Hacker News Reader

> It’s an okay operating system, but it could use a good text editor.

is an old meme.

> I am not an emacs or vim user, but doesn't emacs support vim style editing(key bindings) or it supports just a subset of vim?

it supports quite a bit via Evil.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

sdwiselyon Tracking my phone's silent connections

from memory they recently wontfix'ed some issues about this saying they leave things like updates on http so they can be cached on corporate networks.

sdwiselyon Study blames YouTube for rise in number of Flat Earthers

sadly in my experience I've met a few true believers and youtube being the source doesn't surprise me as "look it up yourself on youtube" seems to be the go-to response to my questions about things like iridium satellites or how GPS works.

sdwiselyon A small notebook for a system administrator

honestly I'd be really happy with a keyboard that folded out to around the size of one of the smallish bluetooth keyboards, X emacs a browser and a terminal on my phablet.

The closest I've come was a nexus 7 with a keyboard case and bluetooth mouse and remote desktop.

sdwiselyon Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – digested read (2018)

ah I was confused in a different way. I scrolled straight down to the body and missed the credit.

I briefly thought NNT was the author of a very strange critique of his own work.

sdwiselyon Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – digested read (2018)

this was a bit confusing without context.

It seems to be a (satire?) book summary. I haven't read Skin in the game.

sdwiselyon NordVPN transfers data to tracking service

thanks, that's actually really interesting!

I can see how it would be useful for invalidating data in analytics, seems like a bad choice of partner for an app promoting privacy though.

As an anti-analysis tool it seems like it's more likely to harm users (api is reporting incorrectly, sensor is faulty etc) than slow down reverse engineering much.

sdwiselyon Do you remember TJ Holowaychuk?

I remember him from the Ruby community before that. Is there a correlation? probably not.

Life happens.

sdwiselyon NordVPN transfers data to tracking service

my summary (not a native speaker and pasting the full translation was too messy).

the nordvpn app for android is sending device data to multiple trackers.

It contains all the normal things you probably expect, screen size, manufacturer, uuids for advertising etc but also some strangely specific stuff.

This includes sensor data (Gyroscope, Accelerometer, etc)

from the json sent to "AppsFlyer":

    sensors":[{"sT":4,"sV":"BOSCH","sVE":[0.015487671,0.022598267,-0.013870239],"sVS":[-0.061203003,-0.059432983,0.04260254],"sN":"BMI160 Gyroscope -Wakeup Secondary"},{"sT":1,"sV":"BOSCH","sVE":[0.6355438,6.844879,7.2422333],"sVS":[0.1184082,6.7634735,7.1632233],"sN":"BMI160 Accelerometer -Wakeup Secondary"},{"sT":4,"sV":"BOSCH","sVE":[0.015487671,0.022598267,-0.013870239],"sVS":[-0.061203003,-0.059432983,0.04260254],"sN":"BMI160 Gyroscope"},{"sT":2,"sV":"Yamaha","sVE":[46.717834,-18.313599,-34.529114],"sVS":[46.717834,-20.56427,-33.029175],"sN":"YAS537 Magnetometer"},{"sT":2,"sV":"Yamaha","sVE":[46.717834,-18.313599,-34.529114],"sVS":[46.717834,-20.56427,-33.029175],"sN":"YAS537 Magnetometer -Wakeup Secondary"},{"sT":1,"sV":"BOSCH","sVE":[0.6355438,6.844879,7.2422333],"sVS":[0.1184082,6.7634735,7.1632233],"sN":"BMI160 Accelerometer"}

sdwiselyon Show HN: Convert article in current tab to readable form and upload it to IPFS

which surely is the best possible without the original author signing it?

All that can be assured is that the content that the person mirroring it and linking you to it is as they intended.

sdwiselyon Google Earth Reverse Engineering

I feel like it's to explicitly allow b-roll for media.

sdwiselyon When Too Cute Is Too Much, the Brain Can Get Aggressive

My girlfriend does it too, it was very confusing to me for a while.

It's like a seething rage of joy.

sdwiselyon AdGuard DNS: A Privacy-Oriented DNS Server

it doesn't seem like they have mentioned it but this is an alternative to their existing self-hosted dns solution.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

sdwiselyon How ‘Baldur’s Gate’ Saved the Computer RPG

> I wonder if people knew back then that this was going to be such an influential game (after it was famous, but before time had passed).

