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fs2

Re:Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction (2019) on Thursday April 08, 2021 @09:21AM (#26738360)
I never like reading and probably never will. So it feels good to read something that doesn't affect me (personally).

Really love how this article is written, the choice of words and sentences really speak to me.

Bitcoin was the first famous crypto currency. But it has been surpassed by many other digital coins with lower fees, more transactions per second, better technical design and all these things combined. Bitcoin also suffers from whales routinely mass selling and buying to make profits at the cost of traders, resulting in volatility.

I'm sure it will rise again a few more times but there are better alternatives available.

Re:Your Computer Isn't Yours on Friday November 13, 2020 @05:15AM (#25080855)
I always laugh when people claim their Apple computers are secure and privacy friendly compared to Windows 10. They are certainly not.

The only viable OS at this point is Linux and even then you have to carefully select your distribution.

Exactly, I'm running fine without Pulseaudio, Policykit and SystemD. Good old sysv init scripts always work, less complexity means less chance for bugs creeping in.
Re:Winamp for Windows 10 on Monday November 02, 2020 @04:46AM (#24966272)
Can relate to this, audacious was terribly slow in the past but it's a pretty good music player now. However, the Winamp skin hasn't dated that well imo
Re:Factorio 1.0 on Friday August 14, 2020 @10:39AM (#24158487)
Looks like fun and it's a game that's been on my watchlist for years. But I've reached an age where I'm pretty sure that once I finish the rocket and escape the planet (that's what seems to be the main goal) I'll never play it again. Just can't be bothered anymore by endless grinding and optimizing. Addictive games like MMOs and building games stopped being addictive for me once I figure out how it works.
Re:I made a simple geolocation service on Friday July 24, 2020 @05:01AM (#23937317)
I've used the free MaxMinds database for a while but since the last year I've been using iplist.cc. It supports IPv4, IPv6, shows if an IP is tor, spam, which ASN and a lot more.

It's also free and fast but with services like these I always wonder how long they manage to stay free.

Re:Tails 4.4 on Thursday March 12, 2020 @08:35AM (#22556138)
Really interesting distro to just test things and to use Curl without exposing your real IP.

However, it always bothers me when Tails detects the virtual machine VirtualBox as being nonfree.

Re:The Only Type of API Services I'll Use on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @03:43AM (#22482124)
The author doesn't seem to have much experience with running a business. The enterprise pricing makes a lot of sense when you know you need a service for multiple years. The bucket based pricing works very well for the example he mentions, sending SMS.
Re:Stop Using Encrypted Email on Thursday February 20, 2020 @03:04AM (#22373507)
"1. PGP is old and broken and messages can potentially be decrypted without access to private key"

Absolute nonsense, PGP is perfectly safe. Blame the broken cowboy software implementations.

Re:Show HN: Static website hosting with auto optimization on Monday February 17, 2020 @07:57AM (#22347334)
Looks interesting, the minification looks like a pretty good selling point.

One thing I noticed is the slow connection from Australia, it seems your CDN is limited to Europe and America.

Re:New in PHP 8 on Monday February 03, 2020 @10:48AM (#22225152)
This is pretty awesome, I've been migrating from C# and NodeJS back to PHP and it's awesome. Want to know why?

- Everything is either built-in or can be enabled from an OFFICIAL repository (like functions for bc,xml,etc). No more trusting sketchy npm packages or having to pull in a ton of dependencies that might stop working some day.

- It's so fast and elegant to consume a (SOAP or REST) webservice. Visual Studio insists on creating tons of files, obscure web.config settings and other misc. stuff. PHP handles this in a couple of lines.

- Development feels natural, every file can be a single class if you want and there are plenty of highly matured frameworks available.

I estimate I've slashed development time in half compared to C#, less bugs and less security issues (verified through two independent code auditors). Even large projects are easier to work on in PHP compared to C#

Except this is not about enforcing opportunities for a certain group but to prevent a group certain privileges based on their skin color and sexual orientation.

Discrimination is not right because you think you have the right motives, the law is also very clear about this.

