News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

balupton

Re:Is my blue your blue? on Monday April 27, 2026 @10:40PM (#47929937)
In terms of pass me the blue note, yep. I consider the 2000 and 50000 in your photo as blue.

The added complexity is their currency is like paper, so it wears, fades, tears, and marks. Furthermore, there are so many zeroes. Their sizes are all identical or similar. Different generations of the notes are in use, some better than others. Indonesians also use "," as the decimal indicator, and "." as the thousands separator; in practice, both are intermixed with no sense or reason, sometimes even in the same paragraph, even on banking websites <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Indonesian/Lessons/Number...>, often due to misconfigured locale settings on computers (expect to see red spellcheck underlines on everything on Indonesian office computers).

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Indonesian_ru...>

<https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.a04f7812fd4ef0b773c7b081206bc28c...>

<https://img.freepik.com/premium-photo/new-rupiah-issued-2022...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/WC177J/a-pile-of-crumpled-indonesi...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/D17MR1/background-of-indonesia-mon...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/JN9ANB/close-up-picture-of-indones...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2CXNYGJ/indonesia-money-isolated-b...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2KBJ4H6/semarang-indonesia-novembe...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2T13B4R/stock-photo-of-indonesian-...>

<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2R5K0NE/new-series-of-rupiah-bankn...>

Re:Is my blue your blue? on Monday April 27, 2026 @07:21PM (#47928614)
Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.
Re:Can you stop beans from making you gassy? on Saturday April 25, 2026 @06:01PM (#47904987)
There are digestive enzymes on the market that solve digestive gas for beans, legumes, lentils, peanuts, broccoli, etc. You take one or a few at your first bite, and problem solved. Bean-zyme is the most popular in the US apparently. Vegan and international options are NOW's Optimal Digestive System, Bulk, California Gold's Digestive Enzymes, and Bulk's Digezymes. Your mileage may vary.
Re:Cloudflare Email Service on Thursday April 16, 2026 @01:46PM (#47796967)
No mention in the announcement that it is restricted to the paid plans. Also no mentioned of it in the paid plan comparison.

From the dashboard link:

> Enable Email Sending Email Sending is currently only available with the Workers Paid plan. Upgrade your plan to start sending emails.

Re:I taught my neighbor to keep the volume down on Sunday February 01, 2026 @10:29PM (#46852092)
We had such a neighbour also with an extremely loud TV on nearly all the time. We eventually deduced that he was deaf. We bought him headphones for the TV with a letter explaining the issue. Problem solved.
Re:Cloudflare Is Down on Friday December 05, 2025 @04:44AM (#46159095)
If all you use them for is caching, then they could provide webhooks for their scheduled maintenance so customers can disable cloudflare during the maintenance and reenable it once it's all good.

However, for customers using other things, perhaps we need an independent cloudflare for cloudflare service that serves its own cache of your site when cloudflare is inaccessible.

Could combine the two ideas so when there is scheduled cloudflare maintenance, it switches dns to the cloudflare for cloudflare service that uses cloudflare if online but if cloudflare is offline then serves cache, and once cloudflare maintenance is finished then restore cloudflare dns.

Plex, Plexamp, and accounts in Sonos went down.

Re:Library Athena (volumes from Project Gutenberg) on Monday November 22, 2021 @03:40AM (#29304203)
How did this get funded? What's the game plan here?
Re:“This destroys the RSA cryptosystem” on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @09:12PM (#26323870)
I've gone ahead and updated the following wiki pages to get the right eyeballs on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_P._Schnorr

Also cross-shared with Cloudflare's forum, as I believe they would be interested: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/this-destroys-the-rsa-cry...

Re:“This destroys the RSA cryptosystem” on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @08:35PM (#26323630)
CryptoHack discord invite: https://discord.com/invite/eJaJ3xC
cmd+h hides, cmd+w closes that window, cmd+q closes the app
Getting a 404 not found. Perhaps dodgy reporting?
Re:VPN leaks users’ IPs via WebRTC on Thursday March 29, 2018 @07:20PM (#16712130)
Seems my setup has me covered: https://www.doileak.com/?cb=liq1xtjsp37zvit5

Actual location is Kuala Lumpur, which was caught by the time zone... So need to look into fixing that.

For those wondering, my setup is:

ProtonVPN via the ProtonVPN Mac Beta (before I used Tunnelblick - which actually was more reliable - the ProtonVPN Mac Beta disconnects often)

AdGuard Pro, with DNSCrypt using the Adguard Family servers: https://gist.github.com/balupton/48057270a67d70e2ac984fdfa47...

Safari. With Camera, Microphone, Location, and Notifications all set as deny by default.

Re:When Trading in Bitcoin, Keep the Tax Man in Mind on Saturday January 20, 2018 @06:50PM (#16196098)
Or move to Malaysia, or buy residency and citizenship in Saint Kitts and Nevis.
Here is a summary of events from what I can gather. Feedback welcome: https://gist.github.com/balupton/d6531a2f48dba896a1bced86e8b...
Got this reply via the YouTube comments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf9ZhU7zF8s&google_comment_i...

Hey Ben,

Thanks for this incredibly thoughtful comment.