I don't think anyone could have picked how lasting and influential it would be. It was one of about 3 games I've ever pre-ordered though.

sdwiselyon How ‘Baldur’s Gate’ Saved the Computer RPG

Pillars of Eternity has also done a fantastic job in this regard.

sdwiselyon Browsers

it's more complicated than that though.

Nobody is lamenting the loss of the edge engine. Things like choice of video codec, drm module, etc have shown is it's a good thing to have a few different vendors with a seat at the table for standards.

Most important of those is Firefox.

sdwiselyon Australia rushes its ‘dangerous’ anti-encryption bill into parliament

and it looks like it just passed the senate unammended.

We are officially bad citizens of the internet and our contributions should be scrutinized as such.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-06/labor-backdown-federa...

sdwiselyon Australia rushes its ‘dangerous’ anti-encryption bill into parliament

As an Australian - good.

Move away from us, we should be considered toxic. It's the best thing that can happen for the rest of the world and it's the best thing that can happen for Australians.

sdwiselyon Registry Agreement Termination Information Page

yeah, most of them you have to wonder why they bothered and others you have to wonder why they would let go of them.

.mcdonalds for example seems like a strange one to let go of even if just for easy memorable addresses people see in store.

perhaps their lack of easy recognition for the user as a url in that context.

sdwiselyon Intro to NFC Payment Relay Attacks

I'm not thinking of the card as the weak point, more the reader.

a rogue employee putting a false reader that relays to the real reader.

Back when I worked in retail we had an issue in our local area where a group impersonated our support department and came on site to install altered versions of our readers.

I'd imagine things like the readers in our public transport ticketing machines are a pretty easy target too to hide a nearby relay.

In Australia our NFC limits are pretty high at ~$100, readers are nearly everywhere and the readers are sometimes display-less plastic discs.

Even the local animal shelter has a tap to make a donation thing now.

Absolutely fine to be!

I actually gave it a quick thought that I was curious how the hostnames were assigned but posted right before bed.

sdwiselyon Renowned hacker 'tessa88' identity revealed, Hacker a Russian

wow, I thought you were talking about a normal size household. 300+ of them were registered to the same address.

"Tor Hidden Services" are services hosted on the tor network and inaccessible outside it.

Hosts are assigned a dns name <id>.onion so clients can connect to that service.

sdwiselyon Build a do-it-yourself home air purifier for about $25

> The app is useless, so a cheaper version without WiFi and bluetooth would be great.

have you tried it with hass (home assistant)? I've been considering getting one and running it via that instead.

sdwiselyon Accelerated “Ray Tracing in One Weekend” in CUDA

some good eli5s here, just adding for the grandparent post to remember that light bounces so the calculations get rather iterative and expensive.

sdwiselyon NixOS – Purely Functional Linux Distribution

Great run-through, thank you!

sdwiselyon Joanna Rutkowska leaves Qubes OS, joins Golem

Another challenge is the trustworthiness of the x86 platform.

I can only imagine that's incredibly frustrating. Knowing no matter how hard you work on Qubes, x86 isn't really deserving of trust right now.

sdwiselyon Spent – Poverty Simulator (2011)

Same here - people think, "why do you need a car, I certainly don't need one on the Upper East Side!" - and for them, they don't. In rural Texas, not having one means you're very geographically bound, and effectively unemployable.

You're absolutely correct. I'm lucky enough to live in Melbourne Australia. Until this year "world's most livable city". Public Transport is fantastic and affordable.

However, if you're unemployed and looking for a entry level job, then lets give a few examples.

Warehouse and factory work - plenty of that around. However by nature they're going to be in industrial zones quite far from residential areas and transport. You can probably rule that out without a car.

Cleaning - You might be able to get commercial cleaning, although your inability to get between jobs isn't going to look great to employers. Residential cleaning doesn't seem likely.

Labouring - No chance you can be reliable because the jobsite will constantly be changing.

By nature plenty of the low-skilled work you're immediately unable to do by not having a car, even in a city with a VERY good infrastructure.

I don't necessarily think the posters are lacking in empathy, I think I was just trying to bright side that perhaps the tone of the comments meant there was a bit more societal awareness than we had back then.

sdwiselyon Spent – Poverty Simulator (2011)

I actually got quite depressed playing the game, then reading the quite dismissive comments of 2011.

It was kind of nice to switch back to the current discussion and see it lean a bit more toward empathy for the poor.

sdwiselyon Facebook Network Breach Impacts Up to 50M Users

> But it’s clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted “View As”, a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts

oh boy, what a mess.