Hacker News Reader

spindritfon The Increasing Trend of Online Extortion

There is no connection between CryptoLocker and ad targeting. What you're proposing would do very little to thwart tracking (imho strong identities would make it easier) and completely kill the open Internet where I can send and receive information from people I don't know, maybe even people I wouldn't want to know otherwise.

spindritfon Google search – “king of united states”

Yeah, I'm not a google bot, I get that falcor wanted to call breitbart garbage.

spindritfon When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

If you're from the EU and looking for a tech-job over here, I'd be happy to help out

How important is it to speak German?

spindritfon When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?

You cannot simply extrapolate from smaller intervention but it does lower the prior for a larger one, of course. Maybe unless you have a specific hypothesis which predicts a non-linear effect.

Also, exercising will actually do very little for your weight because calories have became too cheap and readily available to burn them off. You can eat more by accident than you will use in a fairly vigorous workout.

spindritfon Fix a page in Barbie's book

Really? Seems to be mostly try-hard humour.

http://computer-engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/266

http://computer-engineer-barbie.herokuapp.com/view/402

spindritfon Youtube-dl

Well, you can get a cheap VPS in the US, or UK, or wherever the content is available, and run youtube-dl there. You can also use a proxy[1]. Unfortunately, I think socks proxies are not supported yet[1].

[1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/documentation.html#d5

[2] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/402

spindritfon Youtube-dl

The frequent (almost daily, sometimes more frequent than daily) updates are really impressive.

spindritfon Youtube-dl

Including non-video sites like Soundcloud and it supports playlists (downloads multiple files) on and off Youtube.

spindritfon What Was Said at the Uber Dinner

This has not been my experience but either way, let's say someone pronounces that 2+2=7. You could respond with "it's actually 4" (address the idea) or "anyone who believes 2+2=7 should be fired" (attempt to silence it, without violence though). There's a pretty clear difference between the two approaches.

spindritfon Doxxing defense: Remove your personal info from data brokers

The threats of violence are usually empty posturing but there are other serious risks associated with speaking out online under your real name. In the US you can get "swatted"[1], which is an evil twist on usual pizza pranks. It's not far from that to getting shot (or having your dog shot).

Then there are basic SEO threats to your good name. And the old "taking information out of the Internet is like taking piss out of a pool." Whether the information is true or not.

I don't think this is an appropriate defence though. Sticking to usual good practices of not conflating anonymous personas with your real identity, using a PO box and proxy services (whether for domain registrations or actual network proxies) will be more productive. Not good enough when evading FBI but probably more than fine otherwise.

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

spindritfon Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

I'm rarely if ever troubled by UI changes but it took me a good moment before I figured out how to rerfresh your inbox in new Gmail. It's pretty obvious that you need to drag down when there are messages but without any (inbox zero) acting as an indicator, I went through all the options, and only picked the right move by accident.

If you're just starting out and don't have a feel for the mobile paradigm, those gestures may as well be magic. Maybe you're simply not supposed to refresh anything by hand any more. Maybe it's supposed to be magic.

spindritfon Brands Are Wasting Money on Facebook and Twitter, Forrester Says

You set up a catch-all on your domain, and just make up whatever@domain.tld whenever you need an address. I have all my domains set up that way. Not even for unique addresses, just for convenience.

spindritfon Brands Are Wasting Money on Facebook and Twitter, Forrester Says

I still don't get it. Is there something in the name, a pun?

spindritfon Unicode Text Converter

Those are lost on many people nowadays. And strike through imho looks better.

spindritfon Why Is American Teaching So Bad?

It's not. It's on par with the rest of the western world[1], maybe except Finland which is an outlier whether you include the US or not. At least as of 2009, I doubt it somehow collapsed since.

Not to mention higher education, where Americans lead. Although judging by tuitions perhaps a little too far in the diminishing returns region.

[1] http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

spindritfon Unicode Text Converter

Also, strike-through. Which is the one I find genuinely useful because I like the suggestive way to say s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ then visibly correcting to something else.

http://adamvarga.com/strike/

spindritfon Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

No. A proper certificate protects against malicious DNS resolver.

