Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
I found "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug to be a helpful guide. As an engineer who was shy to approach product design, I felt the language really helped demystify things.
Comment · 5 years ago
> One way to make DNS surveillance more difficult is to use a public open DNS server, such as Google's 8.8.8.8

I assumed Google ran 8.8.8.8 to collect data for targeted advertising, as one of the major players in surveillance capitalism. Am I mistaken?

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Right.

Content creator: Can you distribute my content? Only in $list-of-countries though.

Distributor: Sure.

If the distributor permits VPNs, how are they sure they are authorized to distribute?

Comment · 5 years ago
Legal and moral definition of piracy vary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_piracy

Unfortunately, if you don't have permission to download then you may be committing piracy. In this case, entire countries apparently don't have permission.

If the system is guessing location based on IP address, then granting permission based on that guess, then I expect their permission grant should be valid. How would a user know that they have bugs in their permission system?

If you connect directly first, are told "no", then bypass the system with a VPN: You probably understand that you aren't supposed to have access.

What will happen if you commit this type of piracy? I don't think there's a loss of revenue, or damages so pursuing pirates likely isn't worth it.

Obligatory, I am not a lawyer.

Comment · 5 years ago
One of the unexpected benefits for me has been that I can lock any OAuth enabled app to a container for the OAuth provider I use. To login, I check which container I'm in and click the associated button.

Before this I'd always forget which OAuth provider I previously used. Did I Login with Google to DigitalOcean or did I use GitHub? Worse, I'd often click the wrong button and get logged into a new/empty account. I never came up with a good rule for which OAuth provider I should use, so it's a guessing game.

Locking the app to the container means I don't really need to think.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Same MacBook, same SSD upgrade. I haven't replaced the battery, I tend to stay near an outlet anyway. Debian and Ubuntu work great on it, so I moved off OSX.
Comment · 5 years ago
Surely there are people getting banned from Google who are not HN users. Social media outcry is not a good solution as its not accessible to everyone.

Agreed about wanting to see more transparency.

Comment · 5 years ago
> To be fair, if the rest of your pipeline runs in the megabytes per second, then memory allocation might as well be free from a speed point of view.

This is important, but I think sometime people struggle with this sort of thinking. I struggled to explain a similar concept to a junior engineer recently. He was very keen to try to optimize part of a process that wasn't the bottleneck. I tried a couple approaches, like benchmarking various parts under different conditions, modeling it to calculate how speeding up different components would take.

I wasn't convincing, unfortunately, so he implemented some changes that sussessfully sped up one part but didn't improve end to end performance. I think sometimes you need to see it with your own eyes.

Comment · 5 years ago
Presumably, if the customer doesn't have the right to repair then the manufacturer would be able to make parts that are exceptionally difficult to repair without specialized knowledge and tools. Or worse, enforce cryptographic locks on any software/firmware to prevent unauthorized changes.

I think right to repair is about ensuring that the customer can make reasonable repairs to the product, and the manufacturer not infringing on their rights when designing the product.

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