HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wvh

1,904 karma · joined June 4, 2011

submissionscomments
wvh··on Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
PGP had the right idea, but the system is too hard for the average person.

With "system" I refer to building a web (or multiple!) of trust, based on parameters that you decide upon.

wvh··on Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones
It is a slippery slope. I'm just hoping that a more surgical drone strike against a weapons factory will create less victims than the blunt force of a ballistic missile aimed "in the general direction of".

In a way, technology could enable one party to "outwit" their opponent by taking away the means to wage war without causing random loss of life.

wvh··on Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones
The moral question is if you've unknowingly contributed to war, death and destruction, or if you are actually helping drones to accurately find real targets – which hopefully are not innocent civilians but legitimate military targets.
wvh··on Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony
I guess one can only optimise the system for the majority following the beaten path. Some folks just have to find a way both through the world and through their own head.
wvh··on Dopamine Fracking
I'd say there's at least a third reason: intellectual (or rather technical) curiosity of photography itself. Often, when I take a picture, it is just to see how a particular shot turns out, much less so for any sentimental value to myself or anybody consuming those images later on.

I'd also say that's most likely a healthy kind of dopamine usage, as it's leading one into a life of exploration, learning and wonder.

But you're right, taking a true in-the-moment picture is a skill.

wvh··on GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension
I've been telling less computer literate folks not to install random stuff since the nineties, and I can't understand how many devs are doing just that these days.

I used to work in security auditing, and it makes me feel pretty jaded to think of the gigabytes upon gigabytes of random stuff that just gets pulled in from everywhere in IDEs, package managers, build pipelines and container images.

At least back then there was still a chance to read a significant part of the code and find problems before they found you.

wvh··on Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism
I've been playing guitar since I was a little kid. I wonder how learning "two-handed" skills such as playing music impacts how "handy" or "polydextrous" one is.

There are left-handed guitar players that play right-handed, such as Nick Johnston, who claim the gaps in their technique or preference for certain left-hand-only techniques are informed by being left-handed; so it seems that a life-long of an insane amount of practice does not necessary change how comfortable one is using either hand for a given task.

wvh··on Hindenburg’s Smoking Room
The alternative is/was of course to be stuck in a small space for several days with smokers showing withdrawal symptoms. Not sure I'd want to experience that in something like a submarine...
wvh··on MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
I've never owned anything from Apple, but this model has me interested in having something that can run commercial software (I'm a long-time Linux user). But I really think 8GB is going to be a major limit for running a DAW or anything related to live music production.

I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.

wvh··on Googlebook
Sometimes you've got to protect people against themselves...
wvh··on Googlebook
It used to be so local (regional) brands had sizes adapted to their demographics. There used to be a thing like Italian, French, German, Scandinavian, etc sizing. I guess for global brands like Patagonia it's going to be challenging to fit everybody into the same – let's say – "M" size.
wvh··on I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
One could argue it was not given away for free, but with a silent expectation of reciprocity. Using open-source is a gentleman's agreement to be respectful towards the project, a good citizen, not to abuse and potentially contribute.

But you're right communities are now having to concoct a wild-growing collection of semi open-source licenses to protect themselves from abuse by a few big players.

wvh··on Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16
This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.

I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.

wvh··on A Tour of Oodi
Oodi is more an experiment in creating a social, communal meeting space than a library. I think there's a terrible need for such social spaces in modern society with very few places where you can meet people and where you don't need to consume to hang out somewhere; this especially in countries with climates that make it difficult to hang out in streets and market places.

What's also special is that this is a beautiful building, instead of the derelict buildings such social projects get usually shoved away in.

And, it's welcoming to babies and children.

wvh··on How to get better at guitar
Cranked tube amps melting down was also part of that magic. A feat not appreciated anymore in this day and age on most stages.
wvh··on How to get better at guitar
A lot of us don't turn out to be professional musicians, writers or athletes. In between family and work, you start to realize how much these people put in to be at the top of their game. Time and effort you can't really put in if you didn't make the jump and have other life commitments.

I guess that's why a lot of people grow old wondering what life would have been if they would have followed through on whatever talent they appeared to possess in youth.

wvh··on How to get better at guitar
I think it's pretty frustrating if the songs/pieces you actually want to play are demanding or even at the virtuoso level.

If you really want to play a David Gilmour guitar solo or sing some Led Zeppelin, it better not suck because it won't hit the mark at all.

For me, the reason to pick up the guitar as a kid was to play stuff I liked, stuff that turned out not to be that easy, and every time I play, I feel that gap of where I feel I should be to respect the music I'm trying to play.

I wish I had more your attitude.

wvh··on Set the Line Before It's Crossed
I feel trying to codify human behaviour into simple rules is pretty tough.