What you're talking about is being introduced alongside DNSSEC, and it's called DANE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...

spindritfon Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

ACME sounds great. Copying codes from emails is suboptimal at best. Free certificate from command line and free revocation from the same client sound even better.

I just don't know about the automatic configuration tool. Like webpanels for managing a server, it has never worked for me.

spindritfon Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists

One can hope that once it happens a few times, journalists will maybe rediscover the basic ethics of their profession. Right now, they simply seem to demand a monopoly on digging for dirt.

spindritfon China Just Blocked Thousands of Websites

I'm pretty sure the language barrier and a massive internal market do most of the heavy lifting here. Look at Yandex.

The Great Firewall is a wash at best. It protects local companies from international competition but it's part of a policy that makes foreigners trust Chinese products much less and will hurt their adoption.

spindritfon Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists

I cannot treat complaints from journalists about digging up dirt seriously. This has essentially become their job.

Were was this criticism when some guy's personal phone calls were broadcasted and dissected? When Gawker was buying people's sex tapes? And not months ago, although then too, last week[1].

This is the world you created. Enjoy.

EDIT: And if you're downvoting, I'd love to hear why.

[1] http://defamer.gawker.com/somebody-is-selling-an-usher-sex-t...

spindritfon Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

They have seen a couple of departures lately. Joey Hess[1] blamed the way decisions are made within the project[2].

[1] https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/on_leaving/

[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00174.html

spindritfon Japan Falls into Recession

I have set refcontrol[1] to forge referral and send google.com for online.wsj.com. Saves you the googling.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

spindritfon The Growing Impact of Old Scientific Papers

The alternative explanation to easier access is "great stagnation." Discovery is slowing down, low hanging fruit has been picked, so older papers are relatively more important than they used to be.

spindritfon Why Whole Foods Is Moving in to One of the Poorest Neighborhoods in Chicago

The comment wasn't about poverty in general but about whether poor people work and how much. The ill-designed incentive structure and generally disappointing performance of government bureaucracy in helping anyone are worth noting, however, if you don't work, you clearly have the time to go do some grocery shopping.

Which was the gist of that comment as it was a response to

A poor person is probably working some physically taxing job and is just too tired to cook a healthy meal. Or too tired to get to the market selling healthy food

Probably not.

spindritfon Level Playing Field

If everybody merely followed the standard and didn't extend their browser, progress and innovation would slow down quite a bit. At the very least, with Chrome Google put some fire under javascript performance and encryption/SPDY.

spindritfon Still Here, Part 1: A Memoir

It goes against the preferred political outlook of downmodders. It could have been something as boring as a government statistic and it would have been downvoted just the same.

spindritfon Level Playing Field

Personally, I use Google Apps with a vanity domain :) That's how I know. The only (free) alternative left seems to be Yandex[1] which comes with its own host of privacy issues.

You don't really need a secondary MX when running your own mail server. Senders will keep retrying for a week or so when your server is down.

Secondary makes the whole setup much more complicated because then you need to synchronize anti-spam and other configuration between them. And move data back when the primary server comes back online.

[1] https://pdd.yandex.ru/domains_add/ You need a regular Yandex Mail account first. The domain panel is in Russian only but works with Google translate. Webmail is decent and available in English.

spindritfon Level Playing Field

Google Apps have always been a tack-on for many of Google's smaller services. Google+ was completely unavailable for Apps at first. Now Inbox is unavailable.

It's a fairly conservative product targeted primarily at organizations who value stability over new features. "A personal account with vanity address," while popular with geeks, is not really the intended use.

spindritfon Why Whole Foods Is Moving in to One of the Poorest Neighborhoods in Chicago

From your first link, a comment by tptacek starts with

I do not like where 'yummyfajitas logic takes us and would thus like to find ways to disagree with him, but much of what he says checks out.

What if it's just that? What if what he says is simply true?