Really extensive and interesting to read, thanks for doing this!
Re:Wildfires Are Raging Outside Every Major City in Australia on Thursday January 02, 2020 @05:41AM (#21934319)
It's sad to see how these fires are automatically linked to climate change. Until the mid 2000's Australia burned down small patches of forests to prevent large disasters like these we have now. But that changed when burning down forests (mind you to prevent larger forest fires in the future) were deemed too bad for the environment.

So now the policies and fire prevention techniques changed (for the worse) and exactly what many firefighters predicted has happened: mass fires covering the east coast. It doesn't matter how much the climate changed when the whole part about prevention has been screwed up.

Re:The trouble with VPN and privacy review sites on Friday November 22, 2019 @08:12AM (#21605223)
+1 for Mullvad. Been using them since the beginning but never used their support so can't comment on that. One thing that bugged me was the general instability of Mullvad vs others, a few years ago connections would often drop or become extremely slow. For the last two years this seems to have been massively improved.

Connection dropping is one of the major issues with any commercial VPN provider. I recommend to create a script which runs openvpn and immediately after that "ip link eth0 down" to prevent leaks.

Re:How we hit our $30k ARR milestone on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @10:33AM (#21258812)
Don't use it myself but this is great news. I'm happy to see Adriaan is so open about everything that goes on (also the bad things). Something that I always find difficult for projects like this.
Looks cool and it works pretty well so far. But why no https?
Re:Amazon stores Alexa transcripts indefinitely on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @07:41AM (#20343371)
I really doubt the recording is actually deleted from all of their servers. Wouldn't be surprised when a few years from now there is another news item about how they accidentally kept these logs in backups or how they were shared with law enforcement or ad companies.
Re:How a Google side project evolved into a $4B company on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @07:38AM (#20343360)
What a horrible site, it tries to hijack the back button, full screen cookie warning and uBlock has over a dozen items blocked.
Re:PulseAudio Under the Hood (2017) on Monday June 24, 2019 @04:49AM (#20261598)
A few years back I ditched Pulseaudio for regular Alsa and it's been a godsend. No more crackling audio on bluetooth devices, alsamixer which can set all the volume levels and every program just works out of the box.

The problem I have with Pulseaudio is that it's fixing a problem that doesn't exist. It's great you can mix and match any channel you want with Pulseaudio but that's mostly a theoretical advantage. For desktop users Alsa with dmix offers everything you need, I can play audio, record and mix all at the same time. The few programs which absolutely require Pulse (I'm looking at you Firefox) can be fixed with apulse, which emulates Pulseaudio through Alsa.

Except the videos of Watson aren't spreading hate or violence but he is just another person with an opinion. Because it's unpopular opinion and because he worked with Infowars in the past it's easy to make him into the "bad guy".
Yes, probably.
Disagree, on most of my systems I don't even have swap partition anymore. The few times I need it, I can just create a swap file on the fly and have any amount of swap memory.

Performance problems the author describes can be fixed 90% of the time by changing the dirty_background_ratio in the kernel as described here:

https://linuxmaster.cc/s/improve_performance_and_fix_unrespo...

Re:OpenSSH 8.0 Released on Thursday April 18, 2019 @07:56AM (#19690303)
One of my most used programs. The more I use it, the more features I come to rely on, like using sshfs (although it's separate program), scp, ssh-copy-id, etc.
As the EFF reports: "Starz has no right to silence TorrentFreak’s news article or block links to it. The article reports that there are people on the Internet infringing copyright, but that is a far cry from being an infringement itself"
Re:Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens on Friday April 12, 2019 @08:25AM (#19644144)
My experience exactly. The most common observation with Slack is how people praise it as the next big thing in productivity. But this is always during the honeymoon phase, after a few months of working with Slack it usually quickly wears off.
The statements by Ars are overrated. Yes, it's annoying but without trying to create new and risky applications Google cannot exist.
Re:OpenTTD Compiled to WebAssembly on Monday April 01, 2019 @09:34AM (#19543039)
Really amazing!
Interesting idea, but I think many file upload sites will soon shift to encryption before uploading (like Firefox Send), making filters impossible.

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