Playfully rough intercourse might be the best ever, or turn out quite horrible at the wrong time; the only difference being subtle difference in mood of the parties involved. Same for using somebody as an emotional trashcan, or making a semi-offensive humorous joke about somebody. There's no objective truth.

Boundaries are very fluent and dynamic, depending on moods and trust between parties. Knowing when to give in and being able to walk those rough edges is often what makes life interesting and people good partners and friends.

wvh··on Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?
First you probably need some silent, persistent and occasionally cantankerous folks that can grudgingly work on annoying boring problems all night just because they want to solve it no matter what. If you have a few of those, you really have to start looking for more social people that can glue the herd of cats together so all noses point the same way.

My experience has been that solving a very technical problem and solving a social one are very different skill sets and very few people have both skills and are capable of using both of those skills at the same time.

wvh··on Font Smuggler – Copy hidden brand fonts into Google Docs
We ignored Richard Stallman?
wvh··on Exercise has 'similar effect' to therapy, study on depression shows
It's important to keep cortisol low, and over-exercise can cause cortisol to spike – as does depression in general, hence the sleeping difficulties many depressed people experience. Likely that's why resistance training and HIIT are more helpful in this case as there is less built up of stress hormones.

I've been diagnosed with moderate to severe depression, and I'm a trial runner and do CrossFit. It's a balancing act to find strength and feeling capable through sport without increasing insomnia and early waking, likely because of cortisol spikes.

Sport does more for me than antidepressants, which have little effect than making me feel tired all the time. I've gone through a whole battery of them with little success and I've become quite critical of them. But I'm lucky to generally like sport and eat pretty healthily; I can imagine for others that can be an extra stressor they really don't need.

wvh··on Exercise has 'similar effect' to therapy, study on depression shows
You just described causes of depression, like divorce, social isolation and being unemployed. I know there are people that can feel free in a place as horrible as a concentration camp, but most of us have some basic needs that have to be met to feel OK and have some hope.

Some people have actual neurotransmitter imbalances, but many of us just have monkey brains that don't know how to deal with (real, abstract) modern-day stressors that trigger a fight-or-flight response.

wvh··on Micropayments as a reality check for news sites
Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read? Or content that makes either extreme of the political spectrum feel passionate? I fear it would drown out little truths and balanced opinions.
wvh··on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
Many European countries have decent authentication, banking and payment system alternatives or even innovative solutions. I think, like usually, it's just a problem to break out of national or regional circles into something pan-European.

A lot of people seem to agree that relying on a handful of too powerful American companies, especially in the ad and social media space, is a terrible idea and running foul of privacy requirements. Remains to be seen if some larger alternatives manage to pop up though. The European landscape is pretty fragmented.

wvh··on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
While it's true Europe might not be producing the next Apple or Google, there are lots of alternatives, like national academic login systems, logging into third parties with bank credentials or government IDs... Solutions that depend less on one commercial company capturing the market, that are in place on a national level and work well. It's a different landscape. Factors like current day political turmoil make people much less trusting of "American" solutions. It remains to be seen if this goes beyond sentiment into some actual pan-European solutions that (claim to) safeguard privacy and data.
wvh··on MinIO repository is no longer maintained
I think the landscape has changed with those hyperscalers outcompeting open-source projects with alternative profit avenues for the money available in the market.

From my experience, Ceph works well, but requires a lot more hardware and dedicated cluster monitoring versus something like more simple like Minio; in my eyes, they have a somewhat different target audience. I can throw Minio into some customer environments as a convenient add-on, which I don't think I could do with Ceph.

Hopefully one of the open-source alternatives to Minio will step in and fill that "lighter" object storage gap.

wvh··on MinIO repository is no longer maintained
Apart from Minio, we tried Garage and Ceph. I think there's definitely a need for something that interfaces using S3 API but is just a simple file system underneath, for local, testing and small scale deployments. Not sure that exists? Of course a lot of stuff is being bolted onto S3 and it's not as simple as it initially claimed to be.
wvh··on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun
I guess they consider themselves untouchable.
wvh··on Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results
I feel these practices contribute to the post-truth society where a user looks for a fact and gets a paid-for opinion shoved in the face instead. It should be easy for the user to discern the factual relevance of search query results, and it does not bode well if the provider of the search functionality is in on the deceit.
wvh··on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
I used to think that way. Then, divorce, custody battle and the dark abyss. No home, nobody to talk to; just silence, loneliness, general apathy of the world around you. It's the trap of the middle-aged man: to focus on work, invest in family, and hope these things will be a constant because you are doing the right thing. We don't have enough emotional bonds, don't know how to create them, and if the wife leaves and takes the kids, there's nothing left.
← PreviousPage 2 of 21Next →