HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wang_li

2,140 karma · joined March 17, 2015

submissionscomments
wang_li··on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?
>>Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me

If you don't want someone to make a record of the photons that arrive at a particular place because those photons bounced off you, then don't let them go out into the world far beyond your private space.

wang_li··on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?
There is a super obvious opt out that doesn't require people to take special actions.

Don't go to places that allow recording.

wang_li··on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?
>...but me walking down a street with a handful of people on it should not lead me to expect...

You shouldn't have an expectation either way. If anything, the expectation that you will not be recorded is more of a violation of the social contract that the reverse. It's a public space that can be used for many purposes. If the effect on bystanders is minimal then attempting to exclude an activity is wrong. Can we say "I don't want you to see me, so look away whenever I am out." "I don't want to wait in traffic so everyone else has to pull over and clear the road when I am driving." "I didn't consent to this smell, so this restaurant has to turn off their stoves and ovens hours before I will be coming by."

Reality is that you can't exclude others if they aren't doing something that excludes you.

wang_li··on Delete FROM users WHERE location = 'Iran';
Not trading with a despot can just be not trading with a despot. It doesn't have to have an agenda.

If I personally choose to boycott a sneaker brand because I have a firm belief that they run sweatshops in a foreign country, is that collective punishment? No, I'm just not supporting someone who doesn't align with my values. Even if, as a side effect, the workers won't be getting the pittance that they would have gotten from my purchase.

wang_li··on MrBeast Failed to Disclose Ads and Improperly Collected Children's Data
Overexposure. Desensitization. Regardless, someone doing something good doesn't excuse them when they do something bad. You can be a civil rights icon who improved the lives of millions of people, but when you stand around, watch, and give advice as your buddy rapes a woman, you are a piece of shit.
wang_li··on How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me
The issue here is that people are treating reference materials as tutorials intended to cover your exact concern at the moment. You are expected to know what a narg is and what flargling means. In more real terms, the documentation for screen savers https://developer.apple.com/documentation/screensaver?langua... won't explain what a view is, what subclassing is, or what a Rect is. Those are required knowledge to consume the documentation and it's not a documentation failure that this is true.
wang_li··on This map is not upside down
Geographically "The West" only makes sense in Europe and Asia. Once you expand your scope, compass directions are meaningless and the term "The West" refers to certain philosophies, political, and cultural similarities. And even then, it also refers to a certain time frame.
wang_li··on Keeping SSH sessions alive with systemd-inhibit
What is the problem being solved? That your device is going to sleep or that it is interrupting SSH sessions? If it's the latter turn off keep-alives and an idle SSH session will live through sleeps and network interruptions.
wang_li··on Nearly 1 in 3 Starlink satellites detected within the SKA-Low frequency band
You should also ask why do we have to do this particular research? Both parties are impacting this particular band of the spectrum. One by excluding others and the other by radiating in those frequencies.
wang_li··on F-Droid build servers can't build modern Android apps due to outdated CPUs
You can buy a mini pc for less than $550. For $200 on Amazon you can get an N97 based box with 12 GB RAM and 4 cores running at 3 GHz and a 500 GB SATA SSD. That’s got to be as fast as their current build systems and supports the required instructions.
wang_li··on OpenSSH Post-Quantum Cryptography
I don't want my government to keep secrets for 20 years. There is nothing I am OK with them doing that they can't be generally open about in time. Ex. the MLK files. No justification for the courts saying that the FBI files regarding MLK have to be kept under lock and key for 50 years.
wang_li··on Stop SSL certificate outages with automated monitoring – Enterprise Ready
CAs need to go away. They’re untrustworthy and their inclusion in browsers and OSes seems largely unregulated.
wang_li··on Show HN: I made a tool to generate photomosaics with your pictures
There is a naive approach to making this kind of thing that reduces the component images to such a small size (2-3 pixels in large image) that turns this into more of a dithering exercise than looking for artifacts in each component image to match up lines. It's still a nice effect, but it's quite different when the component images are > 10% the size of the final image, instead of < 1% the size.
wang_li··on Mistakes Microsoft made in the Xbox security system (2005)
RSA doesn’t take that much code. The Atari lynx would initialize all the hardware, perform RSA, and load the next step from the cart in 512 bytes.
wang_li··on Why are there no good dinosaur films?
There's a strong case to be made that the impact not only was enough to trigger the extinction, it happened in 1 day. The theory is that the ejecta from the impact was voluminous enough that it was sent into space and then spread around the Earth. On reentry it heated the atmosphere to thousands of degrees. So animals in New Zealand that likely didn't even feel the impact died when the air was too hot to breath. The only survivors were things in burrows or nests or under water.
wang_li··on Introducing the first alpha of Turso: The next evolution of SQLite
Looks like some real issues with trademark violation in the way they are pitching their product.
wang_li··on ASCIIMoon: The moon's phase live in ASCII art
Two observations.

First, there comes a point when it’s not ascii art, it’s just dithering. The use of different colors for the characters goes even further from ascii art.

Second, opening this on my iPad results in a moon with a black crescent on the bottom and an oddly shaped dark green crescent on the left. What star system is this moon in?

wang_li··on Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme
I went to Canada 10 years ago. When they asked why, I told them I was mailing a birthday gift to a Canadian friend and I wanted to be the one who had to pay any duties or taxes. They had me pull over and go inside. Where they asked the password for my phone and then took it. A couple hours later they came back and gave me my phone, charged me ~$100 and let me go through. When I got to my car I found that they had opened the package I was mailing and a number of things had been moved around, from which I concluded they had also searched my car.

i drove to Surrey to a UPS Store, resealed and shipped the package and returned to the border. The US Immigration officer asked why I was only in Canada for 30 minutes, I explained, he laughed and sent me on my way.

