HN user

hezag

346 karma

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/gnuns; my proof: https://keybase.io/gnuns/sigs/xAbYdXpTu4GQ93esJiyPNXHGA86N33xmI4Rdcomb-mA ]

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zen-browser.app 4mo ago

Zen Browser makes RSS and GitHub PRs first-class citizens via Live Folders

hezag
3pts2
www.vrt.be 4mo ago

AfricaMuseum refuses to yield Congo geological archives despite US pressure

hezag
17pts10
www.susannalea.com 5y ago

Ideas to Postpone the End of the World

hezag
1pts0
github.com 5y ago

Automated tool to study and reverse-engineer algorithmic recommendation systems

hezag
31pts1
www.mindsdb.com 5y ago

Please Reinvent the Wheel

hezag
3pts0
en.wikipedia.org 5y ago

Hunter vs. Farmer Hypothesis

hezag
3pts0
github.com 5y ago

Share API Polyfill

hezag
2pts0
syncedreview.com 6y ago

Learning to Complement Humans

hezag
1pts0
guidetoallyship.com 6y ago

Open-Source Guide to Allyship

hezag
1pts0
torrentfreak.com 6y ago

Torrent Sites Help Game Developer to Share Free Copy of ‘Death and Taxes’

hezag
2pts0
github.com 7y ago

Show HN: Vpdate – a CLI to help keep your package.json version up to date

hezag
1pts0
github.com 8y ago

Show HN: Fio – redirect unix sockets to TCP ports

hezag
2pts1
www.kickstarter.com 8y ago

Beyond the Little Blue Box – Biographical Adventure of Captain Crunch

hezag
2pts0
github.com 9y ago

Show HN: Omigo – A mobile compatible anon random chat with WebRTC + WebSockets

hezag
3pts0
github.com 9y ago

Show HN: Crops – thumbnails with custom size, position, and quality via API

hezag
7pts0
github.com 9y ago

Show HN: Crops – Simple thumbnail generation server

hezag
1pts0
allorigins.pw 10y ago

Show HN: AllOrigins – Pull content from any page as JSON via API

hezag
46pts8
allorigins.pw 10y ago

Show HN: AllOrigins – A free alternative to AnyOrigin with support to gzip pages

hezag
1pts0
watchr.in 11y ago

Show HN: Watchr – Track IP address via url redirection

hezag
1pts0

Not affiliated with the Zen Browser team, just a user who got excited about this latest release.

I submitted this because of the new "Live Folders" feature. For a long time, RSS has felt relegated to third-party extensions or separate reader apps. Zen's update integrates RSS feeds and GitHub Issues/PRs directly into the sidebar tab hierarchy.

all under the guise of helping users who want to save money (poor people) even though this category lacks the skills and the interest to repair their devices anyway outside of a rare few exceptions

This is simply not true. At least in my country, poor people generally have interest and the skills to repair their devices (or to pay someone to do so, as it's cheaper than buying a new one)

  > If the book is available in the district libraries, that means it was approved by a media specialist and can be made available to students again. But any book not currently held in the district libraries must be individually evaluated and approved by a librarian. 

So... It's an allowlist and not a denylist. Even worse.

Abstract of the research article:

  > Fungi are central to every terrestrial and many aquatic ecosystems, but the mechanisms underlying fungal tolerance to mercury, a global pollutant, remain unknown. Here, we show that the plant symbiotic fungus Metarhizium robertsii degrades methylmercury and reduces divalent mercury, decreasing mercury accumulation in plants and greatly increasing their growth in contaminated soils. M. robertsii does this by demethylating methylmercury via a methylmercury demethylase (MMD) and using a mercury ion reductase (MIR) to reduce divalent mercury to volatile elemental mercury. M. robertsii can also remove methylmercury and divalent mercury from fresh and sea water even in the absence of added nutrients. Overexpression of MMD and MIR significantly improved the ability of M. robertsii to bioremediate soil and water contaminated with methylmercury and divalent mercury. MIR homologs, and thereby divalent mercury tolerance, are widespread in fungi. In contrast, MMD homologs were patchily distributed among the few plant associates and soil fungi that were also able to demethylate methylmercury. Phylogenetic analysis suggests that fungi could have acquired methylmercury demethylase genes from bacteria via two independent horizontal gene transfer events. Heterologous expression of MMD in fungi that lack MMD homologs enabled them to demethylate methylmercury. Our work reveals the mechanisms underlying mercury tolerance in fungi, and may provide a cheap and environmentally friendly means of cleaning up mercury pollution.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2214513119
  > "[...] The company cited environmental concerns for removing chargers with every purchase of the device and claimed that the decision will save 861,000 tons of copper, zinc and tin. The Brazilian Ministry of Justice remained unmoved by that reasoning, telling Apple that it could help the environment in other ways, such as giving its devices USB-C support."
Fair enough.

In the book The Right To Be Lazy (1883), Paul Lafargue talks about how work became a sacred thing and argues that automation (138 years ago!) "could easily reduce working hours to three or four hours a day".

Some quotes from the book:

"A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work...."

"Aristotle's dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty. The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this era that men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among the people; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed the hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods: O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit."

"Our findings are based on data that Amazon and other employers provided to OSHA annually from 2017 to 2020 within the General Warehouse and Storage industry (NAICS: 493110) and the last mile delivery industries (NAICS 492110 & 492210). ... All employers are legally required to submit annual injury and illness reports to OSHA for any warehouse, delivery, grocery, or wholesale trade facility with 20 or more employees annually, so these records should include every significantly-sized facility in Amazon’s US logistics network."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371759

A related post from Google Security Blog[0]:

"A recent study[1] found that "~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” Another analysis on security issues in the ubiquitous `curl` command line tool showed that 53 out of 95 bugs would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language. [...]"

[0] https://security.googleblog.com/2021/02/mitigating-memory-sa...

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...

"We really don’t need to arm police with any shitty, biased facial recognition software. Their eyes already do a perfectly good job of that. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor can both attest to that. I can attest to it."*

"[...] Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature.

The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities."

- Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What it Really Stands for" (1917);

This post[0] by Ruben Verborgh helped me understand the problem Solid is trying to solve:

In December 2019, Google and Facebook proudly announced a major milestone, which was echoed in news media all around the world: it is now possible to copy a picture from Facebook to Google Photos. This news came in mere months after we celebrated the 50th anniversary of another technological feat: the moon landing of 20 July 1969, when millions of households witnessed Neil Armstrong take a giant leap for mankind.

So let me get this straight: two of the largest tech companies in history make headlines because in 2019, they move a single photo over the whopping distance of 11 km it takes from the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park to the Googleplex in Mountain View, whereas in 1969, we sent live video signals from 380,000 km away on the actual moon?

If those two companies, both widely hailed as pinnacles of technology, genuinely consider this to be innovation they are proud of, the only logical conclusion is that data-driven innovation today is fundamentally broken.

The problem is widespread and not limited to technology or social media. Any sector that requires personal data to deliver services, from retail over insurance to health, suffers from the damaging effects of siloization. Companies increasingly need more access to data, but they won’t get there if they keep on collecting that data themselves.[...]

0. https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2020/12/07/a-data-ecosystem-...

[...] we’re designing Birdwatch to encourage contributions from people with diverse perspectives, and to reward contributions that are found helpful by a wide range of people.

For example, rather than ranking and selecting top notes by a simple majority vote, Birdwatch can consider how diverse a note’s set of ratings is and determine whether additional inputs are needed before a consensus is reached. Additionally, Birdwatch can proactively seek ratings from contributors who are likely to provide a different perspective based on their previous ratings.

Further, we plan for Birdwatch to have a reputation system in which one earns reputation for contributions that people from a wide range of perspectives find helpful.

https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/about/challenges/