tightening their security policies. Case in point: Snowden and the NSA

Leaks don't seem to happen after the first one. One or two small bills to "change a law" doesn't fix an endemic problem.

Facebook will continue after this blip. They have enough money to spin the PR in their favor and to grease the hands of their political-dependents there in Washington.

> .com, .net, and .org are all owned by Verisign

This does not seem accurate to me. The Wikipedia [1] page for .org says it is managed/controlled by the Public Interest Registry and not Verisign.

I recall this because of the scummy deal the PIR was trying to do to sell .org to a PE firm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.org

How do you integrate this tool into an existing blog?

I like the idea of ActivityPub followers but shifting all the contents over from an existing static site sounds like a wasteful exercise

I picked this up from my time watching those British period pieces, so this might be an assumption based on a fictional telling of the past, but hasn't this concept of being a private teacher/tutor been around for hundreds of years?

As these shows always showed the aristocracy, the aspiring hero/heroin had their private teachers "guiding them to greatness".

I also found it cynical that instead of aspiring to get a PhD to earn a mediocre salary(in comparison) at FANNG, one could navigate the field of being the private tutor to the already-rich and probably earn more.

Random person: "What do you do for a living that has made you so wealthy?"

Elite Hong Kong tutor: "I tutor 12 year olds privately on mathematics."

I looked into this the last time someone posted about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27551619

One thing I realized is how expensive Ethereum domains are. The domain price is equivalent to a regular domain and then you still have to pay the gas fee, which makes it more expensive than a casual .org or .net

The other drawback of these censorship-resistant blogs is that they all require plugins to access the non-HTTP domain, which all but rules out most non-technical people who don't even know what HTTP is.

And while it can still be accessed over HTTP, the bottlenecks become the same companies that might comply with censorship requests.

South Africa is a small economy relative to US, EU(block) or China and has large income disparity(small, very wealthy upper/middle class).

$3.6B = ZAR51.17B (xe.com). That seems like a lot of savings for the small upper/middle class.

The name of the crypto company "afri" suggests it might have targeted the African market as a whole.

Can any Africans/South Africans explain how ZAR51.17B of savings accumulated in this crypto company(or scam)?

Is it like Madoff who conned rich people or did these guys manage to reach pensioners and steal their money too?

I really dislike Twitter content being shared on HN. There is not much information to get from 300 chars or less.

Instead, check out this link: http://blog.almonit.eth.link/2020-05-21/Introduction_to_Dweb...

I checked this thread and the first thing I searched for was nim-lang[1]. Looks like nobody mentioned it yet.

Nim/Nim-lang makes it much easier to write Pythonic code. Minus all the complex things that only smart(er) programmers get(like GC, etc.), with Nim you can write code that is much more readable.

Another win for it is that it has very limited support for OOP, which IMHO sucks in terms of readability and understanding what the code is doing(as compared to imperative code).

[1]https://nim-lang.org/

Micro-managing your life to this extent is probably why all dystopian books/movies involve some well-meaning technical person who thinks we should be doing XYZ to prolong our lives.

While these things may (anecdotally) prolong your life, does anybody really want to be 102 and having to be nursed for all the basic needs like bathing yourself?

Combine this article with the many(many) others that tell you how to micro-manage all aspects of your life(to be "super productive") and you instantly find that once you start to deviate from your steady-state of micro-management, your worry skyrockets.

I almost fell for this one!

The hacker in me keeps thinking that if this became a thing, it would be titled: the Stack Overflow tax

and rather than pay for the service, many people would feel fleeced by it and it would sprout many techniques for bypassing it, creating an endless whack-a-mole for SO and the hell-bent-on-sticking-it-to-SO users.

Anecdotally, I also see this joke as a reminder of how paywalled the rest of the internet is. Public instagram profile? Login. Quora question? Login. Other social media site that allows some type of anon viewing? Giant modals to encourage you to signup/login.

There's a long Wikipedia article that covers this topic entirely:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India

Some strange observations for me from the article:

- There's 200M people in the world born into a life where they are/were considered physically untouchable by other "higher-ranked" people around them

- The usage of the label "backwards" in “other backwards classes,” or OBCs. I'll chalk it down to English not being the native language, but "disadvantaged" is more appropriate as "backwards" has a negative meaning.

I wonder if a better solution for the mental health of these people at the IITs is to simply have their own IIT where they make up the bulk of the student population. Then again, they might face discrimination by "upper-caste" professors refusing to work there or being "that" IIT that tech companies shouldn't hire from.

To the Americans on HN: is this type of discrimination comparable to being born as an African American in a city like Baltimore?

> With the economy increasingly back on its feet, some price pressures are likely to emerge,

How?

The article is short on substance about how a 'reopening' could lead to more inflation.

Is it more people going out and spending money? Something else maybe?

For all those thinking that this is some type of large-scale conspiracy by different entities, consider the following:

- Google automates everything and adds its 'AI' to it

- Even 10K reviews in such a short space of time will trigger the AI and then it will probably flag or even remove those reviews by itself (the AI is probably trained to see this as fraudulent)

- The whole app review thing is probably gamed already and the actual fraudulent reviews are never picked up because fraudsters are (sometimes) good at being fraudulent

I have no vested interest in Google and actually think people should de-Google as much as possible, but this is the same company that gets featured on HN frequently for its non-existent support.

Anecdotally, the .tk domain is a great idea in principle for giving so many people the opportunity to have their very own namespace for free. But like so many free things, bad actors(spammers, et. al) ruin it for the rest of us.

These support jobs are grueling. The pay isn't too great and you are sometimes required to know many years of accumulated sysadmin knowledge for the price of entry-level salaries.

Also, foreign tech support, typically Eastern European. For all the expensive audits tech companies do on their appsec, all it takes is 1 disgruntled Ukrainian who says "fuck those Americans for playing a part in fucking up my country" (or more usually phishing or a bribe) and suddenly a few important domains are compromised.

I wonder if paying the premium to MarkMonitor prevents the risk of foreign and underpaid staff, but the domain industry is more like a commodity now and they hook you in with "cheap cheap cheap".

Also, the only thing crypto seems to be making the news for these days is when a company gets hacked. So much for that revolution.

One would think that banks, who are the prime target for every person that "wants to hack", would be leading the way in terms of bug bounty programs and benefiting from smart people finding gaping holes in their systems.

This bank could have gotten into serious trouble with regulators if a bad actor exploited this bug and stole millions.

Don't expect them to adjust their behavior any time soon, but the "HN effect" might make them undo this action to avoid bad PR and make a few vague promises about "fixing the issue to avoid it happening in the future".

> It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs.

> If not, this is all about making you feel better,...

These 2 statements here reflect this weird behavior I have seen in certain countries like the UK where everyone will say things like "we <3 the NHS" or "protect the NHS" during the pandemic, but on the other end either the government or the proletariat or both will be unhappy to expand funding of the NHS.

At times this behavior feels a bit cult-like and I also think that the dopamine-effects are meant more for those giving the applause.