HN user

_Understated_

1,486 karma
Posts20
Comments399
View on HN
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Where to download IP Geolocation CSV/txt file

_Understated_
2pts3
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: What has happened to the quality of docs.microsoft.com?

_Understated_
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: Microsoft blocked my outlook.com account for using a VPN. Any ideas?

_Understated_
61pts70
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: What are some good sites or blogs about the mechanics behind trading?

_Understated_
8pts4
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Audible Reviews Are Loaded With Fakes

_Understated_
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: What's your favourite software project you've worked on and why?

_Understated_
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Does Anyone Use ML.net?

_Understated_
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Where can I find unbiased research on data-driven adtech effectiveness

_Understated_
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: What would it take to eat into Google's web dominance?

_Understated_
4pts2
readology.net 7y ago

Companies Don't Give a Shit about Your Data Security

_Understated_
1pts0
readology.net 7y ago

Show HN: Readology – Simple, bloat-free blogging platform

_Understated_
3pts2
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: Learning BI on MS Stack. What to Build for Practice?

_Understated_
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Show HN: Epic levels of tracking from a website

_Understated_
2pts2
yakk.io 9y ago

Show HN: Yakk – Project Management and Collaboration On-Premises or in the Cloud

_Understated_
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Why are there so many Amazon stories on the front page?

_Understated_
1pts4
www.bbc.co.uk 9y ago

Supreme Court rules against Named Person scheme

_Understated_
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: What are your thoughts/experiences with right click menus in web apps

_Understated_
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Is Microsoft sabotaging older versions of Windows?

_Understated_
18pts35
enterpass.co 10y ago

EnterPass – Corporate password management without the cloud

_Understated_
3pts0
enterpass.co 10y ago

Show HN: EnterPass – Secure and manage your corporate passwords on your premises

_Understated_
3pts0

I can't help but think that with the way modern languages/programming are going, we're making a rod for our own backs!

Don't get me wrong, I've read about Rust and it's capabilities vs things like C++ and yes, I can see benefits. That's not what I mean.

It's in 10 years when we clone a repo on Github and it pulls down 2000 dependencies: will they all still work?

Everything nowadays seems to require massive dependencies!

I know we've long used libraries for different bits of functionality rather than reinventing the wheel but it just seems like we're giving up masses of control/agility for convenience that may kick the shit out of us later!

Just a thought...

Wouldn't this imply that the vaccine is physically harmful to you?

I have no evidence to say that the vaccine is physically harmful to me, personally, but there are plenty of stories on the web where people in the prime of their health, have been struck down with something after taking it.

However, there is plenty of evidence to say that covid itself is not harmful at all... look at the stats - literally no one is dying!

These jags are also brand new: they're a few years old so there is ZERO data on long-term risks. None! For all we know, in a few years people may start dropping dead with heart conditions.

Now, if covid was as life-threatening to the majority of people as it is being marketed as, then I can potentially see a case where people should get it but the figures do not lie: almost no one is dying from covid.

Remember, this covid jag is a treatment for something that it's unlikely you will succumb to. So, should you get every vaccine going just in case?

Additionally, the gov wants you to keep taking it, over and over again! That will increase your long-term risk (again, zero data on the long-term effects!).

Plus, by giving in and taking it each time you're told, what kind of world are you leaving your children? They're going to have to get a medical procedure to go to the pub ffs!

So, in answer to your question about whether it's harmful... we don't know and the thing is do you really want to risk your health and that of your children for something that has almost zero chance of affecting you?

Edit: Forgot to say, the point of these jags (despite them incorrectly being called vaccines) is only to make you feel better when you catch it. Make no mistake, they DO NOT prevent infection, DO NOT prevent re-infection, DO NOT prevent spreading... so what the hell are they for? I believe that the newest strain that was discovered in South Africa was in someone with the covid jag...

Vaccines should not be a personal freedom choice.

I don't do personal attacks but in your case I'll make an exception: you are a fucking psychopath if you think it's ok to tell people to get a jag for something that is killing literally no one right now!

We're at around 100 deaths per day right now in the UK [0] and those stats don't actually tell you if they died FROM covid or merely had covid 28 days earlier when they died (massive difference!)... completely hides the real data.

In addition, there are on average 450 deaths per day from cancer [1] so where is the big gov. push to eradicate that?

Here are the overall death stats in the UK [2]. COVID is a tiny fraction of it.

[0] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=over... [1] - https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-... [2] - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

I've long felt that WWIII will not be fought (initially, anyway) with tanks and bombs and such, but with computers.

What could be more effective for your enemy than taking out all your power stations and plunging your country into total darkness and chaos? Everything would run out in short order and people would turn on each other.

Saves having to mess the place up with bombs and you have plausible deniability within the international community.

It's funny you should talk about sleep deprivation messing with your mind... I once remember trying to program a for-loop in C# about 8 or 9 years ago (I've been programming since the 90s) when my son was a baby. He'd been up and down for a couple of days as he was unwell and my sleep-addled brain wouldn't let me create a for-loop.

No matter what I tried I could not get the code to compile.

I still laugh about it now but it definitely highlights the importance of sleep.

I haven't read the whole doc but does it take into account stress or factors that lead to stress?

For example, money problems, dangerous job, working in toxic environments etc.

I reckon we don't put enough "science" into working out the life-extending properties of a non-toxic job and a health bank balance.

FWIW I was diagnosed in September as having stable angina. I eat really healthy, don't smoke or drink, no family history of heart issues, and all my blood work was great. However, I have been under immense stress for the last two years to the point of sleepless nights etc (won't go into the details).

I am convinced it's stress that did it!

Edit: I'm fixed now btw :)

but a bigger danger is mobile phone use by cyclists.