I made this video because I believe in what Time Well Spent is about and wanted to tell a story that got both consumers and designers excited about the movement. Excited about designing technology that enhances our humanity. I'm hoping we start to move towards a world where consumers are willing to pay for tech that helps us live fuller lives. This movement is not about blame, but awareness and conversation. Snowden has brought privacy into the tech conversation, shouldn't the paths designers/developers are leading consumers down and whether that's in our best interests be a part of that conversation too?

Re Google, you're right that Youtube and data-profiling/ad models should perhaps be separated. It's Android and IOS that could be incentivized to adapt to Time Well Spent if we could stir up enough demand for it. Show me the seedless apples! I'll pay... but I fear Facebook Google and Apple have such extensive network effect and access to hardware (the latter two) that we need to plea for the change to happen there.

I'm super skeptical of this.

They have been around since Jan 2015. And include Google not in attention companies but in platform companies. This is a strange divide considering Google makes YouTube, and which business is just to intercept as much information as possible, to build a profile of you, to target your attention to advertising and enough value that you don't mind. This is then continued by their recommendation of AdBlock which blocks ads (but not Google's by default, because Google pays them), and not tracking.

Their message seems somewhat to what we have already been hearing from Richard Stallman and Eben Molgen for the past 30 years — https://youtu.be/tbcy_ZxXLl8?list=PLYVl5EnzwqsR20nKqwDCSNONs... — Aral Balkan from Indie for the past 5-10 years — https://ind.ie/ethical-design/ — but packaged up for consumers, blaming tech.

However their delivery seems more at targeting consumers, with the illusion of targeting designers, by blaming those dam malicious tech folk because it is not the consumer's job to accept responsibility of how they spend their time - and instead, it is up to companies to stop wasting the irresponsible and perhaps addicted consumers attention, despite the consumer not wanting to support non-free business models, probably hence why this movement hasn't taken off in its 2 years.

The video seems reminiscent of the rap video by another person, who's message was to consumers, hey there was a time before tech invaded our attention, you can put your phone away you know, perhaps do that. This version seems to be perhaps aimed at children who have never experienced an app-less world, so the expectation of them putting their phone away would perhaps be absurd to them, so hey, let's blame other people instead.

Snodwen, Richard Stallman, Eben Molgen, and Aral Balkan, seem to be having more success in changing this industry's practices. With Snowden more so than anyone else. As with Snowden, it not changing is about the legal and ethical consequences of invading privacy against the consumers will — whereas where invading their privacy for the consumers will, as Google does, is totally okay and sometimes even glorified by consumers.

TimeWellSpent will never solve the Journalism clickbait problem, as the advertising business model, which is the free business model, does not value anything but attention and clicks, which promotes clickbait articles, which promotes shit journalism (publish first, update progressively, and verify at some very later point if ever). Just because consumers expect things for free but expect companies to be ethical. They can’t be ethical if consumers don’t wish to pay for them to be ethical.

It’s kind of like whining that there are no seedless apples, but then when someone engineers a seedless apple and charges money for it, they say, what the hell, you should be free, I’m going to use the unethical clone of you that advertises to me anyway, and screw the R&D you ethical people did.

Thoughts?

Re:Introducing GitHub Community Guidelines on Thursday October 20, 2016 @10:35AM (#12752559)
Reading the comments here, psychoanalyst Jordan Peterson's lecture series critiquing political correctness could not be more needed right now:

- fear of political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvPgjg201w0 - skepticism on political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-7YGGCE9es - the political correctness game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2u62u4entc

A 10 minute summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDg8sP_atIA&feature=youtu.be...

So will be dead in a year or two when they run out of cash or sell.
Re:Node v4.0.0 on Tuesday September 08, 2015 @06:23PM (#10188538)
We've been using a concept of a "esnextguardian" to be what our package.json main points to, it then tries and loads the es6+ version and if that fails, fallbacks to the compiled es5 version. It's been working quite well for all our different Bevry projects. More info: https://github.com/bevry/base#esnextguardian
Re:Static Site Generators on Friday May 16, 2014 @02:44PM (#7757173)
The site uses DocPad, a static site generator.

The downtime was caused by the YAML file having invalid syntax so it would not parse. Whenever a modification to the YAML file is made, a github post hook is sent to the server telling it to regenerate the website.

Normally this happens smoothly without anyone noticing any downtime, while maintaing awesome performance.

In this case because of the bad YAML, DocPad crashed, as it was told to, and the logs showed the error.

I was sleeping at the time so did not notice the issue.

The latest version of the website now handles this gracefully, using the latest successful data if the YAML is bad, as well as showing an error message.

This seems like a less mature and more opinionated edition of DocPad? - http://docpad.org

I find it hard to understand why one would use this over DocPad... Can someone fill me in, I'm curious to know what the interest is about in case I'm missing something!

Re:Saying Goodbye to a Sister on Sunday March 31, 2013 @09:06AM (#5468536)
Already exists, it's moreloveletters.com
Very cool. Now we just need a service on top that will filter it out for just the libraries we care about! Will be perfect for staying up to date with all the libraries!

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