Moral of the story is that every country can and will search your stuff and detain you and often turn you back for no meaningful reason.

wang_li··on Show HN: Turbine – 16-bit CPU Architecture and Emulator built in C
Sometimes by register size, sometimes by ALU size, sometimes by data bus width. But I've never heard of a CPU bitness defined by address bus size.
wang_li··on The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals
>Think early 90's computers, and everything required to run a X server well. lots of memory, nice graphics, a nice cpu to move those graphics around. despite being technically thin clients, Dedicated X servers were not cheap.

They really didn't have that. Largely Unix workstations running X had a graphics stack that almost entirely software with no or little hardware acceleration. What made them workstations compared to PCs was the large "high" resolution monitors. The DEC lab at my university consisted of DECstation 3100s (16 MHz MIPS R2000 with 16 MB RAM and an 8-bit bitmapped display with no hardware acceleration.) The engineering department had labs with Sun and RS/6000 machines.

Commodity PCs were 386s with 4-8 MB RAM and monitors that would do 640x480 or 800x600 and video cards that would do 8 or 15/16 bpp. A great day was when someone put a linux kernel and XFree86 on a 1.2 MB floppy that could use XDMCP to connect to the DECs or Suns to turn any PC in the PC labs into an X terminal.

wang_li··on Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success
It's a bit absurd though. The roads are paid by tax payers from the general fund of the city, but they discriminate on how much it costs to use those roads based on where you live. If everyone entering the zone paid the same then it would be one thing. But they have exemptions and deductions based on residency and income. If they are going to charge people who don't live in the area and not charge the people who do live in the area, then the people in the area should have to buy all the roads and pay for the upkeep.
wang_li··on Why JPEGs still rule the web (2024)
On the classic macs they’re was a program called DropDisk. You could drag a disk image to it and it auto mounted it. That suggests a tool for you. Make a desktop app that you can drag and drop images on that converts them to jpeg and saves them in a folder.
wang_li··on Show HN: PyDoll – Async Python scraping engine with native CAPTCHA bypass
>Most machine learning, data science, and similar applications need data.

So. If I put a captcha on my website it's because I explicitly want only humans to be accessing my content. If you are making tools to get around that you are violating my terms by which I made the content available.

No one should need a captcha. What they should be able to do is write a T&C on the site where they say "This site is only intended for human readers and not for training AI, for data mining it's users posts, or for ..... and if you do use it for any of these you agree to pay me $100,000,000,000." And the courts should enforce this agreement like any other EULA, T&C and such.

wang_li··on Machine Code Isn't Scary
We teach math this way. Addition and subtraction. Then multiplication. Then division. Fractions. Once those are understood we start diversifying and teaching different techniques where these make up the building blocks, statistics, finance, algebra, etc.

It may put people off a programming career, but perhaps that is good. There are a lot of people who work in programming who don't understand the machines they use, who don't understand algorithms and data structures, they have no idea of the impact of latency, of memory use, etc. They're entire career is predicated on being able to never have to solve a problem that hasn't been solved in general terms already.

wang_li··on "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
Lack of thumbs.
wang_li··on Updates to Windows for the Digital Markets Act
>I've used linux as my OS of choice for the past ~ 25 years.

This is kind of a useless statement. You might as well say "I use an operating system." Someone will say "how have you solved problem X or feature Y?" And someone else will say "Oh, that's available in Ubuntu." And then "What about Z?" And the answer is "OpenSUSE has that." And so on. Ultimately, all the Linux advocates will say that Linux is parity with Windows, but the reality is that there is no distro that has 80%+ coverage of Windows features.

wang_li··on CRLF Injection in `–proxy-header` allows extra HTTP headers (CWE-93)
That is not a bug in curl, at most it's a bug in whatever gathered $UNTRUSTED_USER_INPUT.
wang_li··on The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority
> but only if they know the software is higher quality.

I assume all software is shit in some fashion because every single software license includes a clause that has "no fitness for any particular purpose" clause. Meaning, if your word processor doesn't process words, you can't sue them.

When we get consumer protection laws that require that software does what is says on the tin quality will start mattering.

wang_li··on Sierpiński Triangle? In My Bitwise and?
The change rate in binary notation is fractal.
wang_li··on NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
When you speak in abstracts and generic terms about the value of government funding research, you are saying nothing meaningful in terms of knowing whether the government should spend more or less on research. If the OP's specific research was into The Changing Mating Habits of the Delta Smelt Due to Habitat Destruction, then probably it was money that could far better spent paying tuition for, say, medical students or even just letting tax payers keep their money and spend it in a way that directly benefits their family, their community, and themselves. Otherwise you are just handwaving and demanding everyone assume that all research is good and should be publicly funded.

In terms of cutting NSF budget, they have issued grants for things that explicitly violate Title IX of the Civil Rights act.[1] You can't justify all NSF spending by cherry picking successful past spending. We can evaluate the benefits of proposed research and whether it aligns with the intentions and values of society at large. We don't have to spend because someone incanted the words "Because SCIENCE!" over a bubbling beaker.

1. https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2424507&His...

← PreviousPage 10 of 34Next →