Or by pedestrians!

My brother curses the number of pedestrians in Glasgow that cross the road while looking at their phones... they're by far his biggest hazard.

I've often wondered if Mark Zuckerberg has anyone in his inner corporate circle that is willing to say "no" to him.

Meta seems like there was a wall of post-it notes in Zuck's office with a bunch of ideas to stop FB from becoming MySpace and the dart he threw landed on this one.

My gut tells me that Meta is dead in the water but with the billions that FB have in their war chest I wouldn't bet against it completely, however, the fact it requires a headset, a massive source of friction, will restrict the audience.

I dunno... seems like Zuck is living in a fantasy world here.

It does not cost the users anything.

It does: Try creating a a local account on the Home version! You can't. You must create a Microsoft account which ties you Microsoft. You may not be physically handing over $ but you are using their ecosystem. Your actions are now recorded, categorized, analysed and then M$ make more money from them.

There is no way in hell they will give you an OS for $0 unless there is a way to make money from you. None.

Look, I'm not being cynical or negative about it! I'm just putting it in perspective. If people wanna do it then go for it. It's not for me.

This isn't just a Microsoft thing, companies that give you something for nothing are making money from you somehow! Or else they won't be around long.

Most proeminent features for Windows 11 are an updated scheduler tailored to big.little architectures like the new Alder Lake from Intel and Direct Storage for games, a rebranding of the same feature from Xbox One and PS5.

Let's be honest here though: those could easily have been added to Windows 10 as they will be on the same kernel... they added them to Windows 11 so that people would buy the new shiny!

I'm not saying it's wrong, companies need to get new money in to keep going, but those features hardly merited a "new" OS :)

They likely want laptops being sold running Win11 to have sane security capabilities for corporate use out of the box

Corporate security has been fine for years: TPM 1.2 (if I remember the versions correctly) alongside bitlocker and sensible corporate policies render computers all but impervious to everything. However, this implies a competent IT division in your company... I've worked in plenty without them!

Social engineering or clicking a dodgy link/download is probably a bigger threat than someone hacking your computer and that can be mitigated to a huge extent by restricting access to only the things that the user needs, locking down apps, running with low privileges, auditing relevant things etc... again, competent IT division needed for this too.

Now, if your threat matrix includes nation-states then one could argue that any device is hackable.

My take is that hardware vendors saw the writing on the wall with the pandemic-buying about to ease-up and worked with Microsoft (or pressured them...) to help out. We're already seeing Chromebooks on the wane[0].

From my perspective (long-time Windows guy now on Fedora) I see nothing of value in Windows 11 that 10 didn't have already.

Edit: Forgot the answer I was gonna write :)

[0] https://chromeunboxed.com/canalys-report-chromebook-sales-do...

As an anecdote, in 2013 I "measured" inflation as it affected me. By this I mean the things I buy like petrol, food, utilities, insurance etc. I looked at bank statements from 2011 and 2012 and compared them to the 2013 bank statements.

It wasn't 100% accurate as a couple of things changed but it was definitely close enough to be applicable.

In 2013 I was paying out 13% more for roughly the same stuff yet the official government figure was was less than 3% per annum.

So my own inflation in that two year period was twice what the government said it should be.

In short, it doesn't surprise me that they're talking shit about inflation! High inflation won't win you an election.

I haven't checked 2021 vs 2019/2020 yet but I will in January 2022... although, I may not want to :(

I haven't read this article but I have read others about the pros and cons of Metaverse.

My take?

It's going to be another method for FB (and other "carefully curated partners") to assault your eyeballs with advertising so they can make bank.

The end.

Facebook became the town square

I don't see it like that. If they did become the town square, it's one where people must only say certain things that are part of the official narrative [0] or where people post things to an authoritative figure who reads out the stuff that he's approved using rules that he won't disclose.

[0] - whatever that actually means...

I wouldn't say JavaScript is exotic, it's more to do with what is being done with it.

Traditionally it was used to enhance HTML pages with some DOM manipulation but it's now being used for a million other things too.

So historically, if your JavaScript code broke your page would still render as it was just html but now there are all sorts of build processes and long chains that use JavaScript to create the html in the first place... I'd consider that the exotic bit.

Traditional JS running in the browser manipulating DOM elements is very much a foundational aspect of the web and won't deteriorate with age (with the exception of perhaps deprecated functions in the far-off future) but all these js libraries and tools and build processes with massive dependency-chains are what's being referred to.

It's just a means to an end.

This is the conclusion that most people don't ever reach. They assume that there is an altruistic element to things like open source within Microsoft (and other commercial organisations) and perhaps among the developers there is... giving back, helping out and all that.

But if Microsoft (or Google, FB, etc. etc) thought for one second that supporting, nurturing and building open source software and tools was affecting the bottom line negatively they'd drop it in a heartbeat: they answer to the shareholders and they only have one question - will this make more money?

Ok, if I squint really hard I can see where you're coming from but if I took your stance I would have to disconnect from the internet.

Every site has logs. They can all see where I've been, what I've looked at, how long I looked at it and so on. I get that part. I'm a developer. I build that stuff myself.

However, I need to draw the line somewhere and using UBlock Origin and never ever seeing an on-page advertisement AND minimising all tracking is the threat-model I'm targetting. And, I'd reckon that most people who care about privacy would stop about there too.

With HN, there are no distractions on the screen. Nothing flashing or moving or asking me to sign up or anything... that's what I am trying to prevent.

In any case, lets say I could stop everything and still let the text on a web page through on my browser... just the text, nothing else: we've seen in the past how even that is a signal that can be tracked.

We can't stop it completely but I feel that I'm doing my bit to make it less effective and hopefully, eventually, pointless.